Fiction – Page 18 – Auxiliary Memory

Heinlein’s 13th Scribner’s Novel

There are legions of Robert A. Heinlein fans out there that grew up reading the 12 canonical Heinlein young adult novels published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in the 1940s and 1950s, that if we were ever given three magical wishes would use our first wish to get the 13th novel. Many science fiction writers have tried to write that 13th Scribner’s novel hoping to pay it forward for the immense rewards they were given from reading the original 12 Heinlein juveniles, as they are now called.

In 2003 the Heinlein estate gave Spider Robinson the chance to write that 13th juvenile based on an outline and note cards Heinlein had developed in 1955. In 2006 Variable Star came out with Robert A. Heinlein as the first author and Spider Robinson as the second printed boldly across the top of the cover. I immediately bought the hardcover edition thinking I’d read it as soon as it arrived from Amazon, but I didn’t. I wanted it to be the 13th Scribner’s, but feared it wouldn’t. It’s taken me two and a half years to get ready.

Over the decades I have read many essays by all kinds of people explaining how their lives were affected and even shaped by reading the twelve Heinlein juveniles. Spider Robinson wasn’t specifically tasked to write the 13th, and he even explains in the afterward that he was given leeway to write pretty much anything he wanted, but I feel from reading the results that he wanted to write another Heinlein juvenile. Since Robinson includes profanity, sex and drugs, we know he wasn’t seriously writing a novel that Alice Dalgleish, Heinlein’s editor, would have accepted back in the 1950s.

On the other hand, there is so much Heinlein in Variable Star that it is obvious that Robinson does want to write a novel that Heinlein fans will love, and maybe even praise as a novel that Heinlein would have written. This is a dangerous task to take on. What if you were a writer and William Shakespeare’s estate asked you to write a new play that they could sell to the fans of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet? I think Robinson intentionally hedged his bets and put enough of his known style and favorite topics into Variable Star so if reviews were really bad he could claim he wasn’t crazy enough to imitate Heinlein completely. But this book is stuffed to gills with Heinlein cliches.

I am 57 years old and I still try to understand why those twelve Heinlein books imprinted so strongly on my adolescent psychology. It is enticing to think about Heinlein’s formula. And it would be a fun challenge to analyze those 1950s books and try and recreate updated versions of them for the 2010s. So here’s a quick overview what I think were his essential ingredients:

All the books are about boys of high school age
In most of the stories the boys are free of parental control
Girls and romance are not part of the story
No sex or profanity
All the stories involve outer space travel
Most of the stories involve exotic aliens
Success depends on the boys and their talent
Science, math and engineering are of supreme importance
Violence is often a solution
Great things can happen to kids if they are ready

Robinson breaks several of these points in Variable Star. Joel Johnston has finished junior college and wants to get married. He drinks, gets high, has sex, and he and his friends cuss. But if Robinson had jettison the insanely stupid romantic plot, cut the boozing, drugs and cussing, this book could have been very much like a Heinlein juvenile. Robinson appears to be as romantically tone deaf as Heinlein. Many of Heinlein’s later books had characters wanting to get married ten minutes after they meet, and Robinson’s writing follows later Heinlein in dealing with the same silly male and female relationships. Both write romances that feel like they were written by eleven year old girls trying to write about sex and love.

Variable Star is not the 13th Scribner’s juvenile by Robert A. Heinlein. Alice Dalgleish would have wanted to edit out Heinlein’s reproductive organs if he had submitted this novel to her back in 1955. I will admit Variable Star had many of Heinlein’s pet ideas from the time period, and the novel is somewhat structured like a Heinlein juvenile, but it’s more of a structural copy of Starship Troopers, because both are essentially one long first person monologue. I love Starship Troopers and have read it many times. Heinlein was at his best talking straight to the reader with Starship Troopers. It’s a very hard writing style to pull off, and he never got away with it again, at least in my opinion. Sadly, it’s the number one fault of Variable Star. Since I listened to the book on audio it was all too obvious how much the narrator told the reader information and how little came through real dramatic action. I wished Robinson had copied the more restrained and dramatic first person style of Time for the Stars.

Heinlein was great on coming up with far out science fictional ideas, but he was a damn poor writer when it came to dramatic scenes and plot, and Robinson marches right along in his footsteps. For all the wrath Heinlein fans give poor Alice Dalgleish, I feel she kept Heinlein from boring his readers. Alice Dalgleish is an evil woman among Heinlein’s true fans for censoring the master’s words, but I don’t think she deserves their scorn, nor does she deserve the evil portrayal of her as Alice Dahl in Variable Star. To me grumbling from the grave is just whining after you’re dead. Google Alice Dalgleish, she’s rather obscure, but she had a major impact on children’s literature. Heinlein fans should worship her for giving them twelve cherished books from the leading American literary publisher of the time, that won all kinds of awards for their children’s line, were these books were published.

Most of the juveniles are stories written in the first person, heavy with info dumps, but they were kept under control, probably by Alice, and in the juveniles the info dumps were just long enough to teach and inspire kids without sounding like lectures. Later Heinlein and in Variable Star, all too often the story comes to a complete stop so the author can pontificate.

Variable Star should have been published with only Spider Robinson’s name on the cover. Many of my criticisms of the book would have been removed if that had been the case. Of course we’re all savvy enough to know that writers estate’s want to maximize their profits by pulling various literary gimmicks. If Variable Star had been published with only Robinson’s name on the cover, but with an intro about how he was given the Heinlein outline and note cards in a forward I would have had much more respect for the estate.

Since I bought the book in hardcover and audio, I also feel cheated that neither edition contained the actual Heinlein outline and notes. I would have had much more respect for the Heinlein estate if they allowed Robinson to publish that working outline and notes in the back of Variable Star. The book is a gimmick, and we should be allowed to see how good Robinson was at playing the game. Also, with Heinlein’s name on the cover, we should have gotten some actual Heinlein words.

Now if Variable Star had been published with only Robinson’s name, and no mention of Heinlein at all, and I read the book for its own merits then my judgment would be totally different. I think the book has many serious literary flaws, but it also has some fantastic science fictional speculation. If I had read Variable Star as a book with no link to Heinlein on the cover, or within, I still would have thought it was inspired by Heinlein and figured Robinson is one of his literary descendents. And I would have called him out on several 1950s Heinlein ideas that I feel are invalid for science fiction written after the year 1988.

Using telepaths for ship to Earth communication on slower than light spaceships following all of Einstein’s rules was a far out idea when Heinlein did it in his book Time for the Stars. And from what Robinson said about the various names Heinlein considered for Variable Star I’m guessing he didn’t use that outline because Time for the Stars is the book he wanted to write with those ideas. Since science has thoroughly trashed the concept of telepathy in humans in the succeeding decades it’s rather silly to bring back the idea. ESP is only suitable for fantasy stories, not modern science fiction.

Science has also killed many other Heinlein ideas from the 1950s, like farming on Ganymede, people being able to do astrogation calculations in their head, and faster than light travel. For Robinson to have near light speed travel, much less FTL, he has to resort to mystical mumbo-jumbo of the silliest kind. Now I don’t fault Spider Robinson too much on this though.

Diehard Heinlein true believers have total faith that FTL travel is possible even though they are reduced to counting the number of FTL drives that can fit on the head of a pin. Their religious faith depends on science finding a way around all the physics we currently know today. I’m willing to concede there may be a God, Heaven and Hell, life after death and faster than light travel, but the odds are about equal for all of them. I try not to be too critical about people’s deepest desires, but if Robinson wanted to write a cutting edge 2006 science fiction novel he should have stuck to all the rules of known science today.

Now it might seem like I’m totally trashing this novel as unworthy of reading, and I don’t want to do that. I think Variable Star does have some merits, some even equal to the sense of wonder of the 1950s Heinlein juveniles, but I can’t discuss them in detail without spoiling the story. There is a core tragedy that if the novel had been written differently could have made this novel into a major SF classic. This part of the novel made me feel totally satisfied with my purchase, even counting that I bought the book twice. Sadly, I consider it a shame that these great elements were stuck inside a gimmick novel.

Robinson narrated the audio book and did a great job. Usually I don’t like audio books read by their authors. He also includes an afterwards that makes me really like him, so I hate to be critical. We’re both lovers of Heinlein’s juveniles, which I consider a stronger bond than blood relationship. However, I’m not like many of the spiritual children of Heinlein because I rebelled against the old man. Many of my Heinlein brothers and sisters hate me for the things I say about Heinlein’s later books.

The true believers raise their hackles at any criticism of Heinlein. I had a different take on the old man. Heinlein preached science, and the lesson I learned from him is go with what’s logical and real. Heinlein threw out many hypothetical ideas to research. Most didn’t pan out, no big deal. Science moves on. Heinlein always believed mankind was the toughest varmint in this neck of the galaxy, and you can’t be tough living in your naval gazing on fantasies.

Variable Star’s many faults remind me of later Heinlein, and I can almost imagine a much older Heinlein writing Variable Star trying to recapture his glory days at Scribner’s. I think Robinson missed the mark at writing the 13th juvenile but still came very close to writing a Heinlein like novel. This can be seen as praise and insult, since I think later Heinlein is a bloated parody of younger Heinlein. I truly hate stories like The Cat Who Walks Through Walls where Heinlein dredged up cherished characters I loved in adolescence turning them into silly kissy-kissy wife-swapping swingers. I give Robinson great credit for not doing this. Robinson is far more liberal than Heinlein, and I admired those liberal qualities in Variable Star, but I wonder what Heinlein would have thought though.

This is going to sound weird, but those twelve Heinlein juvenile novels from the 1950s are sacred to me. As much as I would love to read another one I can’t. The world of 2009 is too different. Heinlein vastly improved my troubled childhood with his stories, and I will always love them, but I had to grow up. I don’t think anyone can write the 13th 1950s Heinlein Scribner’s novel in 2009. I think Alexei Panshin came closest with his 1968 novel Rite of Passage but that novel worked because I was still in my teens. Maybe a 2009 teenager will find Variable Star just as magical as I found Time for the Stars all those years ago. I think that’s possible. But for us old Heinlein fans, I don’t know.

If I was going to write a series of young adult science fiction novels for the 2010s, that I hoped would be as inspirational as the 1950s Heinlein stories had been for me, I think they should include these elements:

The lead characters could be boys or girls
The main character would still be high school age kids who find some way to live independent of their parents
Science, math and engineering would still be vitally important
I would accept the importance of sex and romance in these stories because realistically sex and romance is a huge part of teenage life, but the primary subject of the story would be sense of wonder and the future
I’m not sure what role violence would play
I could skip profanity, although I think editors accept it now in young adult novels
Success of the plot would still depend on the kids
Nearly all the ideas Heinlein had about space travel have turned out to be wrong, so it would be vitally important to invent new realistic explorations of space that kids could evaluate

This is where Robinson really missed the boat with Variable Star. By focusing on Heinlein’s peak ideas he seems to have forgotten they are over a half century old. Heinlein speculated about many things that we’ve since come to realize as completely wrong. Kids can’t built atomic rockets that take them to the Moon. There is no intelligent life on Venus and Mars. Just the radiation will keep us from farming Ganymede. And all the forms of space travel Heinlein envisioned are no more realistic than Tinkerbell’s fairy dust as a mode of transportation.

Just because science has outpaced science fiction doesn’t mean those twelve Heinlein juveniles aren’t great stories, still readable today. They have just migrated to the world of lovable childhood fantasy stories. The job of the next Heinlein is to write speculative fiction based on the science we know today. Like I said, there are some core elements of Variable Star that does this, unfortunately Robinson ruins it with a fantasy invention that fits in a plot that’s based on a sequence of way too many coincidences to be believable. I’ve read that Robinson has gotten the go ahead to write three sequels to this book. I would have loved to read those books if they were based on Variable Star’s core problem, and if the book from chapter 19 on had been different.

The idea of developing many colonized worlds through slower-than-light travel is excellent speculative matter for current science fiction. Having the main event of chapter 17 affect those worlds is another great idea for science fiction to explore. But the story needs to do it without telepathy or breaking the speed limits imposed on information. That would be a far out story worthy of many books.

Finally, hey Spider, one mention that a door dilates is cool homage to Beyond This Horizon, mentioned over and over again is just story stopping agony. One unbelievable coincidence in a novel is forgivable, but one per chapter is authorial suicide.

JWH – 4/25/9

Filming Science Fiction Short Stories

Over at BestScienceFictionStories.com Rusty Keele got an email from a film director asking him about which science fiction short stories would make great 10-15 minute films. Go by and post your suggestions. I suggested “The Menace From Earth” by Robert A. Heinlein, even though it would have to be cut down some to meet the time limit.

I remember the science fiction stories from the old Twilight Zone series that started back 1959. Those short films had tremendous impact, so it is possible to tell a gripping story in 25 minutes, but I think it’s going to take a special kind of tale to work in 10-15 minutes. Maybe it will be flash video fiction. However, limiting the length of the film makes it much easier for an amateur film maker to produce, and with people watching videos on YouTube, Hulu, and on their iPods, making short science fiction films might be a great idea.

Since I’m always wishing for more people to discover the wonders of the science fiction short story, and support the dying science fiction magazines (F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog), I’d especially love to see short films based on recent stories from the magazines, and use those films to promote the science fiction short story market. Even though those markets are dying, they still have 15,000-30,000 readers, so that’s a ready audience for the films. I wonder if some kind of marketing synergy could be attained by tying several small enterprises together.

Could we see a film opening with the flashy logo graphics marketing A SFSignal Production partnered with Asimov’s Science Fiction Films of a John X Smith film …, and maybe backed by money collected from online fans from genre entrepreneurs like those great Broadway producers Max Blaylystock and Leo Bloom?

The trouble is getting people to see the short films. Every year at the Oscars when they present the award for short film I always wonder where to do people see them. It’s a shame theaters can’t replace those annoying trivia shows and commercials they torture their patrons with while they wait for their movies to start with good short films. SFSignal has become a great place to catch a short video. I wonder if short Flash based films on the SF/F magazine sites would get them more subscribers? Macromedia Flash based films have evolved into high tech ways of watching videos online.

Most great science fiction short stories are more suitable for film length productions. I wish movie makers would audition the genre mags every month for potential films to make. Hollywood movie makers are obviously short on material when they have to make Terminator movies over and over and bring back Star Trek for the nth time. I mean, when was the last time you saw a really innovative SF film? There are way too many classic SF novels from the 1950s and 1960s that Hollywood has never filmed for them to be wasting their money on remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Another good game to play, would be to list which great classic SF novels would make mind blowing films. Here are some of my suggestions:

Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany
Mindswap by Robert Sheckley
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
Have Space Suit-Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
Women of the Iron People by Eleanor Arnason
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

I could go on and on.

JWH – 2/26/9

The Fate of SF Magazines

Over at Slashdot.org they posted a news announcement with comments, “Difficult Times for SF Magazines” that is very worth reading if you’re worried about the fate of SF magazines. The main announcement was Realms of Fantasy will cease publication with the April issue and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has dropped it’s schedule from monthly to bi-monthly. The folks leaving comments make some interesting points about the state of SF, with many writers lamenting that SF isn’t what it used to be.

Here’s a comment from Moridineas that I particularly liked:

The difference between then and now–imho–is that the Asimovs, Heinleins, de Camps, etc etc etc are gone, and they haven’t really been replaced. My other opinion is that s.f. was largely a product of the zeitgeist of the what, roughly 50 years that it roughly flourished (1920-1970 or so?). We’ve got HDTVs, the Internet, Star Trek and Star Wars on TV, rovers on Mars, decoding DNA, etc etc. The sense of wonder in s.f. is largely gone because we take so much for granted that was virtually unimaginable back then.

Here’s another worthy comment to consider and was echoed by others from Steeleye Brad:

Ugh, agreeing with this. I ended my subscription to Analog around a year and a half ago, when I realized that the story quality had really gone down the shitter. I found myself starting to read a story, but then quitting 1-2 pages in because they were just so terrible. When I would get an issue and go through every story like this, I gave up. Stories with neat concepts completely ruined by confusing writing and indecipherable plots, lame tales where it was screamingly obvious the main character was an author’s self-insert, and vomit-inducing non-stories that served only to let the author express their political views (normally this is ok, except when the author’s soap-boxing completely drowns out and overwhelms the story).

Ultimately the topic degenerates into the pros and cons of publishing on the Internet and sidestepping the issue of content and whether or not the decline of the SF magazines represents a loss of interest in SF or if its an issue of declining story quality. I brought up this topic in two online SF book clubs and the common comment is they don’t find the stories very engaging. Second to that is many people have busy lives and let all their magazines go unread.

I started subscribing to the SF magazines back in the 1960s and kept subscribing until very recently. I was most faithful to F&SF over the decades. Currently I get F&SF and Asimov’s, but both are up for renewal and I’m not sure I want to renew, at least the paper edition. I might subscribe to digital editions at Fictionwise.com.

To be honest I don’t read them. I try every once in awhile. I have a tremendous nostalgia that makes me want to keep reading these old friends, but when I try I seldom find stories that grab me. And it’s not the ideas, but the characterization. I think when I was young I loved the stories just for the ideas and I wasn’t savvy enough about story telling to know the stories were badly told. Now, after decades of reading great stories I can’t overlook this.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of far out stories out there, it’s just a matter of finding them. Maybe what’s needed is for the genre to get down to one magazine. Refocus the field of science fiction. And since the magazine publishing and distribution industry is so screwed, maybe the short story market should move to a different format. I’d suggest a trade or mass market paperback series published quarterly to start with edited by team of editors to get the very best and diverse kind of story. Tie the publication to a web 2.0 site where readers can discuss the stories and vote on them and interact with the writers. Also get Audible.com to do an unabridged audio edition of the book each quarter, as well as publishing it in the Kindle, Sony and all the Fictionwise ebook editions.

I think we need a modern day Hugo Gernsback or John W. Campbell to reinvent the field of science fiction. The number one goal should be to eliminate fantasy stories from the mix and develop real science fiction stories. The next goal should be to find well written engaging stories that focus on good characterization. Publish stories that grab people and make them keep reading, and not stories that you have to struggle to the end for a payoff.

Science fiction has reinvented itself many times. I lament the passing of every genre magazine and worry about F&SF, Asimov’s and Analog, the old big three that now have circulations that are a tiny fraction of their glory days. I can’t tell if this trend means science fiction itself is dying. It does feel like we’re on the downward slope of the right hand side of the bell curve.

I’m a member of two online SF book clubs that focus on the classics of science fiction, and like many of the folk who left comments on Slashdot, feel SF golden age was really from 1950-1970, the Heinlein-Asimov-Clarke era. I think there was another bulge of SF fans with a generation that grew up with writers like Vernor Vinge, Dan Simmons, Neil Stephenson, David Brin, Greg Bear, John Varley, etc. And currently there’s a ripple bulge with writers like John Scalzi, Charles Stross, Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds and others.

Whether SF will ever have another golden age with over hundred thousand people subscribing to its top SF magazine is hard to predict. Like I said, with a new Campbell or Gernsback discovering a new team of Heinlein-Asimov-Clarke level writers it could happen.

JWH – 2/1/9

Books Read 2008

2008 was a year of reading about the world and looking back at classic science fiction. 18 of the 45 books I read this year were SF. 11 were non-fiction. 12 books were ones I had read before – for some reason I listened to many SF classics that I first read back in the 1960s. Although I enjoyed many science fiction and fantasy novels this year, the stories that moved me the most were two by Edith Wharton. Two other novels stood out, The Road was intense and Oscar Wao was dazzling.

Science fiction books from the 1950s and 1960s are starting to show their age. I think Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke holds up the best. I liked City and The Case of Conscience, but structurally they had problems. City and Way Station presented wonderful sense of wonder ideas, but the writing is so dated that I worry that kids today will find them hard to read. I still have nostalgic love for the Heinlein juveniles Red Planet, Starman Jones and Podkayne of Mars, and they hold up enough to get reprinted as audio books, but I also worry that young people will have problems reading them. Their science is very dated, with canals on Mars, Venus being habitable, and people doing calculations for interstellar space jumps with pencil and paper.

Favorite Fiction:

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Favorite Non-Fiction:

Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman
The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
The Post American World by Fareed Zakara
Einstein by Walter Isaacson

The Whole List:

Old Man’s War – John Scalzi
Candy Girl – Diablo Cody
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
Running with Scissors – Augustine Burroughs
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Einstein – Walter Isaacson
Marsbound – Joe Haldeman
The Cult of the Amateur – Andrew Keen
The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
The Coming Economic Collapse – Stephen Leeb
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick (3rd time)
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls – Robert A. Heinlein (2nd time)
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett (2nd time)
Death by Black Hole – Neil deGrasse Tyson
Territory – Emma Bull
Drop City – T. C. Boyle
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
Podkayne of Mars – Robert A. Heinlein (4th time)
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
The Post American World – Fareed Zakara
After Dark – Haruki Murakami
Twilight – Stephenie Meyer
City – Clifford Simak (2nd time)
Proust was a Neuroscientist – Jonah Lehrer
Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny (2nd time)
Starman Jones – Robert A. Heinlein (4th time)
The Little Book – Selden Edwards
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
Hot, Flat and Crowded – Thomas L. Friedman
Way Station – Clifford Simak (2nd time)
Spin – Robert Charles Wilson
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick (2nd time)
The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life – Steve Leveen
Red Planet – Robert A. Heinlein (4th time)
Swords and Deviltry – Fritz Leiber
METAtropolis – ed. John Scalzi
The Space Merchants – Pohl & Kornbluth (2nd time)
Living Dead in Dallas – Charlaine Harris
When You are Engulfed in Flames – David Sedaris
A Case of Conscience – James Blish
The Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell
Childhood’s End – Arthur C. Clarke (3rd time)
Like a Rolling Stone – Greil Marcus
The Last Man on the Moon – Eugene Cernan & Don Davis

JWH 1/2/9

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

Childhood’s End holds up extremely well in the 55 years since the book first appeared in 1953. I just finished listening to the new Audible Frontiers audio book edition from Audible.com, and I was surprised in several ways. First, I was surprised that a science fiction book from 1950s worked so well as a whole. I’ve been re-reading a number of classic SF novels from the 1950s this year and many of them are fix-up novels, made by gluing short stories together, stories that were first published in the pulp magazines, and the results feel episodic. The original idea of Childhood’s End started out as a short story, “Guardian Angel” from a 1950 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, but it works well as a novel even though it’s a series of encounters with different characters over time that could be also criticized as episodic. It cohered for me perfectly.

Second, I was surprised how so much of the story had stuck with me since my last reading in 1985, showing how memorable the story is. Third, I was surprised by how many classic SF ideas Clarke included in his novel. Fourth, I was surprised by how many social issues Clarke dealt with that would explode later in the 1960s. Finally, I was very surprised by Clarke’s belief in the limits of mankind. Unlike Heinlein, Clarke suggests that man isn’t the toughest alien around, and is unfit to be the alpha creature of the galaxy.

Childhood’s End has to be somewhat inspired by the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still. In the film, Klaatu, a traveler in a flying saucer from a distant alien civilization comes to help the Earth. In the book, Karellen, the leader and his crew from an advance alien civilization come to help Earth in flying saucers. Of course, Arthur C. Clarke takes the idea much further than the “Farewell to the Master” story by Harry Bates which inspired the film. And strangely enough both stories have deep religious undertones, with Klaatu acting out the Christ role, and Karellen and his crew acting out the role of angels, messengers of God, even if they look like Lucifer.

Klaatu came to Earth, preached about our evil ways and told the people of our planet to get their act together or face retribution from a higher power. Karellen came to Earth and stayed, gently guiding the transformation of human society with miracle powers. Both the film and book preached that human society is severely flawed, that the human race is a danger to itself, that our governments can’t help and that individuals are full of weak behaviors (the seven deadly sins). Clarke is very philosophical about the future of mankind, and if you haven’t read the book yet, stop reading here because I’m going to give everything away.

To carry the religious metaphor further, both stories suggest that aliens from the stars will bring salvation to mankind. Arthur C. Clarke goes even further, and suggests that mankind must be reborn before we can travel to the heavens because our current minds and bodies are too limited to see the wonders of transcendental society of higher beings.

Clarke explores what will happen to people when the aliens solve all of our big problems. We fall back onto finding meaning in art, music, sports, sex and self education, but that isn’t enough. Karellen won’t allow people to travel beyond the Moon, and Clarke says without the final frontier our lives will become meaningless. In other words, life on Earth isn’t the real show, and it’s only until we evolve into a higher being that finally we will really understand our true purpose. Isn’t that same exact message religion gives to us poor mortals. Is this message built into our DNA? Is it some kind of ancestral memory?

When I was young, back in the 1950s when I first saw the film The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the 1960s when I first read Childhood’s End, I believed in what Clarke was saying. Science fiction was my substitute for religion. I’ve been a religious skeptic since I was 12, but it’s taken me much longer to become skeptical of the preaching of science fiction. Childhood’s End is a wonderful story, but so is the Bible. I don’t believe either. Whoever we are as a species, and as individuals of that species, is all we’ll ever be. Nobody will save us but ourselves, and if we are condemned to oblivion, then we only have ourselves to blame.

We might not be alone in this universe, but for now, we stand alone. Clarke really must have believed in higher psychic powers and that mankind would evolve into a super-being because the same message was replayed in his 1960s story, 2001: A Space Odyssey. ESP was a major theme in 1950s science fiction. Science fiction writers obviously believed, or wanted to believe, than humans would one day evolve their own miracle powers and become god-like ourselves. This is one hell of a wish fulfilling fantasy! Of course this same fantasy appears in both religion and regular fantasy novels. The same year 2001 came out, shows like I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched were hits, and those power fantasies are still just as popular in various forms of entertainment today.

In the year 2008 I think we need to psychoanalyze Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke and his fans, rather than evaluate the novel as science fiction. It is a metaphysical fantasy that needs to be interpreted. Do people really believe that we can’t solve our own problems and need God or alien overlords to save us? Will life on Earth always be meaningless without a purpose delivered from a higher being? Is frail mortal life so worthless? Do people really believe that homo superior will be telepathic? Or that any adaptation of nature to our evolution will include ESP powers?

Arthur C. Clarke was a scientist, so could he have been savvy enough to have written Childhood’s End for the masses, well knowing Marx’s dictate that religion is the opium of the masses and fashioned his SF novel to addict science fiction readers in the same way and sell more books?

This is why back then, I was a disciple of Robert A. Heinlein. He was “a better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” kind of guy, believing mankind would build it’s own spaceships and the Klaatus and Karellens of the sky better get the fuck out of our way, for we are a jealous people.

JWH 12/30/8