humanity takes its first halting steps
into space
giant alien craft darken the skies over
every major city progress as we know it
stops the time of the overlords has
begun the time of humanity is coming to
a close
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arthur c clarke was an atheist who was
fascinated by God I can relate to that
he called himself a logical positivist a
humanist and at times a crypto Buddhist
and it's this last aspect that colors
most of his best work in part Buddhism
is about accepting impermanence and
becoming alright with change or endings
and this is at the heart of childhoods
end because while the way we introduced
childhoods end may seem menacing the
overlords in the book are not they just
seem that way too much of a suspicious
mankind they are instead as servants of
a power we cannot understand for a
purpose that we couldn't fully fathom
even if it were laid out to us when the
overseers arrive they show benevolence
they explain that they're here to
protect us from ourselves and help usher
us through an age where we might wipe
each other out through atomic war but
they never make an appearance in person
for 50 years they hover above earth
cities without letting anyone see their
true form then at last they reveal
themselves they look just like the
demons of myth with cloven hooves and
great bat-like wings
why not because as one of the character
suspects they came to earth millennia
ago and left us with some lingering
cultural memory of them but rather
because of something else something far
more powerful something specific to
their mission something we don't find
out until late in the tale humanity did
not conjure images of demons from the
past but from the future our
precognitive memory recalled them and
their role in what was to come because
these overseers assured in an age of
prosperity for mankind but with it came
the slowing of most cultural advances
there was only one area that the
overseers were truly interested in
psychic phenomena the same pseudoscience
sci-fi had drawn on from The Forgotten
foundations but here it's used not as a
marvel to
entice the reader but to explore a
larger concept the evolution of mankind
the overseers are actually the servants
of a great cosmic intelligence a
collective being that a thousand
different races have joined one by one
as they evolved to the point where their
consciousness could melt and they could
break down the barriers of individuality
to become a larger whole the overseers
are here to see that mankind makes that
leap soon children start to develop such
powers at an astonishing rate they
become an entity that is no longer human
and the last generation of humanity
spasms violently through its death
throes unable to accept this next step
the book ends with one last human
returning to Planet Earth as the
children make their final transition
from physical form and vanish into a
pillar of flame even as the earth itself
is consumed the last human reports not a
sense of anger or loss but a certain
contentment and acceptance and that's
what the book is really about it's about
how we accept that our time has passed
or that the world changes in ways we
don't understand it avoids the Golden
Age assumption that the best option is
to fight it and explores other ways we
might approach transformation or loss
even the overseers are struggling with a
cosmic disillusionment as we find out
that they are stuck at an evolutionary
roadblock
unlike the species they Shepherd towards
joining the Overmind
they themselves have no latent psychic
ability they can't make the final
transition to Nirvana or apotheosis
themselves as a reader you experience
the horror of your own extinction but
also face the question of whether that
is a bad thing whether it's a necessary
part of moving on
he couples this with that question of a
higher power he so often like to explore
he is a higher power by definition good
do terms like good and evil even mean
anything when dealing with such a force
he makes the benevolent overseers
demonic to reinforce this question to
make us ask whether our ideas of good
and bad are fundamentally human centric
or if they're tied to something deeper
or perhaps more accurately he challenges
us to separate out the parts of our
moral philosophy that are rooted in a
human centric perspective with all its
cultural biases and evolutionary drives
from those that are universal perhaps
closer to something he might call true
this was something few authors in the
Golden Age challenged us to do but
arthur c clarke did because he saw that
you could be a man of reason but still
be concerned with the higher questions
the intangible questions that will never
find their answer through an empirical
test he along with a few others brought
this mindset to a new generation of
writers who would respond to the golden
age by trying to make science fiction
more about philosophy than science so
join us next week as we begin to explore
the weird worlds of the science fiction
authors who were really on the fringes
of the Golden Age the authors who were
active in this period but who were
really doing their own thing obscure
compared to the big three but also
unshackled from the ideology and the
mindset that's so dominated most of
Golden Age writing great and terrible
and we'll kick it off with one of the
strangest most intriguing of them all
cordwainer Smith we'll see you then
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