AUDIO

Science
As a scientist, Sir Arthur C. Clarke remains in many of his extrapolations true to the physical reality he understands. He refuses to fictionalize the laws of physics -- what is now known about space/time: Jan’s journey to the Overlord’s world, for instance, obeys the laws of time dilation. There is no “jump” into “hyperspace,” or any such circumventing of known realities. But Clarke goes beyond the known laws. Time is even stranger than relativity effects: it is not linear but circular. Jan Rodricks learns the name of the Overlords’ sun; Jeffrey Greggson, as yet unborn, communicates telepathically with his mother Jean. The human race fears in its myths of the past the beings it will encounter in the future.

“The stars are not for man,” Karellen tells the human race. He may be right – even outside the world of Childhood’s End. In the early 21st century our lives are not even close to the 1950’s dreams of the conquest of space. By 2001, we did not have shuttles routinely transporting passengers to the moon as in the 2001 world of the film of that name. The fiction and film that presented human beings journeying easily from star to star encountering aliens everywhere were not a realistic predictor of the future, but stories of the past – echoing tales of exploration of the Americas -- the old West, cowboys and Indians. 

Experience has taught us how difficult, dangerous, and expensive it is even to reach our own moon. There have been shuttle disasters and the scaling down of the NASA budget. The laws of physics (as they are presently understood) and the enormous reaches of space/time itself  constrain us. Far from the days of fictional Martian invasions, we are increasingly sure that there is no intelligent life in the solar system (possibly not even on earth, as the old joke goes). Beyond our solar system, civilizations may rise up and become extinct without our having heard a word from them and without their reaching the ability to journey light years to our own small planet. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has not yet heard purposeful communicative signals from the stars.

Still Sir Arthur C. Clarke is resolute in his belief: “I have little doubt that the Universe is teeming with life,” he says in his introduction to Childhood’s End (1990).  “SETI…is now a fully accepted department of astronomy. The fact that it is still a science without a subject should be neither surprising nor disappointing. It is only within half a human lifetime that we have possessed the technology to listen to the stars”(vii).

Archetypes
But we don’t read SF for predictions about the future – as Arthur Clarke wrote: “it’s a work of fiction, for goodness sake!” (vii) We read in order to imagine possibilities. Clarke has created a fictional world in which it is possible for human beings --or what they become-- to achieve the stars. To do this, he must take a leap of faith into near mysticism. The idea of a merger with some kind of universal consciousness is not new. It appears in Buddhism and Hinduism; in all religions, mystics have experienced it. 

The recurring SF idea that the next evolutionary step will be into the realm of paranormal powers was also not new when Clarke first wrote the book, and it still continues to be portrayed in both print and nonprint media (See “Species,” “Prey,” “Heroes,” “X-Men,” and so on). Rashaverak uses familiar imagery from nature to explain the coming change to George Greggson: “Imagine that every man’s mind is an island, surrounded by ocean. Each seems isolated, yet in reality all are linked by the bedrock from which they spring. If the ocean were to vanish, that would be the end of the islands. They would all be part of one continent, but their individuality would have gone” (Ch. 20).

Many believe today that ESP exists; many decry the lack of scientific evidence as Clarke came to do and discusses in his preface to the 1990 edition of Childhood’s End. But whatever the reality, myths about the paranormal have come into being partly because of the isolation of each human mind and the wish for a closer communication with our fellows. In the book we can‘t have it both ways—both total merging (being part of one continent) and total individuality (remaining as separate islands). The latter is obliterated by the former, and human individual consciousness does not survive the change.

The world of a SF story or novel is a created artifice (like all fiction),  which draws on ancient archetypes that reappear in all human stories. Psychologist Carl Jung believed that human beings shared a “collective unconscious,” passed on genetically, from which come primordial images appearing personally in dreams and collectively in myths and legends. Whether this is genetic or not, the persistence of these figures and patterns is undeniable.

As the hero of a legend must encounter a monster, devil, or dragon before achieving the goal of his quest, so the individual must face his “shadow’ (Jung’s term), his “dark side” before achieving wholeness and transcendence. In Childhood’s End the hero is not a single man but the entire human race, with the human beings Rikki Stormgren, George Greggson, and Jan Rodricks as representatives.

The unknown depths of space can be seen as symbolic of the mysterious human unconscious, and humanity cannot journey there unaided. It is fitting in Jungian terms that the Overlords are the guides to this realm. They come when we are near self-destruction, not only from the nuclear threat but from, as Karellen tells the human race in his last speech, dangerous experimentation with the powers of the human mind. Resembling in their physical form the most feared mythic beings in our civilization, which archetypally embody our most destructive impulses, they turn out, once seen directly, to be neither good nor evil, but necessary. They create the conditions whereby the children of the last generation may surpass their human limitations, survive, and be unified with the Overmind, the most powerful and transcendent being in the known (fictional) universe.

Describing the Indescribable 

The Overmind, a mystery to both Overlords and human beings, is the truly unknowable alien.

It is from the human unconscious –-the realm of dreams and art itself-- that the Overmind emerges as an evolutionary next step. Karellen makes clear that this is a dangerous transition: some races are able to draw back from this change “playing no further part in the story of the universe. That would never have been your fate –-or your fortune. Your race was too vital for that. It would have plunged into ruin and taken others with it,” another pat on the back for humanity. Scientists experimenting with the paranormal were on the verge of unleashing forces that “could have spread havoc to the stars….you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which …would have poisoned other and greater minds” (Ch. 20). Thus it is for the good of the entire universe that the Overlords come to earth to save us, not from nuclear holocaust as first seemed, but from our psychic powers. In spite of our demise as a species, we are not unimportant – we are especially dangerous, outstandingly vitally creative.

Unlike the Overlords, who by now seem comfortingly humanlike, the Overmind, which is, we are told, as much beyond us as we are beyond an amoeba, can be described only figuratively (“like a tree of fire”--another biblical image) and by its effects upon its environment. Throughout the novel Clarke continues the now-familiar though scarcely comforting imagery of earthly cataclysm –- particularly volcanic eruption-- to suggest the nature of the Overmind.

When Jean and George Greggson choose to relocate to the art colony on the island of Athens, it is so that George will have more scope for his artistic endeavors. For we know that art has suffered with the Overlords’ arrival. The island called Athens itself is near another island known as Sparta. In Greek civilization these two city states represented two poles of human existence, peace and war. The islands have been named for this contrast.

When Jean looks out at the causeway between the islands, she sees “a thin knife-edge dividing the water that led to Sparta. That rocky island, with its brooding volcanic cone, was such a contrast to this peaceful spot that it sometimes frightened her." She wondered how the scientists "could be so certain that it would never reawaken and overwhelm them all” (Ch. 15).

The two islands are a fit emblem for the human psyche – and for art itself which arises from the human unconscious. A knife edge –an image suggesting great danger-- separates the rational from the irrational,a dualism that the Overlords do not possess. It is not coincidence that it is Jean Morrell, now Greggson, who is aware of this dual potential. Remember she was designated the most important person alive earlier by the Overlords, and it will be her son Jeff who is the first human to join the Overmind. The volcano does indeed awaken.

As events move toward their conclusion, the earth itself seems to respond in empathy. Near the island of Sparta

“For almost a hundred years the stresses had been slowly increasing, here in the burning darkness deep beneath the ocean’s floor. Though the submarine canyon had been formed geological ages ago, the tortured rocks had never reconciled themselves to their new positions….They were ready to move again” (Ch. 16).

Jeff, alone on Sparta, is “exploring the rock pools along the narrow Spartan beach – an occupation he found endlessly absorbing. One never knew what exotic creatures one might find.” (Ch. 16) At this point he is a normal little boy, curious about the life forms of his own planet as he will one day be entranced by the strange and beautiful dreams showing him other worlds. 

As if a forewarning as to what will happen to him “[v]ery firmly something took hold of the beach and gave it a single sudden jerk.” The waters recede in preparation for the tsunami, and it is this event which tips the Overlords’ hand as they intervene to save the life of “Subject Zero” (Ch. 16).  This is the point at which the islands are merged with the ocean floor as one day individual humans will merge with the Overmind.

Later, after the children of the island colony are removed by the Overlords to be sheltered in another part of earth, a nuclear bomb ends the island’s existence by the choice of the inhabitants: “The island had been born in fire; in fire it chose to die.”   Even the workings of the bomb itself mirror nature: “Far down in the rock, the segments of uranium began to rush together, seeking the union they could never achieve….And the island rose to meet the dawn” (Ch. 21). The human residents of Athens perish in the conflagration; it is the nonhuman offspring of the last humans who do reach this hitherto impossible union.

The imagery of concealment, of what can be seen versus what is not seen, continues in Jan’s visit to the Overlords’ planet where Jan has his first glimpse of the Overmind: “It was not on the horizon but beyond it – a single serrated peak, climbing up over the edge of the world, its lower slopes hidden as the bulk of an iceberg is concealed below the water line.”  The serrated peak recalls the image of the dangerous knife edge dividing Athens and Sparta.

Jan realizes that he is not really seeing a mountain but he has no other way to think of it: “It was not organic life that he was watching: it was not even, he suspected, matter as he knew it.

“The somber red was brightening to an angrier hue. Streaks of vivid yellow appeared, so that for a moment Jan felt he was looking at a volcano pouring streams of lava down on to the land beneath. But these streams….were moving upwards” (Ch. 22). He sees the bright blue ring sweep into space and vanishing even as it grows.

Even as the earth dissolves Jan still sees what the once-human children have become: “That burning column is still there….it looks like the funnel of a tornado, about to retract into the clouds.” Once the Overmind has left, even the once substantial mountains disappear “[l]ike wisps of smoke” and finally “[i]n a soundless concussion of light, Earth’s core gave up its hoarded energies.” These energies have been invoked throughout the book. Now they are gone and “the sun’s remaining children pursued their ancient paths once more as corks floating on a placid lake ride out the tiny ripples set in motion by a falling stone (Ch. 24).

By the end of the novel,the last man and the earth itself have perished in destruction recalling the novel’s original (1954) opening with its hint of vast sleeping energies and future disaster. But the book doesn’t end with the destruction of earth. We see the effect of this destruction on the book’s other central character Karellen as we are finally permitted a glimpse into “his vast and labyrinthine mind.” We learn that he feels “a sadness that no logic could dispel.” His sadness is not for mankind but for his own race: “For all their achievements, thought Karellen, [….] his people were no better than a tribe that has passed its whole existence upon some flat and dusty plain. Far off were the mountains, where power and beauty dwelt, where the thunder sported above the glaciers and the air was clear and keen. There the sun still walked, transfiguring the peaks with glory, when all the land below was wrapped in darkness. And they could only watch and wonder; they could never scale those heights” (Ch. 24).

If we were at all chagrined to learn early in the book that we were a savage subject race overmastered by the achievements and mental abilities of the Overlords, we can now rejoice in our superiority, which has been hinted at throughout the novel in the many remarks made by Overlords about our ingenuity and curiosity, in Karellen’s quiet regard for Rikki Stormgren and Jan Rodricks, two human beings who tried to deceive him and all for the sake of knowledge.

Did Karellen care for us? Yes and no. If he could, he would perhaps destroy the remaining human beings “as you would destroy a mortally wounded pet you loved.” (Ch. 20).  At the end of the book, “in silent farewell, he saluted the men he had known.” Then he “turned his back upon the dwindling sun.”

This Week

This week we read 3 more alien encounter stories.  In "The Screwfly Solution"(1977) by Raccoona Sheldon (AKA James Tiptree Jr., AKA Alice Sheldon), aliens once more come to earth, but with a different purpose.  We follow that by two stories set on other planets as we start to consider SF which has moved away from earth and into the realm of alien anthropology.  The most recent is the rather horrifying "Blood Child" (1995) by the late Octavia Butler.  "How Beautiful With Banners" (1966) by Golden Age writer James Blish   is a masterpiece of human character study as well as a truly inventive depiction of alien life.