Hard-Headed Science-Fictional Romantic (A)Theism: The Mystic Leaps in Arthur C. Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END and SPACE ODYSSEY

 

            In August of 2011, there was an exchange on the ListServ of the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA-L Digest, 13.24) among some heavy hitters in the field — Elizabeth Hull, Eric Rabkin, James Gunn — on the tone and meaning of the conclusion of Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 novel, Childhood's End. The ending is both somber and sublime and a test — perhaps a kind of Rorschach test — of readers' values and worldview.

            In the climactic sequence of the novel, the prepubescent children of Earth come together in a mass with each former child showing "no more emotion or feeling here than in the face of a snake or an insect." The controlling aliens in the novel, "The Overlords themselves were more human than this," but the lead Overlord tells the last human, watching with distress Earth's former children, that he is “searching for something that is no longer there. […T]hey have no more identity than the cells in your own body. But linked together, they are something much greater than you" (ch. 23, [Ballantine 1953: 202-03]).

            To that last man and to just about any reader, the transition from children to … this is appalling. In their development, the children at first appear savage and then what we would call subhuman: filthy to start with, and then appallingly destructive, sterilizing the world around them, and finally destroying it. They are on their way free from "the tyranny of matter" (ch. 20, p. 183), but this allows a contempt for the body and for nonhuman life: The adults of Earth have been dead for a while, typically in despair at the loss of posterity and their world, typically by suicide in one sense or other (ch. 20, p, 185; ch. 21, p. 188; ch. 23, pp. 208 & passim).

            Finally, what has quickly evolved from the children of Earth absorbs into itself the energies of the planet and leaps like a "great burning column" into the "Overmind": an evolved entity beyond matter and energy, combining as many species as It (I'm going to capitalize the "I") can find for further evolution. Finally, the Children are gone, and the Overmind departs: "They had leeched away the last atom of [… Earth's] substance. It had nourished them, though the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs toward the sun" (ch. 24, pp. 216-17).

            Where they are going is foreshadowed by the dreams of the first child to begin the metamorphosis as he moves in his subconscious with increasing fearlessness and enthusiasm "into the universe that was opening up before him," including visions of "Sidereous 4 and the Pillars of the Dawn"; as one of the Overlords says, "and there was awe in his voice. 'He has reached the center of the Universe'" — though perhaps just the local universe, our galaxy — "And," adds the head Overlord, "he has barely begun his journey," envying the leap that will destroy the human species but which his species cannot make (ch. 18, pp. 170-80; ch. 20, p. 185).

            With no exception I can recall, my students who spoke up on the end of Childhood's End really disliked it. I would cite to them how the Overlords envy humans for being able to evolve beyond individuality and the material world. I'd read Clarke's pulling out all the figurative stops in a crescendo of prose/poetry to describe the children of Earth's fiery apotheosis. And I'd quote the judgment of the last man — a humanist romantic — on what he had seen of the end of his kind: "Yet it was fitting; it has the sublime inevitability of a great work of art" (ch. 24, p. 205).

            Nah. They'd have none of it, at least not those who spoke up. Individuality was too high a price even for immortality and participation in a kind of godhead.

            So we moved on to Clarke's and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as novel and film, where another final man, in a sense, retains his individuality but becomes Star-Child (ch. 47), a god-like entity in communication with the other gods (ch. 32, "Concerning E.T.'s"). I pointed out to my students that the ending of Childhood's End, although indecorously flashy, was in a well-established Eastern tradition of becoming nothing to become All, and that 2001 was in the Western tradition of the Superman/Übermensch, as signalled by Kubrick's use of Richard Strauss's tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra — which makes the transcendent theme pretty damn problematic, given the Nazi horrors Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas on supermen either led or got dragged to.

            Now I have problems with the whole set of issues involving apotheosis, transcendence, supermen, separable souls, and the Platonic-Christian-puritanical tradition of asceticism and the denigration of the body.* (Ancient Egyptians, Spartans, and others come in here also, but in complex ways, and also some of the far more recent Cyberpunks, who know better.) Still, I admire Clarke for confronting head-on a problem in what we might call humanist-Romantic- secular-scientific SF: all us geeks who think of ourselves as hard-headed but really, really want SF adventure in galaxies far, far away, or at least our local group.

            This issue is handled by that head Overlord, Karellen, in what amounts to a press conference addressing the human species under his supervision. "

                "There has been some complaint, among the younger and more romantic elements of your population, because outer space has been closed to you. We had a purpose in doing this; we do not impose bans for the pleasure of it. But have you ever stopped to consider—if you will excuse a slightly unflattering analogy—what a man from your Stone Age would have felt, if he suddenly found himself in a modern city?”               “Surely,” protested the Herald Tribune, “there is a fundamental difference. We are accustomed to science. On your world there are doubtless many things which we might not understand — but they wouldn’t seem magic to us.”               “Are you quite sure of that?” said Karellen, so softly that it was hard to hear his words. “Only a hundred years lies between the age of electricity and the age of steam, but what would a Victorian engineer have made of a television set or an electronic computer. And how long would he have lived if he started to investigate their workings? The gulf between two biologies can easily become so great that it is — lethal.”
               […]               “And there are other reasons why we have restricted the human race to Earth. Watch.” The lights dimmed and vanished. As they faded, a milky opalescence formed in the center of the room. It congealed into a whirlpool of stars—a spiral nebula seen from a point far beyond its outermost sun.               “No human eyes have ever seen this sight before,” said Karellen’s voice from the darkness. “You are looking at your own Universe, the island galaxy of which your Sun is a member, from a distance of half a million light-years.”               There was a long silence. Then Karellen continued, and now his voice held something that was not quite pity and not precisely scorn.               “Your race has shown a notable incapacity for dealing with the problems of its own rather small planet. When we arrived, you were on the point of destroying yourselves with the powers that science had rashly given you. Without our intervention, the Earth today would be a radioactive wilderness.               “Now you have a world at peace, and a united race. Soon you will be sufficiently civilized to run your planet without our assistance. Perhaps you could eventually handle the problems of an entire solar system — say fifty moons and planets. But do you really imagine that you could ever cope with this?”               The nebula expanded. Now the individual stars were rushing past, appearing and vanishing as swiftly as sparks from a forge. And each of those transient sparks was a sun, with who knew how many circling worlds ...               “In this single galaxy of ours,” murmured Karellen, “there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. Even that figure gives only a faint idea of the immensity of space. In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world.               “Your race, in its present stage of evolution, cannot face that stupendous challenge. One of my duties has been to protect you from the powers and forces that lie among the stars — forces beyond anything that you can ever imagine.”               The image of the galaxy’s swirling fire-mists faded; light returned to the sudden silence of the great chamber.               Karellen turned to go; the audience was over. At the door he paused and looked back upon the hushed crowd. “It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man." (Part II, ch. 14, [Ballantine 1953: 136-37]) 

            One of those "younger and more romantic elements" (with the unRomantic name of "Jan") becomes the Last Man, and he, too, comes to this conclusion, and does it looking at the extinction of humankind and the leap to the stars of the beyond-human children. After noting "the sublime inevitability" in the passing and surpassing of the human species, the last man sees that "[…] the road to the stars was a road that forked in two directions, and neither led to a goal that took any account of human hopes or fears."

               At the end of one path were the Overlords. They had preserved their individuality, their independent egos; they possessed self-awareness, and the pronoun “I” had a meaning in their language. They had emotions, some at least of which were shared by humanity. But they were trapped, Jan realized now, in a cul-de-sac from which they could never escape. Their minds were ten — perhaps a hundred — times as powerful as men’s. It made no difference in the final reckoning. They were equally helpless, equally overwhelmed by the unimaginable complexity of a galaxy of a hundred thousand million suns, and a cosmos of a hundred thousand million galaxies" (CE ch. 23, p. 205).

            And at the end of the other path is either disillusionment or something godlike. In Clarke's mostly capital-G Godless universe, it had to be something that had, highly improbably, evolved.

            The usually hard-headed, often hard-science thinker and author Arthur C. Clarke ran into the hard facts of not just the great barrier of the speed of light but, even if that barrier could be broken, the sheer immensity of the universe. And that was the universe of 1953 and 1968, not the increasingly plausible multiverse of the 21^st century.

            We could joke back in the 1980s about Carl Sagan's pronunciation of "billions and billions of stars" and the line as many of us remember it that "We are made of starstuff." Neil deGrasse Tyson says the same things, with an additional generation of science behind him, and with a better voice. We joked, but these ideas are literally awe-inspiring, at least if one has a working imagination and sense of awe.

            That starstuff and "billions and billions of stars" also should be daunting, since Sagan and Tyson can take us through the universe only through the spaceship of the imagination. As places for Romantic exploration, "The stars are not for man." And "no, nor woman neither," as Hamlet added to a somewhat related comment on human beings as "how like a god!" and "this quintessence of dust" (2.2.300-06).

           

            Clarke's mystic leaps are either audacious or cowardly, depending on how you want to look at them, and the ideas are dangerous (and Eric Rabkin did a penetrating brief critique on Childhood's End in the ListServ exchange). Still, they should be kept in mind every time we see a space opera or any variation on the theme of (actual title in 1940), Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Insofar as we take them seriously, Clarke's mystic leaps are a variety of leaps of faith into the absurd. Any idea of human beings "conquering" the universe or the galaxy or even more than a handful of stars: that is what is ever-so-politely called in scientific and scholarly discourse, "counterfactual." Less politely put, galactic spacefaring is fun fantasy I thoroughly enjoy, but also thoroughly Romantic and fantastic bullshit; and in the Flash Gordon/universal conquest vision, parochial — and delusional. Given the suffering and evils of our world, a comfortable Theist is pretty contemptible and possibly dangerous; given the immensity and indifference of the universe, a comfortable atheistic SF fan hasn't thought things through.

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         * Note

                  "Ursula K. Le Guin and Arthur C. Clarke on Immanence, Transcendence, and Massacres." Extrapolation 28 (Summer 1987): 105-29.

Old Books, Prediction, & Threats (Existential and Otherwise) [8 March 2015]

      I do a lot of reading and a fair amount of writing on line, and there's a good chance you do, too; but I'd like to pause to remind all and sundry that there are a number of advantages in the slow-reading of old and somewhat old books in hard-copy rather than comparable on-line reading, even when nowadays one can highlight on-line text, do very efficient searches, and even make/take notes: plus copy, paste, and link, as (somewhat ironically) I do below.
            First off, there are just matters of format. Except for some brief periods when pulp and "pulpish" books came with internal ads, one can read in books pretty much without commercial breaks and distractions. This is a distinct advantage when even places like the log-in page on my credit union site interrupts demands for complex passwords with slide-over announcements about whatever it might be that a credit union can offer that they think I want. ("Every time you read an ad, the hucksters win.")
            And second off — and last for this blog post — it's useful to get in simple format information relevant for current controversies from sources free from at least specific agendas on those controversies.
            I've been thinking such thoughts after coming across a very simple table and a brief paragraph in a "fix-up" book, bringing together materials from 1967-72, Alfred W. Crosby Jr.'s The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, i.e., the 1492 of the voyage of Columbus and not, say, the completion of the Reconquest of Spain by Catholic Christians and the expulsion of "Moors" and Jews and other undesirables. (You can find an updated summary of Exchange on line, here.)
            More exactly, I've been thinking these thoughts while putting The Columbian Exchange in dialog, so to speak, with some brief portions of the 1968 novel by Arthur C. Clarke (and Stanley Kubrick), 2001: A Space Odyssey: portions giving some novelistic introspection by Dr. Heywood Floyd that would've been inappropriate in the Kubrick (and Clarke) film.
            What got me back to this section of 2001 was a minor brouhaha a year or so back on the word "pad" in "iPad." Along with some other SF geeks, I pointed out that the deep background for "pad" probably had little to do with generic Kotex but may've been a conscious or unconscious allusion to 2001: the novel. In the second leg of his mini-odyssey from Earth to the Moon, Dr. Floyd (ch. 9) finds that
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          There was plenty to occupy his time, even if he did nothing but sit and read. When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.
          [* * *]
          Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. […] The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.
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Now prediction is not the business of science fiction — "a novelist's business is lying," not predicting the future, as Ursula K. Le Guin has insisted — but looking up the quotation did get me thinking about where Clarke in 2001 had been pretty accurate at prediction and where not. With the Newspad, Clarke had been, if anything, too timid, perhaps balancing his wild over-optimism about Artificial Intelligence (HAL 9000), a Moon colony, and space exploration generally.
            But how did Clarke do in more somber areas, on the sort of questions suggested in reading Columbian Exchange?
            On the first leg of his trip to the Moon (in Chapter), Dr. Floyd raises some of the questions central to the thematic and political concerns of 2001.
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          Though birth control was cheap, reliable, and endorsed by all the main religions, it had come too late; the population of the world was now six billion - a third of them in the Chinese Empire. Laws had even been passed in some authoritarian societies limiting families to two children, but their enforcement had proved impracticable. As a result, food was short in every country; even the United States had meatless days, and widespread famine was predicted within fifteen years, despite heroic efforts to farm the sea and to develop synthetic foods.
          With the need for international cooperation more urgent than ever, there were still as many frontiers as in any earlier age. In a million years, the human race had lost few of its aggressive instincts; along symbolic lines visible only to politicians, the thirty-eight nuclear powers watched one another with belligerent anxiety. Among them, they possessed sufficient megatonnage to remove the entire surface crust of the planet. Although there had been - miraculously - no use of atomic weapons, this situation could hardly last forever.
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            Birth control in the year 2001 was relatively cheap and reliable, among the well-off, but as Clarke makes fairly clear elsewhere — I think it's in Childhood's End, and in any case is the case — truly reliable birth control is for men as well as women, and truly reliable birth control renders users sterile until they make the conscious decision to restore their fertility. That kind of birth control wasn't and isn't available, and the Roman Catholic Church still hasn't endorsed even condoms. .
            The world population in 2001 was indeed some six billion and we passed seven billion on or about 12 March 2012. We do not, however, have massive food shortages, nor do we have thirty-eight nuclear powers, nor, probably "sufficient megatonnage to remove the entire surface crust of the planet." We do, however, as a species, have sufficient megatonnage to bring on nuclear winter and destroy the human species (and many other species) or, short of that, destroy human civilization.
            What Clarke was on to in 1968, and which is too often forgotten post-2001 (in spite of the once-influential Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and my never-influential but frequent kvetching) is just how special atomic weapons are.
            Why Clarke remains correct on atomic weapons, and why he was so wrong on famine, is clarified in a very simple table in Columbian Exchange — or at least it's clarified when combined with a slightly more complex list in Matthew White's "Ranking: The One Hundred Deadliest Multicides" (pp. 529-30). And a short paragraph in Columbian Exchange reminds of us the continuing relevance of the cover-story for Dr. Floyd's trip to the Moon — an epidemic from a new pathogen at the US Moon base — and why Bill Maher should be chided and anti-vaccination activists should be slapped around a bit.
            The table in Columbian Exchange just gives the estimated population of humans in the various large regions of Earth for every half century from 1650 to 1950 (p. 166) and is important in one way for showing the stability of the population of North America between 1650 and 1750, the decrease in population of Latin America between 1650 and 1750, and the decrease in the population of Africa between 1650 and 1900. Since there was an influx of Europeans into the Americas and Africa during these periods, the cause of the stability or decline in populations is collapse in the number of indigenous peoples: from conquest (necessarily including mass murder), exploitation, and enslavement — as should be well known — but largely from disease in the Americas as "virgin" populations of healthy native Americans got exposed to diseases endemic among Europeans and their animals, with later exposure from African slaves.
            (The Africans and a fair number of underclass Europeans are innocent here: they weren't willing immigrants; the Conquistadors et al. were ignorant how virulent they and some of their animals were as disease vectors, but are still guilty as sin [or sins: mostly Greed and Pride and Wrath, with Sloth and Lust coming in later, almost completing the traditional set].)
            The general trend in human population 1650 on, however, was upward, moving from some 5.45 million in 1650 to near 2.5 billion in 1950; as modestly numerous mammalian species go, humans had a population explosion after 1650, and one requiring an explanation.
            For Crosby, the main explanation for the rise in population was the part of the Exchange wherein New World crops were adopted enthusiastically (for the most part) in Europe, Africa, and Asia, providing new sources of nutrition, and a wider variety of crops: allowing cultivation of land unsuitable for Old World wheat or rice.
            American maize and potatoes, primarily, could feed rising populations, so the populations rose. It was a second agricultural revolution, and that revolution has continued, allowing us humans to avoid the great famines Clarke and others feared for 2001.
            It has been one hell of an explosion, and a tribute to human reproductivity.
            In the first fifty years of the twentieth century, the human population boomed from 1.608 billion to 2.454 billion, with increases in every region. This is impressive and important because the first fifty years on the twentieth century were also the time of what Matthew White has called "the Hemoclysm": the deluge of blood. White is referring mostly to World War II, with some 66 million deaths, and its prelude, World War I, with 15 million. But it is also the time of the deaths (in descending order of awfulness) of some twenty million people in Stalin's purges and deportations and intentional famines, ten million people in the "Congo Free State" of King Leopold of Belgium — showing what can be done without fanaticism, but with just greed and "capitalism by other means" — the Russian Civil War (nine million deaths), the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe (2.1 million), and the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 at about one million. The figures don't include the Korean War, which started in 1950, nor the non-war related deaths in North Korea starting in 1948 and continuing to … well, continuing to today. And I've omitted the Spanish Civil War and other smaller horrors with body-counts under a million.
            As far as "anthropogenic" deaths from war and massacres go, if the first half of the twentieth century didn't put a dent in human population — if the period showed hardly a slowing down of population increase — well, nothing short of thermonuclear Armageddon will do that.
            But thermonuclear Armageddon will do that, and with six billion human beings around in 2001, and over seven billion human beings around now, many either despairing or looking forward to living far higher off the figurative hog — Dr. Floyd and his creator were right to worry that some (relatively) small but sufficient number of them — some high-power folk among us — will fuck up sufficiently to trigger Armageddon.
            Let's get back, though, to the cover story for Dr. Floyd's trip to Earth's Moon and the USA's Clavius Base: the possibility of "an epidemic on the Moon" (ch. 7), possibly "extraterrestrial" in origins (ch. 9).
            That's not what's happening in 2001: A Space Odyssey; what is really happening is the discovery of evidence that the Earth had been visited by intelligent E.T.'s who have left an artifact "approximately three million years old" (ch. 11), which would be major news. Still, "an epidemic on the Moon" possibly "extraterrestrial" in origins could be bigger.
            World War I and World War II combined killed some 81 million people; the "Spanish" flu pandemic from 1918 through 1920 "infected 500 million people across the world […] and killed 50 to 100 million of them," which works out to "three to five percent of the world's population" of human beings at the time.
            There's another tribute to human reproductivity there, but also a warning. Some "Andromeda Strain" from outer space would be an existential threat to humankind; and if it did something like unravel all forms of DNA and RNA, it could lead to mass extinction on par with thermonuclear war or super-volcanoes or Earth's getting smacked with another asteroid or comet. The Pathogen From Outer Space!!!, however, is unlikely, but the basic point gets us back from science fiction and matters as far back as 1918 and into my lifetime, and yours, and a simple, stark paragraph in The Columbian Exchange.
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The Columbian exchange continues [in the 1970s] and will continue. The men of the Old World continue to enjoy the benefits of biological warfare as American Indians continue to die of Old World diseases. Between 1871 and 1947, the total number of natives of Tierra del Fuego dropped from between 7,000 and 9,000 to 150, many of them victims of a malady which is even now one of the chief killers of the aborigines of the [Gran] Chaco [in South America]: measles.
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            Bill Maher was sixteen when Columbian Exchange was published, and sixteen was Vladimir Putin's age when 2001: a Space Odyssey was released and the novel 2001 published. In 1968, Barack Obama was seven, and few of the people were born who today decide whether or not to get their kids inoculated against measles and other communicable diseases — and not many more were around who today make decisions on US and Russian nuclear policies.
            Crosby and Clarke had agendas all right, and so does Matthew White; but Crosby and Clarke could not have had in mind specific leaders in 2015, or parents in fancy enclaves in California. In simple prose and with simple tables — without website glitz and distractions — they told stories, laid out arguments, and gave information with continuing relevance.
            The human species can survive very great losses; it's unlikely we'll survive a nuclear cataclysm. The human species has survived epidemics and pandemics and endemic (childhood) diseases; but only fools and/or the irresponsible or immoral invite communicable disease — and responsible parents and societies try to protect children from unnecessary suffering, even when that suffering is far from lethal.

            Long-range trade in crops and products, animals and ideas, has brought wealth and abundance of people. It has also brought death and misery. Global exchange and globalization will do the same and do it disastrously unless we take long-standing advice and literally and figuratively move and trade with caution.