All posts tagged Tomorrow’s World

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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Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)

Arthur C. Clarke and John Wyndham were my favourite sci-fi authors as a boy, as an eleven, twelve, thirteen year old at the start of the 1970s. Clarke was still happily writing, I remember excitedly swapping Rendezvous with Rama with friends soon after it came out.

Childhood’s End is his fifth novel and one of the best books I had ever read. The memory of the book’s artful pacing, and the cumulative revelations leading up to the nihilistic final scenes, made an impact on my young imagination which has lasted all my life.

Premise

The idea behind the plot can be relatively simply stated.

There are lots of inhabited planets in the universe. Most of the inhabitants proceed through a similar cycle, from agriculture to industrialisation and scientific literacy, then the start of space travel and so on. It’s at this point that they are ready to move on to ‘the next stage’. A race called the Overlords is dispatched to guide them. Under the tutelage of the Overlords – who abolish war and poverty – the pupil race becomes wise and peaceful, experiencing a Golden Age.

But this is all deceiving. The Overlords have not been sent to supervise this golden age and are not there for the good of the pupil race at all. Another power, a power deeper and older and more powerful than them, the ‘Overmind’, has detected that the supervised species is about to move on to the next stage of evolution, to abandon physical bodies and become pure minds, initially as individuals, then uniting together to form a group mind, and then abandoning the host planet altogether to take to the stars and join the Overmind.

This is the basic plot of Childhood’s End. It is an epic story about the near future transformation of the human race into a completely new species and the end of the world as we know it, so big, so awe-inspiring, it reminds you of the galactic prophecies of H.G. Wells or Olaf Stapledon.

What makes it so powerful is that Clarke turns this story into a thriller. We don’t see this narrative told as a whole through the eyes of some future historian. Instead we discover it piecemeal through the eyes of a succession of pretty normal human characters, each of whom experiences a particular phase of the development, each of whom is granted a waystation revelation, learns a part of the truth, each of which is as much of a shock and surprise to them as it is to the reader, as the narrative as a whole slowly peels off skins like an onion, giving the reader a succession of imaginative jolts and marvels, a sense of mounting horror and suspense, right up until the shocking end-of-the-world scenes of the last few pages.

Key episodes

1 Earth and the Overlords

Thus the book opens by describing the work of two German rocket scientists, one captured by the Soviets, one by the Americans at the end of the Second World War. They are both nearing completion of plans for man-carrying rockets for their respective Cold War masters, when one day they look up and see the vast silver ships of the Overlords in the sky above them. At a stroke the world’s population realises that ‘we are not alone’. At a stroke, the rocket scientists realise their work is futile.

Five years later a lengthy section lets us get to know Rikki Stormgren, the Finnish Secretary General of the United Nations. We learn that within days of their arrival the Overlords (an earth nickname, not the name they give themselves) gave one speech across the whole world’s radio sets explaining that they are here to help not harm, to prevent the nuclear wars which might lead to humanity’s extinction – and then had settled down into a routine of inviting Stormgren to a weekly conference to discuss the management of earth.

To attend, Stormgren enters a metal pod via a set of retractable steps, then the pod zooms up into the stratosphere, entering a brief opening in the spaceship which immediately closes. When the pod door opens he finds himself in a comfortable room with a grille and a big screen which is blank and opaque. He hears the voice of the being named Karellan, who speaks perfect English, is always calm and polite, knows all about earth politics, and always gives wise advice about international problems. Despite questioning from Stormgren, Karellan gives little or nothing away about the Overlords.

The Overlords only interfere in earth affairs twice: in South Africa apartheid has collapsed and been replaced with persecution of the white minority which the Overlords intervene to put an end to. And – in a scene I have remembered my whole life – in Spain, at a bullfight, when the first toreador sticks a spear into the bull, the entire audience of 10,000 experiences what the bull feels and shrieks in agony (p.37). The Overlords abolish cruelty to animals.

Unsurprisingly, a movement has grown up resenting the Overlords’ intrusion in human affairs, the ‘Freedom League’ led by a man named Alexander Wainwright. One night Stormgren is kidnapped and – in scenes more reminiscent of a thriller – smuggled out of his house, swapped from a car to a lorry in a deep tunnel (to escape the Overlords’ detection devices), driven south then flown to South America where he wakes up in the hands of some goons from the Freedom League. They are fairly civilised, just want to know more about Stormgren’s weekly meetings with Karellan. As you might expect he is soon rescued by the all-powerful Overlords. In a compelling scene, the interrogators suddenly freeze in mid-sentence and Stormgren hears a polite voice emanating from a small metal sphere hovering at head height, which guides him out of the old mine works where he’s being held hostage, into one of the Overlords’ little flying machines, and so back to freedom (p.38).

Fifteen pages are then devoted to another episode featuring Stormgren as he discusses with his number two, Pieter van Ryberg, and the senior scientist at the UN, a Frenchman named Duval, a plan to see beyond the opaque screen in the ‘meeting room’. It takes Duval a few weeks to work up a super-powerful torch which Stormgren can hide in the base of the briefcase he always takes with him to the meetings. When the time seems right he can swing it up to face the screen and see if the torch’s beam illuminates what they all guess must be the room on the other side – and the Overlord who occupies it.

At this next meeting, Stormgren repeats the complaints of much of the population that they want to know what their rulers and masters look like. Karellan promises to make a global announcement that the Overlords will reveal themselves in fifty years time. Only then, he argues, will humanity have become completely acculturated and used to their presence, and their appearance won’t have the same impact.

As the conversation comes to an end Stormgren leaps up and swings the flashlight towards the opaque screen. He is just in time to see a room like the one he’s sitting in and a huge figure exiting an enormous door. What he sees shocks and stuns him for the rest of his life. We, the readers, have to wait till the next section to find out why.

2 The Golden Age (pp.56-119)

The fifty years are up. An Overlord flyer touches down on earth. The world’s press is gathered expectantly for the first Overlord to show himself. A doorway opens and gangway descends. Two little earth children from the crowd are invited up it. And then an enormous figures steps down the gangway, holding the sweet children in his arms. It is the figure of an enormous devil, deep red in colour, complete with horns and cloven hooves, leathery wings and long pointed tail! The social impact is immense. Now we learn what Stormgren had glimpsed in the spaceship fifty years earlier. And the meaning of his speculation that the two races must have met, sometime back in the mists of time, and something gone very badly wrong between them to leave such a diabolical folk memory.

But fifty years was the right period. Most people alive now accept the Overlords’ rule completely. Also, organised religion has faded away under the Rule of reason instituted by the Overlords and so there isn’t a great population of fundamentalists to stir up trouble (pp.56-58).

Clarke then embarks on a long description of the Golden Age of peace and plenty which the human race experiences. Ignorance, disease, poverty and fear cease to exist. Everyone speaks English. New agriculture supplies all food needs. Robots man the factories which supply a world of new consumer goods. The end of the Cold War, and all war, frees up resources and skills to be devoted to entirely peaceful ends. New technology creates flying machines which can get to anywhere on earth in under a day. Most people have at least two houses, often in exotic locations such as the top of Mount Kilimanjaro or deep in the Pacific depths.

With so much time on their hands humanity, as so often in these kinds of utopian visions, turn out to be immensely bookish, takes to higher education till age 25, becomes philosophers and poets and artists. Nobody has to do any work they don’t want to.

Like a good liberal Clarke imagines that all religious faiths will wither away. The Overlords give historical institutes a kind of historical TV machine which can show scenes from the past. Human historians immediately go back to check out the real people behind the legends of Moses, Mohammed, Jesus and so on. Organised religion does not survive the immense disillusionment of what they find (p.63). So religion disappears and the human race turns into millions of bookish, thoughtful, jolly nice chaps rather like, well, Arthur C. Clarke.

All this is exemplified in the social set around Rupert Boyce and his mixed-race wife, Maia, who give a stylish party at Rupert’s mountain-top home. Guests include a famous film producer, a minor poet, a mathematician, two famous actors, an atomic power engineer, a game warden, the editor of a weekly news magazine, a statistician from the World Bank, a violin virtuoso, a professor of archaeology and an astrophysicist. The world has turned into Hampstead.

Among the guests are George Greggson and Jean Morrel who are going to turn out to be tremendously important to the story, and the future of the human race.

They are astonished to discover that one of the guests is an Overlord, Rashaverak, who is quietly reading through Rupert’s world-famous and priceless collection of antique and ancient books about astrology, parapsychology, clairvoyance and so on.

Half way through the party, a bit drunk, George finds himself on the roof with another guest, a black man named Jan Rodricks, who is half-brother to the host’s wife, Maia. Jan is an astrophysicist, quiet and self-contained so George soon returns to the noisy party below,but Jan also will be a key player in the last stages of the novel.

George is talked by Rupert into attending a drunken session of Ouija the host has organised. It uses an up-to-date design by consisting of a round table of ballbearings on which is placed a circular tray. All the members – Rupert, Maia, George, Jean and, latterly, Jan – place hands on the tray while Rupert asks questions. Then the tray moves around the table towards the words Yes or No printed on the edge, along with all the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 1 to 10.

They seem to get half sensible answers to some of Rupert’s questions but drunk George thinks it’s all nonsense until Jan, out of nowhere, asks the identity of the Overlords’ home star. To his surprise the board immediately spells out the number NGS 549672 and most people are too puzzled by this to notice George’s partner, Jean, faint.

Jan recognizes this as a star-catalog number and travels to the Royal Astronomical Society in London where he looks it up and confirms it is a star which really exists and has been logged. Earlier we had observed him watching from Rupert’s roof one of the Overlords’ supply ships taking off from the moon and leaving a long tracer line across the sky: along with their appearance the Overlords no longer conceal that a) there is not in fact a fleet of ships but only one, the one hovering over New York, all the others were holograms and b) that they receive supplies from their home planet via a transhipping base on Pluto.

We cut to a discussion between Rashaverak – who witnessed the Ouija board scene – and Karellan. The latter says ‘it has begun’ creating a tremendous sense of suspense and anticipation in the reader, and they both indicate that Jean must, somehow, have been the channel through which this inaccessible knowledge had reached the Ouija board.

Jan then goes to visit Professor Sullivan in his research lab miles and miles underwater in the South Pacific Basin. For some time the Overlords have been collecting examples of earth’s flora and fauna. Jan has discovered that Professor Sullivan has been asked to supply examples of the world’s two largest creatures, the giant squid and the blue whale, for them. In fact they are going to build and design them from scratch with metal skeletons, cover them with rubber and plastic and paint them. Real samples would be difficult to get hold of and would stink and rot.

Jan proposes a scheme: that they build a hidey-hole into the metal whale and Jan stows away and flies to the Overlords’ home planet. Sullivan enthusiastically agrees to help. This storyline takes up twenty pages and brings us to the end of part two. Jan successfully stows away, the artificial whale is lifted up to the Overlord spaceship and it departs for its home planet.

Before departing Jan thoughtfully writes his sister Maia a letter laying out some of the practical issues: since the Overlord ships travel at near light speed, and Jan has identified that star NGS 549672 is 40 light years from earth, he will be gone for 40 years there and, assuming they send him right back, 40 years coming back. However, due to the weirdness of relativity, because he’s flying at near light speed, Jan himself will only age a few months. (Clarke gives an additional explanation that the line of light which Jan saw behind the departing spaceship wasn’t caused by anything so banal as flames from rockets, but due to the bending of light or maybe of the fabric of space-time itself, by the near light speed passage of the ship: he is not seeing a line of fire but a line of the bending of space into which the light of multiple stars is strained in order to create the impression of a line of light.) Jan is taking a supply of food, oxygen and will inject a narcoleptic to create a state of drug-induced hibernation for the duration of the flight.

This second section ends with Karellan holding a press conference at which he announces to the world’s press that the Overlords have discovered the presence of a stowaway, Jan, on one of their ships: he will be sent right back. But the incident has raised the whole issue of humans and space travel. The Overlords have allowed humans to develop the technology to fly to the moon and set up bases there. But now Karellan demonstrates why humans will never go to the stars. He conjures up a three dimensional hologram of the whole galaxy and then the universe. He points out that when the Overlords arrived mankind was on the bring of sparking a nuclear war. They saved them from that fate but if they can’t even manage the affairs of one little planet how, he rhetorically asks, would they cope with this: and the gorgeous fabric of millions upon millions of stars in the Milky Way strikes the attending press and scientists dumb.

3 The Last Generation (pp.120-189)

This final third of the novel is extraordinarily powerful and has two main threads. In the first we follow Jan Rodericks as he arrives at the Overlords’s home planet and what he finds and sees there. In the second, we follow Jean and George Greggson, who we met at Rupert’s party and now the significance of that seance session finally becomes clear.

We had already met the kind of people Clarke thinks will flourish in the future – film directors, poets, philosophers and the like. Now a group of these bien-pensant liberals establishes an artists’ colony on an island in the Pacific, which they immodestly name New Athens.

Among them are George and Jean Greggson, who by now have a seven year old son, Jeffrey, and a baby daughter Jennifer Anne. One day Jeffrey is playing on the beach when he feels a distant rumble and then the tide goes out out out and continues going out. Having seen footage and movies of this phenomenon I know this indicates a tsunami is coming but Jeffrey, inevitably, wanders down the beach following the tide until… a voice speaks in his ear telling him to Run run, and he turns and sets off up the beach and then up apath into the surrounding cliff as fast as his feet can carry him. It is a sweet bit of thriller detail when he finds a big rock blocking his way, the voice tells him to close his eyes, there’s a loud fizzing sound and when he opens his eyes the rock has gone so he can continue running.

All this is made that much more dramatic and involving by being told by Jeffrey in his own boyish words to his parents, who initially think he is making it up… until George himself visits the path and finds a rock which has clearly been blasted to nothingness. Only the Overlords could have done this. But why?

Then odd things start happening with Jennifer the baby. Her mother has a fit when she hears the rattle rattling but goes into the baby’s room to find it being shaken a metre above the baby’s head, unheld by any human hand. Jennifer begins to exercise other telekinetic powers. Soon food finds its way from the fridge to her cot by itself. She feeds and looks after herself, while her mother retreats into shock and George desperately tries to figure out what’s going on.

Eventually Kerallan tells them, explaining the basic premise of the narrative which I described above: the Overlords serve the Overmind, a vast cosmic intelligence, born of amalgamated ancient civilizations and freed from the limitations of material existence. The Overlords themselves are unable to join the Overmind, but serve it as a bridge species, fostering other races’ eventual union with it.

Now, Karellen explains, the time of humanity as a race of single individuals each with a concrete identity is coming to an end. The Overlords have been present at four such metamorphoses and know that it always starts with one member of the species ‘breaking through’. Then like the first crystal in a solution that one example catalyses all the others. Which explains why George and Jean become aware that other people’s children on New Athens are developing the same skills. Jeffrey had gone a long way down the road to individuality, but now he is called back into the group mind, also becoming indifferent to his parents’ existence.

All the children on new Athens become infected. Their minds reach into each other and merge into a single vast group consciousness. If the Pacific were to be dried up, Karellan explains, the islands speckling it would lose their identity as islands and become part of one new continent. Their children are now ceasing to be the individuals which their parents knew and are becoming something else, completely alien to the ‘old type of human’.

Adult society takes the decision to move all the transforming children to one continent, for their own safety and because their parents can’t bear their proximity, and cannot do anything for them now. Cameras are placed around their settlements to observe their strange behaviour. Sometimes they wander with their eyes closed. Sometimes they join hands and dance. They become filthy and ragged, their bodies mattering less and less.

The members of New Athens – that ideal colony of Hampstead intellectuals – are plunged into such grief and despair they blow themselves up with an atomic bomb planted at the base of the island. All over the planet the adult humans have to come to grips with the realisation that – their culture, their race, their species is ceasing to exist. Many choose not to live on.

Meanwhile, 40 light years away, Jan Rodricks emerges from hibernation on the Overlord supply ship and arrives on their planet. Clarke is really good at depicting a place which has physical reality but almost every aspect of which is genuinely alien and incomprehensible to him, not least the vast volcano-shaped mountain in the far distance which emits vast rings of smoke which then fly over the Overlord city. None of the Overlords were expecting him so no-one speaks English, until one slowly learns the language enough to give him a broken insight into their ways and purposes.

But then he is politely told that he will be placed on the next freight ship heading to earth and off he goes. Months later, as the Overlord shuttle enters earth orbit, Jan realises there’s something wrong. It takes him a moment and then he realises that there are no lights on the dark side of the earth, facing away from the sun. Almost as if those hundreds of brightly illuminated cities have… gone.

And of course this is what he discovers when the Overlord pod deposits him back on the surface. Karellan meets him and explains everything that has happened. The entire adult human race has either died out or killed itself. Jan is now the last man alive.

Only hundreds of millions of children – no longer fitting Jan’s definition of ‘human’ – remain on the quarantined continent, having become a single intelligence readying themselves to join the Overmind.

Jan finds that some Overlords have remained on Earth to study the children from a safe distance. When the evolved children mentally alter the Moon’s rotation and make other planetary manipulations, it becomes too dangerous to remain. The departing Overlords offer to take Rodricks with them, but he chooses to stay to witness Earth’s end and transmit a report of what he sees.

Before they depart, Rodricks asks Rashaverak what encounter the Overlords had with humanity in the past, according to an assumption that the fear that humans had of their ‘demonic’ form was due to a traumatic encounter with them in the distant past. But, in a really imaginative touch, Rashaverak explains that the primal fear experienced by humans was not due to a racial memory, but a racial premonition of the Overlords’ role in their metamorphosis. Time, as the Overlords have repeatedly told their human proteges, is much stranger than we can imagine. It was fear and anger and hatred of this future which endowed the figure of the devil with such terror.

Right up to the end the Overlords want to study what happens. They candidly explain to Jan that they are sad at their barrenness. Why do other species transform into mind and join the Overmind? Why can’t they? Hence their intense interest at studying, for example, all the books in Rupert Boyce’s library, hence their remaining on to study the children long after the rest of the human race has gone extinct.

Now Jan remains behind to witness the end of planet earth and relay his impressions and thoughts via radio to the Overlords whose spaceship retires to a safe distance, namely ‘six thousand million kilometres beyond the orbit of Pluto’ (p.189).

Jan describes earthquakes and spots of fire in the sky, and then how different fires come together to form a vast burning column which ascends from the planet into space. As the column disappears he experiences a terrible sense of emptiness when the children have gone. The atmosphere is leaving the planet taking with it everything which isn’t secured. Then everything around him and the earth itself become transparent and he can see a great white light emanating from the core of the planet upwards towards him.

The Earth evaporates in a flash of light. The children have used every atom of it as fuel to drive their final metamorphosis and journey to join the Overmind. Karellen looks back at the receding Solar System, reflects on the fate of the Overlords to obey, and the incomprehensible fate of the human race.

Critique

The everyday

It is a fantastic book, convincing and thrilling. Some critics think the human settings of each episode – the minutiae of Rikki Stormgren’s living arrangements and his kidnapping, or the immense labour spent describing the ins and outs of George and Jean Greggson’s marriage detract from the story, but I agree with Clarke’s approach and it’s what I like about Wyndham’s novels, as well. That these awe-inspiring changes happen to perfectly ordinary – or in fictional terms, ordinary – people. For me the fantasy is far more effective for being rooted in the everyday.

Anglocentric

When I read the long central section, the Golden Age, I thought, Wow! This is what the future’s going to be like! Clarke predicts that:

  • Everyone will speak English
  • Technology will do all the dirty jobs, giving everyone masses of leisure time
  • Everyone will have advanced university educations, often to age 25
  • organised religion will have withered away
  • quick cheap travel will be available for all

You can see how these assumptions grow out of faith that the post-war American economic boom would prove endless, and spread around the world, providing a never-ending stream of gee whizz technology.

When Clark wrote the Yanks were perfecting and marketing a dazzling array of household white goods – fridges, freezers, fridge freezers, ice machines, toaster, barbecues, hoovers, washing machines, tumble dryers. Futurologists, politicians and advertising companies thought it would never stop.

In economic, technical, scientific and cultural terms America emerged as the leader of the world. Hence the Overlords’ space ship hovers – as so many alien spaceships before and since have done – over New York, the only city which really counts in these kinds of stories.

But the 65 years since the book was published have proved otherwise. There are other countries in the world besides America. Not everyone wants to be American or to speak English. A whole load of angry Muslims can testify to that, not to mention Indians, Indonesians, the whole of South America, and so on.

The poor have not been eradicated. There is not enough food for everyone. There is not so little work to be done that everyone devotes their lives to leisure, poetry and philosophy. It’s striking how sci fi prophets from Wells to Clarke have all made exactly the same set of mistaken predictions based on:

  1. complete ignorance of economics
  2. complete ignorance of human nature

Economics Capitalism works through companies achieving competitive advantage. No company is going to introduce a new labour-saving technology which gives them a competitive advantage – and then let the whole workforce have half the week off. More likely they’ll introduce the technology and make everyone work harder, attending training courses and keeping up with the machines’ new higher levels of demand.

All through my teens in the 1970s Tomorrow’s World and every other magazine and new programme, all the articles by Asimov and Clarke and blizzards of other futurologists told us that technology was just about to usher in a new world of leisure. The great struggle of life by the early 21st century would be deciding how to spend all this leisure time, which course to take at the free universities, whether to become a poet or a painter.

Human nature Educated white men, bookish writers like Asimov and Clarke, imagined that in the future everyone would become educated and bookish like, well like them. That the future would be full of swots who, freed from the need to do work, would dabble in philosophy or art.

Has it turned out that way? Or was that just a laughably self-centred and blinkered view of human nature.

From Dickens through Wells and Huxley and then the great waves of 1950s sci fi gurus, right through to the present day, liberals all pin their hopes on education to bring about social reform. For me, this is a doomed approach. Maybe because I grew up among a lot of working class people who didn’t just not want an education, and were itching to leave school at 16 so they could get a job, money, a car and a girlfriend – but who also actively despised, bullied, threw stones and spat at anyone they caught reading.

Most people are not bookish. Plenty of people never read a book from one Christmas to the next. Those who do read, tend to read very intensively and make the cardinal error of thinking that everyone else is like them. Like all liberals, Clarke assumes that people want to be educated, want to be jolly bookish chaps like himself.

But they don’t, they really don’t.

Religion A massive tell-tale symptom of this secular liberalism is Clarke’s confidence that all religions will fade away, wither and die, disappear.

The numbers of people who admit to religious belief in the post-industrial west may well continue to decline, but in the rest of the world? In the Muslim world? In Latin America? In south-east Asia? In Africa? In nationalist India? All around the world passionate and sometimes violent religious belief continues to flourish.

It seems to me that sci-fi fantasies like this are messages from a specific place and time and culture which made the great mistake of assuming its very narrow and specific values would spread out to conquer all humanity.

Asimov, Clarke, Blish, they write stories in which techy white male Americans end up running everything, everyone speaks English, everyone uses American tech, everyone adopts American values, everyone is behind America’s efforts to colonise space.

As that period of American triumphalism (roughly 1950 to 1975) recedes, these works become more dated, period pieces, insights into a worldview which is becoming as remote as the medieval Europe which thought that the great Day of Judgement was just around the corner.

Maybe you could almost make the generalisation that science fiction, as a genre, expects just such a great change is just around the corner, comparable to all those feverish end-of-the-world predictions which seized men’s minds from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance.

In science fictions from Wells to Wyndham a great event is just about to take place which will change everything.

Maybe, not so deep down, science fiction as a genre feeds on that profound human wish that there should be an apocalyptic change or ending or transformation, now, within our lifetimes, something, anything, to relieve the boredom, oppression, grinding, numbing grind of the daily struggle for existence.

It’s true there have been real changes and great turning points over the past century – the beginning and end of the two world wars, the atom bombs on Japan, the Soviet detonation of a hydrogen bomb, Sputnik, men on the moon, the collapse of the communist bloc in 1990 – these have been big cultural, social, scientific and political changes.

But deep down they didn’t change anything. People everywhere have still had to scrape a living, worried about their children, got ill and died in the same old way. Only above a certain level of education and literacy, and from a particularly Western perspective, do better-educated professional people care much about these kind of historic events.

For most people most of the time there are no such transformations. Life carries on being as much of a struggle as it ever was.

Related links

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 London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend 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 – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion 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 passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring 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 Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to 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
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
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 down 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
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke – a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
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

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
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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