All posts tagged International Space Station

John Christopher on the changing face of science fiction (2003)

Christopher’s preface

When his young adult novel The White Mountains was reissued by Penguin in 2003, John Christopher was asked to write a new introduction to it. The resulting preface is only eight pages long and mostly explains a bit about the book’s conception and execution. But it also includes quite a passage describing how science fiction developed during his lifetime, which I think is worth publicising and pondering.

Christopher tells us that he was a well-established author of a dozen or more novels for adults when he received a letter from his agent telling him a publisher was asking whether he would consider writing a novel for children.

But what sort of book was it going to be? The publisher obviously wanted science fiction, but I was getting tired of destroying the world – by famine or freezing or earthquakes – and I was no longer interested in exploring the universe outside our planet. There was a reason for that.

When I was the age of the boys and girls for whom it was now proposed I write, I’d been very excited about the possibilities of space travel, but those had been different days. In the early thirties we knew just about enough about the solar system for its possibilities to be a magnet to the imagination. The moon might be cold and dead, but the planets offered scope for dreaming. Mars, for instance, was colder than our earth and had a thinner atmosphere, but possibly not too cold or airless to support life.

And Mars had those canals. An Italian astronomer called Schiaparelli, looking through his telescope in the nineteenth century, said he had seen canali on Mars’s rust-red surface. In Italian that just means ‘channels’, but it got translated as ‘canals’, which was much more intriguing. Maybe in that thin but breathable atmosphere there were long waterways, built by an ancient race of Martians, dotted with Martian cities that were lit by day by a smaller sun and at night by the magic gleam of two low-lying moons. An ancient race, because one might suppose that on that chillier planet the process of life’s evolution had been in advance of ours. Apart from being older, the Martians might well be wiser and able to pass on to us the fruit of their knowledge. Or, if they were so ancient as to have become extinct, the ruins of their cities might still be there to be explored.

Then there was Venus – closer to the sun and much hotter than the earth – with its permanent blanket of clouds. What might lie beneath the clouds? Perhaps a planet in an earlier period of evolution, as Mars was in a later one. Something like our own Carboniferous era, perhaps. Did tropical swamps teeming with dinosaurs and hovering pterodactyls await the arrival of our first spaceship?

Because that was something else we felt confident about: early experiments with rockets had already made the eventual conquest of space more than plausible. It could happen in our lifetime, and with it bring unthinkable wonders. It was a bit like being in Elizabethan England, reading stories about what might be found in the new world which was opening up on the far side of the barely explored western ocean.

But in three short decades everything changed. By the 1960s we knew more about the universe and the solar system – but what we’d learned was much less interesting than what we’d imagined. We knew that Mars was not just cold but an altogether hostile environment, Venus a choking oven of poisonous gases. The chance of any kind of life existing on either planet – or anywhere within reach of our probing rockets – was incredibly remote.

A couple of years after I wrote The White Mountains, space itself was finally conquered. The landing on the moon was televised around the world, timed to coincide with prime-time US television viewing. That meant the early hours of the morning in the Channel Islands, where I then lived. The boy I had been at fourteen would never have believed that I couldn’t be bothered to stay up to watch.

I had seen the future, and found it disappointing: so what remained? Well, there was the past. The colour which had bleached out of our interplanetary speculations was still bright in human history and there was life there, and romance and action… The publisher wanted the future: I was more interested in the past…

The Tripod trilogy reconciles future and past

Christopher then goes on to explain how he conceived a way of combining the two, the publisher’s request for science fiction with his own disillusion with science fiction tropes and growing fondness for past history, by imagining an earth set in the future and which has been conquered by futuristic machines, the tripods (very similar to the Martians of H.G. Wells’s War of The Worlds) but the invaders have realised the best way of controlling human society is to take it back to the Middle Ages, by creating small rural communities of serfs obeying the local lord of the manor who in turn owes fealty to the king who is himself guided by the tripods.

And hence the odd atmosphere of Christopher’s Tripod trilogy, which combine futuristic alien masters with a society which is thoroughly feudal and medieval in feel.

Disillusionment with space travel

So much for the origins of this particular novel, but the point of quoting his words in full is to convey Christopher’s eye-witness testimony to how young science-fiction-minded writers’ attitude changed massively between, say, 1930 and 1970.

The just-enough knowledge of the solar system which he describes in the 1930s is the imaginative backdrop to the Flash Gordon, space rocket and ray gun, bubble gum sci fi stories of the 1940s, 50s and on into the 60s. It explains the early space fiction of John Wyndham, two of whose novels are set on a Mars where humans can breathe the ‘air’, can settle and meet the native ‘Martians’, as they do in Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, the first of which was written as long ago as 1946, and as they do in thousands and thousands of other travelling-to-Mars and colonising-Venus stories.

I wonder if we could delve deeper and locate just when that sense of disillusionment kicked in. Immediately after the Second World War science fiction received a boost from at least two specific inventions: one was the atom bomb, with its ramifications for new ‘atomic power’ which imaginative writers speculated could be turned into engines which could power spaceships across the solar system; the second was the practical application of rocket technology by the Nazis, who developed their big V1 and V2 rockets, both of which are prototypes for the countless cigar-shaped rockets to the moon, to Mars or to Venus which infest the science fiction magazines of the period.

And behind specifically sci fi-friendly inventions there lay the enormous psychological boost of America’s post-war economic boom, when cars and bras got bigger and bigger, the consumer revolution of fridges, washing machines and so on, which fuelled the widespread expectation that pretty soon gadgets would be developed to solve every household or lifestyle problem – including ones for teleporting round the planet or jetting off to the stars.

Is it possible, I wonder, to date precisely when the sense of disillusion which Christopher so eloquently describes, began to kick in? Or did it happen to different people at different times? I grew up in the late 1960s and early 1970s and remember watching Tomorrow’s World with James Burke who also covered the Apollo moon landings, and there was still plenty of optimism about building a space station and using it as a jumping off point for Mars and all the rest of it.

J.G. Ballard was a relatively lone voice when he declared in about 1973 that the Space Age was over. That seemed a mad thing to say but what he was specifically referring to was the fact that the later moon landings were not covered live by American TV because ratings fell off. By the last moon mission, the Apollo 17 trip of 1972, the moon landings and the TV series that presented them to a worldwide audience, had been cancelled.

People were bored. Although we then went on to decades of the space shuttle and the creation of the international space station (the 1980s and 90s) Ballard was, I think, right to realise that these developments no longer captured widespread popular attention. They relapsed into being the special interest of a diminishing band of fans, with occasional flare-ups of wider interest whenever a rocket or shuttle blew up (January 28, 1986) or the occasional landing of a little buggy on Mars (as with the current Mars rover mission).

Anthropomorphism and Western chauvinism

But more than just shedding light on the trajectory from optimism to indifference about space travel in the mind of Christopher and by extension his generation (he was born in 1922), this passage also tells us something else about the sociological shape of the human imagination.

What I mean is the incredibly anthropomorphic nature of the speculations Christopher found so exciting. He expected there to be cities, or ruins of cities, or ‘wise old civilisations’ which could teach us newbies the secrets of the universe. Or maybe Venus would be at the other end of the evolutionary scale and just like earth in the age of the dinosaurs.

Either way you can see how these are obviously entirely human, anthropomorphic imaginings.

Digging a bit deeper, the notion that there might be ‘ruins’ on Mars is not only anthropomorphic but very Anglocentric. The 1920s and 30s were a great era for finding ruins of lost civilisations, crystallised by the publicity surrounding the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922. But the point is that these, along with discoveries made along the Silk Road in Asia or aboriginal holy sites in Australia, or Inca and Aztec sites in Central America, or the imperial cities of Zimbabwe or Chad, these were all discoveries made by Europeans and Americans, and so became part of our culture, the relics were brought back to our countries and became part of our colonial ownership of the rest of the world.

The ruins might be in Central America or Asia but they were made by white men, written up in white men’s journals for white men organisations and popularised through the newspapers, tabloids and magazines of the West, percolating down to schoolboys like Christopher and his contemporaries as controlled and ordered and structured into heroic narratives of Western exploration and discovery and understanding.

And it’s this ordered, directed, pro-Western structuring of narratives of discovery which underpin thousands and thousands of science fiction planetary stories from the 30s, 40s and 50s. Underpinned by the basic assumption that we earthlings, generally American earthlings, have a God-given right to colonise, inhabit, discover, communicate with, define and categorise and generally own the rest of the solar system if not the galaxy.

Which makes all the narratives which share this basic underpinning or ideological framework – no matter how disturbing their surface details and gaudy monsters might be – at their core, reassuring and comforting because they reinforce the notions of order and civilisation and morality and hierarchy and category which underpinned Western discourse (i.e. the aggregated total of the news media, scientific research, history and the humanities and all types of fiction) during that era.

Christopher’s young notions about the solar system and aliens were human-friendly and Western friendly.

Moving from adult to children’s fiction

In this respect Christopher’s transition from writing for adults to writing for children at just the time he did makes perfect sense, because the adult world, at the end of the 1960s, was ceasing to be the homogenous world of the 30s, 40s and 50s, and morphing into something else, something harsher and more fragmented.

Of course the Great Depression of the 1930s and then the vast calamity of the Second World War were physically and economically much more disastrous than anything which happened in the 60s and 70s. But the late 1960s and 70s saw the breakdown of the ideological, moral and cultural consensus which had dominated the West since 1945.

John Wyndham’s science fiction novels are ‘cosy’ because the protagonists all share the same values and worldview, even when they’re taking potshots at each other – to take a tiny example, Croker, the ostensible ‘baddie’ who staged the attack on Senate House in Day of The Triffids, later candidly admits it was the wrong solution to the plight of a world gone blind, and ends up becoming the leader of a new community. Deep down everyone is on the same side, believes the same things, shares the same values.

J.G. Ballard’s fiction represents, from the start, the collapse of this consensus. In Ballard’s early works the characters go mad, have psychotic breakdowns. To be precise, his characters’ response to some environmental catastrophe is to withdraw into private worlds and fantasies and to cease altogether to share values with anyone else. The moral consensus apparent in all Wyndham’s novels vanishes like morning dew leaving a ruined landscape of wandering psychotics – not psychotic killers, just people living entirely inside their own heads, to their own made-up values.

In the mid- to late-1960s, Ballard’s novels featured a lot of casual sex and violence and psychological breakdown which outraged the philistines and traditionalists. What is not so often commented on is that, as the 1970s progressed, the decade Tom Wolfe labelled the Me Decade (‘characterised by narcissism, self-indulgence, and a lack of social concern’) Ballard’s fictions came to seem prophetic of the widespread collapse of communitarianism and the rise of atomized individualism widely observed in that decade.

By the time Reagan and Thatcher were elected in 1979, although he’d carried on writing pretty much the same kind of thing, society had so completely transformed its values that Ballard came to seem like the prophet of smug, gated, amoral, rich sybarites, the subjects of his final (and, to me, deeply unsatisfying) novels, Running Wild (1988), Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006).

These all describe ‘transgressive’ behaviour among upper-middle-class professional types. They’re often described as satires, but they’re not, they’re more like shopping lists or role models for the era of the Sunday Times rich list and the never-ending series of lifestyle magazines which arose during the 1980s.

Thus to read in chronological order the novels of John Wyndham in the 30s, 40s, 50s, of John Christopher in the 50s and 60s, the optimistic techno-novels of Arthur C. Clarke from the 1950s through the 1970s, and then onto the stories and novels of J.G. Ballard is to watch the decline of Western optimism and consensus, to observe the death and burial of any sense of shared values and morals.

Now we are living in the aftermath of that collapse, with ever-increasing fragmentation of Western societies into angry tribes all convinced that they are the hard-done-by ones, and demanding restitution, justice and compensation from everyone else – the splintering of shared progressive ideas on the left into a welter of special interest and identity groups which itself mirrors the anger of right-wing communities who perceive their own white ethnic and traditional (cis-) gender identities under attack.

Sometimes reading the media, especially social media, feels like watching wild ferrets snapping at each other’s throats, against the darkening backdrop of the never-ending pandemic and the relentless environmental catastrophe of global warming.

We have come a long, long way from the innocently triumphalist vision of space-suited chaps rocketing off to colonise Venus and Mars. Now, far from colonising any other planets, it looks like we don’t even know how to hold democratic elections any more, and can’t agree what they’re for (this piece was written soon after the Proud Boys invaded the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021).

We certainly don’t know how to manage the planet we live on, let alone set ourselves up to ‘conquer’ and run others.

Reviews of other John Christopher novels

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Posted by Simon on April 9, 2021

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2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke (1987)

Clarke’s famous characters

I was struck by the cosy, clubby, collegiate atmosphere created by this novel. Although it’s meant to be about far-out events at the limits of human understanding, a thriller-cum-disaster story set at the remote end of the solar system – it often feels more like an after-dinner conversation at a gentleman’s club.

Every character is the ‘best in the world’ at their trade. Thus, at the captain’s table aboard the spaceship Universe, sit a typical cross-section of the planet’s great and good: ‘the planet’s best known science communicator’, a leading classical conductor, the first man to land on Mercury, the famous movie star Yva Merlin, and the planet’s best-known popular writer. We learn that the man who paid for Universe to be built is, of course, the richest man in the world, ‘the legendary Sir Lawrence Tsung’ (p.31).

These characters all know each other, share the same kind of rational approach to the world, give each other the same kind of nicknames, cultivate a knowing cliqueyness. Thus the notable passengers on the Universe who I’ve listed above are immediately nicknamed ‘the Famous Five’ by the other civilian passenger, the world famous scientist Dr Heywood Floyd (who appears in 2001: A Space Odyssey and is the key figure in 2010: Odyssey Two).

Even when new characters are introduced, such as the Afrikaaner Rolf van der Berg, who appears in what is at first a standalone strand of the plot, he is quickly bound into the club of the internationally famous by virtue of the fact that his uncle, Dr Paul Kreuger, was eminent enough to nearly be awarded a Nobel prize for particle physics (he was only disqualified because of political concerns about apartheid).

Something very similar happened a few years ago when I read through the adventure novels of Alistair MacLean in chronological order. The early ones are about nobodies who perform amazing feats battling Soviet agents or criminal gangs. But as they go on, they get worse, and MacLeans’s novels really began to go really downhill when they started to feature famous people (not real famous people – fictional famous people, the greatest racing driver, the most famous circus performer, the eminent film star, and so on).

You could call it laziness, or a fatal temptation for authors who have to churn out popular fiction by the yard – but you can see how, in a novel about nobodies, you have to earn the reader’s interest and attention; whereas, by contrast, if you start your story with a cast list which already includes the world’s most famous novelist, the world’s most famous conductor, the world’s most famous nuclear physicist, the world’s most famous space explorer and so on… then you can kind of demand the reader’s attention, as if they were reading the gossip column in Tatler or The Spectator.

It’s a kind of fictional short cut to trying to involve us. It’s like he’s expecting us to give him our respect and attention merely for the high falutin’ company he keeps, before he’s even started the story.

In these pally, clubby circles everyone is eminent enough to have been discussed in the papers and magazines and had their private lives pawed over. Which explains why famous characters aren’t introduced in their own right, but as the famous so-and-so who some critics / papers / colleagues criticise for his x, y, z public behaviour. This allows the author to then enact another cheap fictional strategy, which is – having invented various scandals or misunderstandings which dog the reputation of famous person x, y or z, to then present us as the man on the inside, the one in the know who is going to share the real reasons behind scandal x, y or z. It is the strategy of the gossip columnist, not the novelist.

And also, in these pally, clubby circles, everyone has nicknames for each other. Thus Floyd nicknames his fellow guests ‘the Famous Five’, but four of them quickly nickname the best-selling novelist Margaret M’Bala Maggie M (p.71). Later on, when Heywood comes up with a plan to use water from Halley’s Comet to fuel the Universe, despite some risks, he is quickly nicknamed ‘Suicide’ Floyd by the sceptics (p.176).

And when they’re not nicknaming each other, the characters are quick to come up with jokey nicknames for the space features they’re discovering, chirpy, jokey names which domesticates the bleak and weird features of space and brings even them into the cosy circle, the confident cabal of Clarke’s top men in their field. The habit of nicknaming which I’ve described among the little clique of VIPs aboard the Universe is shared by the crews of every other space ship and by astronomers back on Earth. That’s my point. These are all the same kind of people with the same sense of humour.

  • it looked exactly like a terrestrial geyser and had been promptly christened ‘Old Faithful’ (p.22)
  • the fifteen-hundred-kilometre-long feature that’s been christened the Grand Canal (p.38)
  • a perfectly straight two-kilometre-long feature which looked so artificial that it was christened the Great Wall. (p.136)

There is lots of ‘wry’ humour, ‘rueful’ remarks, ‘wry’ jokes and ‘rueful’ expressions. I’ve never really understood what wry and rueful mean. I can look them up in a dictionary, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone give a ‘wry smile’. It’s the kind of phrase you only read in popular fiction.

  • Maggie M viewed the situation with rueful amusement. (p.200)
  • ‘By the time I abandoned Shaka,’ she wryly admitted, ‘I knew exactly what a modern Germans feels about Hitler.’ (p.209)

Not much of this is actually funny, and it has an undermining effect on the book’s tone. If you’re writing a thriller you need to be very confident of yourself to include lots of supposed humour. The risk is it won’t be funny but will work to undermine the necessary tension and suspense. This is what happened to Alistair MacLean – he got more and more jokey and less and less gripping or believable.

And, as I pointed out in my review of 2010: Odyssey Two, even if you make one of your characters comment on the fact that they appear to be in a cheap pulp melodrama – that doesn’t deflect the allegation, it’s an admission.

It was uncomfortably like one of those cheap ‘mad scientist’ melodramas… (p.146)

Clarke turned 70 as the book neared completion. Later, he would be knighted. So maybe that’s another reason for this rather self-satisfied and clubby atmosphere: maybe it reflects the mind of a man rich in honours and achievements, a genuine pioneer in science thinking as well as fiction, an incredibly effective populariser of all kinds of ideas from satellites to mobile phones to scuba diving, a man who had an amazingly distinguished life and career, who knew everyone, who was garlanded with honours. Maybe this book accurately reflects what that feels like.

Why Clarke’s predictions failed

As the title suggests, the book is set in 2061, sixty years after the alien monolith was discovered on the moon which kick-started this whole series.

Any sci-fi author writing about the future has to throw in some major events to pad out, to add ballast to their supposed future history, the obvious one being a nuclear war.

Clarke is no exception to this rule and predicts that by 2061 there will have been a short nuclear war carried out by two minor powers and only involving two bombs (I wonder if he was thinking about India and Pakistan). In light of this poisonous little conflict, Russia, America and China promptly band together to ban nuclear weapons and so the world is at peace (p.28).

Later on we learn that there has been a Third Cultural Revolution in China (there had already been a second one by the time of the 2010 book). Oh yes, and there has been the Great Californian Earthquake which reduced most of the state to flaming rubble (p.26).

In other words, Clarke’s treatment of history is the same kind of lightweight caricature as his treatment of his ‘famous’ characters – a lamentably simplistic, cartoon view of human affairs, of history, economics, geopolitics and so on, which can all be summarised in a few throwaway brushstrokes.

Like so many of the sci-fi writers of his generation (who all came to eminence in the 1950s), Clarke thinks there’ll be a nuclear war or two which will teach ‘humanity’ the errors of its ways, which will end war and conflict, and so, with the money saved, ‘mankind’ will invent a hyperdrive and set off to colonise the stars.

This simple-minded delusion is so basic to so many of these narratives that you could call it Science Fiction’s foundational myth.

This iteration of it – 2061: Odyssey Three – follows the myth exactly:  the small nuclear war leads to peace, which leads to a ‘peace dividend’, which funds the inevitable development of a new ‘space drive’, and so on to ever-widening space exploration.

Scientifically careful, as always, Clarke attributes the ability to travel at speed through space to a new ‘drive’ based on the development of muonium-hydrogen compounds in the 2040s. As a result – and as so often -the solar system is soon littered with human colonies on all the habitable planets and the moons of the gas giants, as well as various space stations in orbit, and a busy traffic of shuttles and freighters popping between them.

Seeking clues as to why – contrary to the confident predictions of Asimov, Blish, Bradbury, Clarke and so many other sci-fi writers – none of this has happened, I think there are two main reasons:

1. Erroneous comparison with other technologies

Clarke makes a profoundly mistaken comparison between air travel and space.

The Wright brothers made ‘the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft on December 17, 1903, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina’. Only 50 years later passengers were sitting in first class while globe-spanning jet airliners flew them to Australia.

I.e it took just fifty years for the technology of manned flight to be transformed out of all recognition and to become commonly available to anyone with the cash.

In my opinion Clarke then makes the very false assumption that space travel will also proceed in the same kind of unstoppable leaps and bounds, from early primitive experiments to widespread commercial availability in a similar timespan – from Sputnik (1957) through the first men on the moon (1969), the first space shuttle in 1982 to the crewing of the International Space Station in 2000 and he then projects that forward onto bases on the moon, then Mars, then manned flights to Venus, then the new space drive and boom!

All so easy when you’re writing novels, essays and brochures for NASA.

2. Failure to understand economics

The analogy doesn’t hold because of simple economics. The space shuttle project cost some $210 billion, and each launch of a space shuttle cost over a billion dollars (until the last launch in 2011).

No commercial company can afford to spend this much. No commercial company will ever be able to make a profit out of space travel, either for tourists or for natural resources.

Only governments can fund this sort of cost, and even then only the governments of major powers, and even then only if there are demonstrable scientific, technological or geopolitical benefits. The Americans only put a man on the moon because they felt they were in a life-or-death struggle against Soviet Russia. The edge of that rivalry was wearing out in the 1980s and collapsed with the end of the Soviet Union in 1990.

There never was a commercial imperative for space travel and now there is next to no geopolitical motive. I predict there will never be a base on the moon. There will certainly never be ‘bases’ on Mars, let alone any of the other planets or moons. It just costs vastly too much, and for little or no payback.

3. Confusing space enthusiasts with ‘all mankind’

A related passage indicates another error in Clarke’s thinking. He was in the middle of explaining how ‘mankind’s thirst for knowledge pushed them on to explore blah blah blah’, when I realised, there’s the problem.

Clarke makes the common error of thinking that the subjects, activities and achievements which he has devoted his life to – are of interest to all mankind. Unfortunately, astronomy, astrophysics, space engineering, astronautics and all the rest of it are, at the end of the day, a very small minority interest. However:

1. Within the fictions, naturally enough, all the characters have dedicated their lives to these matters, and so his books – like those of Asimov or Blish – give the impression that the whole world cares as passionately about the aphelion of Io or the temperature on Callista, as they do.

2. There is a megalomania about science fiction as a genre. Pretty much from the start, from the minute H.G. Wells’s Martians emerged from their spaceships back in 1897, science fiction has dealt with global threats and an absolute central assumption of thousands of its stories is that the world will be saved by a handful of heroes. That the entire world will look up as the alien spaceships are destroyed by Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day.

To make it clearer – on page 83 of this book Clarke writes that really major scientific discoveries, the ones that shatter the entire worldview of a culture, don’t come along very often:

Galileos and Einsteins seldom appear more than once per century, which is just as well for the equanimity of mankind.

Just what does he mean here by ‘mankind’? Galileo published his discoveries in the 1630s, while Europe was being wracked by the Thirty Years War. Was the average European’s view of life turned upside down? No. Most Europeans were illiterate. What about the inhabitants of north or south America, Australia, Africa, or Asia? I don’t think they were too bothered either. So by ‘mankind’, Clarke is clearly referring to a tiny sub-set of Western European intellectuals.

Also, obviously enough, he has chosen two guys – Galileo and Einstein – who made big changes to the way we see the universe, to astronomy and astrophysics.

But Darwin’s theory had arguably the most seismic impact on the West, making Christian faith significantly harder to believe, while Fleming’s discovery of penicillin has had more impact on human life than any other scientific discovery ever, by saving probably billions of lives.

In Clarke’s prophecy when the major powers step in to prevent a nuclear war, it signals the end of all wars which results, of course, in a ‘peace dividend’ and, Clarke cheerfully informs us, ‘humanity’ then decides to devote this enormous amount of money to just the kind of things Clarke thinks are important, like exploring the solar system.

The flaw is when Clarke identifies the ambition and interests of a tiny minority of the earth’s population with ‘humanity’. It is, basically, identifying his own interests with all of ‘humanity’.

But the overwhelming majority of ‘earth’s population’ doesn’t want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in constructing spaceships which half a dozen like-minded chaps can have adventures in. Sorry.

4. Confusing America with ‘all mankind’

A common error made by high-profile, high-paid American authors is to think the entire world circles round America and American cultural products.

In pulp magazines, in short stories, in novels, and in Hollywood movies, American science fiction writers have complacently assumed that Americans will bear the brunt of any alien invasion, Americans will defeat the bad guys, Americans will develop all the new technology, including the mythical space drive, Americans will lead the way in colonising space.

The cold reality

Taken together, all these wrong assumptions, false analogies and economic illiteracy, combined with the enormous PR campaign surrounding NASA and the Apollo space programme throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, misled clever men like Clarke and Asimov into thinking that the whole world shared their passion, and that the outward urge was unstoppable.

Now, in 2019, from Syria to Xinjiang, from Burma to Brazil, people are in the same old trouble they always have been i.e. huge numbers of people are crushingly poor, unfree, victimised, exploited by massive corporations or locked up by the military police. People have other, more pressing priorities. Space is too expensive to travel to or to commercially exploit. These sci-fi stories are fantasy in the literal sense of something which never could and never will happen.

They are yesterday’s futures.

(It was only after thinking this all through that I came upon the following article about the end of the Space Age in, of all places, the New Statesman.)

The plot

When I saw the date (2061) I thought well, at least we won’t have to put up with Dr Heywood Floyd, who was a key figure in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the rather irritating central character of 2010: Odyssey Two.

So I burst out laughing when I discovered that Floyd is in 2061, appearing at the ripe old age of one hundred and three.

How come? Well, it turns out Floyd falls off a hotel balcony during a party to celebrate his return from the 2010-15 Jupiter mission, and breaks so many bones that he’s taken up to the space hospital in orbit round the Earth where he heals slowly but, by the time he does, it’s clear he’ll never be able to walk on Earth again.

So he stays up there for the next 45 years, sipping cocktails and chatting to the other occupants of the hotel, all – it goes without saying – eminent in their fields. A kind of All Souls College in space. Very cosy.

As the story opens a Chinese billionaire has funded the construction of several spaceships, leading up to the state-of-the-art spaceship Universe. Universe is scheduled to fly across the solar system to rendezvous with Halley’s Comet.

Although Clarke’s astrophysics is as precise as ever, the fictional part feels laughable. The Universe has gravity and joining Floyd at the captain’s table for fine wine and Michelin star meals are a selection of the planet’s great and good – ‘the planet’s best known science communicator’, a leading conductor, the first man to land on Mercury, and the planet’s best known popular writer, the ‘Famous Five’ I mentioned earlier.

This long sequence about the comet is only included so that Clarke can publish his (fascinating) speculations about what Halley’s Comet really looks like and what it would be like to land on it. This is genuinely interesting and obviously based on research and an intimate knowledge of space physics. I particularly enjoyed the bit where several scientists go a-wandering in their space suits, down into the spooky subterranean caverns of the comet, complete with their eerie stalactites.

But this entire sequence – the building, launch, docking at a space station, Floyd joining it, the journey to Halley’s Comet, docking with Halley’s Comet, exploring Halley’s Comet – all turns out just to be the hors d’oeuvre to what develops into quite a conventional thriller, albeit set in space.

For while the rich passengers on the Universe are frolicking on Halley’s Comet, hundreds of thousands of kilometres away, the spaceship Galaxy (also owned by richest man in the world, the ‘legendary’ Sir Lawrence Tsung) sent to investigate the moons of what was once the planet Jupiter, is hijacked by a woman with a gun – Rosie Miller – clearly an agent of some Earth power (but who or why remains a mystery), who forces the pilot at gunpoint to set the ship down on the surface of Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

Now it just so happens that out of the several billion human inhabitants of the solar system, the second mate on the spaceship Galaxy is none other than the famous Heywood Floyd’s grandson, Chris.

  1. This continues the book’s strong sense that it is a very small world in which only about twenty people count
  2. It means Floyd is thrown into understandable concern for his grandson and so
  3. He supports the ‘audacious’ plan to refuel Galaxy with water from the geysers of Halley’s Comet and then fly the Universe at top speed to Europa to rescue the Galaxy‘s 30-odd crew.

But it also turns out that 4. young Chris Floyd is himself not what he seems – he is working undercover for Astropol (the futuristic version of Interpol) who had suspected something dodgy was going to happen on the Galaxy. Aha! Mystery. Suspense.

The story turns into two parallel narratives. On Europa the crew of the Galaxy have to keep their ship afloat on the bubbling ‘ocean’ while being blown by its ‘winds’ towards a ‘shore’, all the time worrying about food and life support systems etc.

While, in alternating chapters, we eavesdrop on the harried crew and pampered passengers of the Universe as it travels at over four million kilometres per hour out towards Jupiter/Lucifer.

Young Chris Floyd and the geologist Rolf van der Berg persuade the captain of the Galaxy to let them take the ship’s little shuttle and go on an explore. There’s the usual Clarkean accuracy about the physical difficulty of extracting a shuttle out of a spaceship lying on its side beached on an alien moon, but soon enough they’re puttering across the surface.

They stop right at the foot of what astronomers have for some time been calling Mount Zeus, a vast, straight-sided geometrically clean mountain.

This appears to be what the intrigue was about, what the Rosie hijacked and forced the Galaxy to land for, because Mount Zeus is a diamond, the biggest diamond in the solar system, a diamond weighing a million million tonnes.

Van der Berg collects stray chips and fragments while explaining to Chris Floyd that the collapse of Jupiter into a star flung some of its diamond core outwards, at high speed. Most disappeared into space but this enormous mountain-sized chunk embedded in Europa, causing tectonic upheavals which they can still feel in the form of earth tremors.

Van der Berg sends an enigmatic message up to the radio receiver on another of Jupiter’s moons, Ganymede, which will relay it to Earth. The message is in code designed to tip off his friends on Earth to do something on the stock exchange – although whether knowledge that there exists a diamond the size of Mount Everest will collapse the diamond market forever, or prices will rise for rare Europa diamonds isn’t really made clear. This is a simple flaw at the heart of the ‘thriller’ narrative which is – we never understand why the hijacker forced Galaxy to land and we never really understand the consequences of Van der Berg discovering Mount Zeus is the biggest diamond in the solar system. That thread of the story is left completely unresolved.

Lastly, the two young guys fly over the surface to investigate the Europan avatar of the Monolith. Remember the monolith they found on the moon back in 2001, and then Dave Bowman discovered sticking up out of Japetus and which then multiplied in 2010: Odyssey Two to destroy Jupiter and turn it into a new sun?

Well, yet another version of it is lying sideways on the surface of Europe creating a great two-kilometre-long wall. Abutting against it they see round objects a bit like igloos. Can these be the homes of intelligent life? Nothing is moving around as they guide the shuttle down to land in a snow-covered space between igloos. But it is as they descend that Chris Floyd has a perfectly clear and lucid conversation with his grandfather – who is, of course, millions of kilometres away on Universal – which rather worries van der Berg, who thinks his pilot’s gone mad. Only later is there speculation that it was the monolith using a hologram projection of Heywood Floyd in order to communicate with his grandson. And what does the monolith say? That all the intelligent life forms who live in the igloos have fled because the little space shuttle is poisoning their atmosphere.

End

And then the novel is suddenly all over. Universe rescues everyone from Galaxy and takes them to Ganymede. The adventure ends with more heavy comedy as the human colonists are subjected to ha-ha-hilarious lectures from ‘the Famous Five’.

The ‘thriller’ plot, the entire rationale for the hijacking of Galaxy, the storyline in which Chris Floyd is an agent for Astropol, van der Berg’s cryptic messages about diamonds back to Earth – all these are just dropped. I’ve no idea why Rosie Miller hijacked the ship and I doubt whether the mere existence of a diamond mountain millions of miles from Earth would have any effect on the diamond market.

There’s another massive loose end, which is that, at the end of 2010: Odyssey Two Bowman had conveyed to Earth the warning that humans must never approach Europa. It had been set aside by the guardians for new life forms to flourish on. A couple of probes which flew too close were quickly evaporated, presumably by the guardian monolith.

So how how how how how come a) the Galaxy is able to land and b) Floyd and van der Berg are able to go shuttling all over its surface, poisoning the atmosphere, destabilising the diamond mountain and generally interfering, with no consequences whatsoever.

In all these instances – the prohibition on visiting Europa, the ‘thriller’ / Astropol conspiracy / something secret to do with van der Berg and diamonds – the plotline is just dropped. Galaxy is rescued. Then Hal and Dave and Heywood are having a nice chat. Then a thousand years later, Lucifer goes out. It feels oddly amateurish and half-hearted.

Postscript

There is a kind of postscript. We overhear conversation between the spirit of Dave Bowman, of HAL and of Dr Floyd. Somehow the other two have co-opted Floyd’s spirit, though he is still alive (?).

They recap the idea that the monoliths destroyed Jupiter in order to create a sun which would stimulate the evolution of intelligent life on Europa. But, the thing I don’t understand is that – Jupiter was itself teeming with life, strange vast gasbags blown in the impossible storms of Jupiter which had been described at length by Bowman’s spirit as it penetrated and explored Jupiter’s atmosphere in 2010: Odyssey Two.

That the creation of Lucifer resulted in the end of night on earth, I found upsetting enough. But the fact that in destroying Jupiter, the creators of the monolith destroyed all its life forms seemed to me as callous, brutal, clumsy and unthinking as most human activities. It nullified the sense which 2001 gave so powerfully of the intelligences behind the monolith being ineffably superior. Turns out they make just as questionable judgments as clumsy man.

In fact, right at the end of the story we learn that Mount Zeus was always unstable – having been flung at high speed into Europa by the destruction of Jupiter – and that right at the end, this diamond as big as Mount Everest collapses into Europa’s young seas, wiping out many species including some of the ones the monolith destroyed Jupiter in order to encourage.

It seems like futility piled on futility.

In their final exchanges, Hal and Bowman tell the spirit of Floyd that they want him to remain with them as guardian spirits protecting what life forms have survived on Europa.

Really? Even this is incredible. It took billions of years for mammals to evolve on earth, 30 million or so years for proto-apes to evolve into man. Are Bowman and HAL really going to wait that long?

Clarke has a staggering grasp of the laws of physics and astrophysics which govern the solar system in all its complexity. But his fictions seem to ignore the mind-boggling lengths of time involved in the evolution of species.

Post-postscript

But sure enough, it’s ‘only’ 1,000 years later that the population of Earth one day sees Lucifer collapse and the solar system’s second sun go out. To be precise:

Suddenly, almost as swiftly as it had been born, Lucifer began to fade. The night that men had not known for thirty generations flooded back into the sky. The banished stars returned.

And for the second time in four million years, the Monolith awoke. (final words)

That’s where the novel ends, presumably setting the reader up for the fourth and final novel in the 2001 series, which – I would bet – involves a trip to Europa and a meeting with the other intelligent life in the solar system.

Related links

Arthur C. Clarke reviews

  • Childhood’s End (1953) a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
  • A Fall of Moondust (1961) a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into galactic consciousness
  • Rendezvous with Rama (1973) a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it
  • 2010: Odyssey Two (1982) Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the enormous monolith on Japetus
  • 2061: Odyssey Three (1987) Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, a moon of the former Jupiter, but the thriller aspects are only pretexts for Clarke’s wonderful descriptions of landing on Halley’s Comet and the evolution of wild and unexpected new forms of life on Europa

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped andys
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after a catastrophe on the moon

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?

1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s

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by Simon on January 16, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 16, 2019

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