Wednesday, 20 June 2007 05:53 pm
(no subject)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deckardcanineUch. Two out of the last five nights had me in bed before midnight but still awake after 3 AM. Which was especially bad last night, because I set my alarm for 6:15 on weekdays.
My Saturday insomnia had been a mystery for a while. Was it difficulty finding the right layers for optimal temperature? Not primarily. Was it an undue amount of stress from the last thing I read online (someone saying that my movie review missed the whole point)? Couldn’t be; I wasn’t thinking about it that much.
Had I contracted something from the Father’s Day Eve shrimp scampi dinner? My face did feel hard, kinda like my mask. My grandfather used to get swollen from shellfish -- was I finally getting my first allergy? I’ll know if it happens again.
But what really kept me up, as evidenced by insomnia reports from other members of the family, was the coffee in the huge slice of cake we shared for dessert. The waitress said “an eight-year-old little girl” had one by herself. Time must have slowed down for her, I say.
For Tuesday night, I can think of only one factor to have kept me up: I had decided to pick up my reading pace and finish Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.
In this story, slightly renovated from its Cold War-inspired 1953 release, aliens called Overlords come to Earth in 2001 and place militarily superior ships over the major cities. But that is almost the full extent of their threat. They establish a few rules, most notably bans on war and space travel, and trust humans to follow them. No punishment is necessary, because humans suffer anyway by breaking the rules, and this becomes clear within five years. As the decades pass, humanity enters its ultimate golden age.
I discovered later that a fairly common complaint about Clarke is his optimism with regard to social progress. Indeed, the height of the golden age includes one government, no poverty, virtually no crime, easy travel around Earth, no obligation to hold a job, no ethnic prejudice... and almost no religion. Science had been leading to the end of religion anyway, and when the Overlords -- who unmistakably resemble devils when they finally show themselves -- responded to pressure to let humans look back on time to check for miracles, the process leapt ahead. Following this and the independent invention of a reliable contraceptive, many behaviors once called sinful were now impolite at worst.
Well, now I figured that Clarke was not a modern Thomas More. If he thought that today’s religions could be so thoroughly dispelled overnight, then my ability to relate to the golden-age mentality was bound to be limited. Nevertheless, the book’s jacket included praise from C.S. Lewis, so it couldn’t be too offensive to a Christian mindset. By the time there came evidence of something we’d call supernatural, I knew that it wasn’t all in praise of the triumph of science as we know it. I was prepared to accept the optimism and proceed.
Another common complaint about this book is boredom. For me, the pace was never too slack (in contrast with a certain movie based on another Clarke novel), it never got too jargony, and there was a quiet sort of excitement from the get-go. Oh my, a utopia? I could hardly wait to see how it would turn out unfavorable and the Overlords proved to fit their devilish appearance after all. Even if we were to get extinct, I felt it was going to be juicy. The fact that we could get only so close to the humans in the progressing century -- and even the lead Overlord’s wonderful diction revealed only so much individual inner character -- didn’t bother me like in Foundation.
Late in the book, when I still had very little idea what might happen in the end, I started to worry. There were only a few visible downsides to the golden age, like a decline in artistic creativity and news quality. The looming onslaught of boredom looked like a small price to pay for the benefits, and I had yet to be convinced that I would not prefer that age to any other. What’s more, if the Overlords were to be believed (and they usually were honest), humanity soon would have bombed itself to oblivion without intervention. What could they possibly have in store for us that was worse?
Truly, the better part of my joy while reading had been in anticipation. It was a risky investment, for if I didn’t like the final revelation, it would be impossible to revisit the story with much of any joy.
The revelation came... and perplexed me too much at first. I could see no clear connection between the cataclysm which the Overlords knew would come soon and the utopia, or even the more direct actions of the Overlords. Eventually I started to make sense of it, but the author pretty much guaranteed that it defied human imagination, sorta like the ending of that aforementioned movie.
I won’t say exactly what I understand to have happened, but it blew away my hope of a useful fable. For that matter, it blew away hope in general, from the standpoint of everyone about whom I ever cared, including the Overlords. Clarke’s text suggested that it could not be classified as fortunate or unfortunate, good or evil, enviable or pitiable. But I am no big-picture atheist, and this was the most dismal ending I had encountered in a long time. I had not expected the worst after all. I could barely think of anything to take my mind off the gloom. At least Philip K. Dick had the consideration to make the gloom basically uniform throughout his works.
And that is why I should avoid sci-fi books as bedtime approaches. Just to be safe, I’ll hold off on Neuromancer for a while.
My Saturday insomnia had been a mystery for a while. Was it difficulty finding the right layers for optimal temperature? Not primarily. Was it an undue amount of stress from the last thing I read online (someone saying that my movie review missed the whole point)? Couldn’t be; I wasn’t thinking about it that much.
Had I contracted something from the Father’s Day Eve shrimp scampi dinner? My face did feel hard, kinda like my mask. My grandfather used to get swollen from shellfish -- was I finally getting my first allergy? I’ll know if it happens again.
But what really kept me up, as evidenced by insomnia reports from other members of the family, was the coffee in the huge slice of cake we shared for dessert. The waitress said “an eight-year-old little girl” had one by herself. Time must have slowed down for her, I say.
For Tuesday night, I can think of only one factor to have kept me up: I had decided to pick up my reading pace and finish Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.
In this story, slightly renovated from its Cold War-inspired 1953 release, aliens called Overlords come to Earth in 2001 and place militarily superior ships over the major cities. But that is almost the full extent of their threat. They establish a few rules, most notably bans on war and space travel, and trust humans to follow them. No punishment is necessary, because humans suffer anyway by breaking the rules, and this becomes clear within five years. As the decades pass, humanity enters its ultimate golden age.
I discovered later that a fairly common complaint about Clarke is his optimism with regard to social progress. Indeed, the height of the golden age includes one government, no poverty, virtually no crime, easy travel around Earth, no obligation to hold a job, no ethnic prejudice... and almost no religion. Science had been leading to the end of religion anyway, and when the Overlords -- who unmistakably resemble devils when they finally show themselves -- responded to pressure to let humans look back on time to check for miracles, the process leapt ahead. Following this and the independent invention of a reliable contraceptive, many behaviors once called sinful were now impolite at worst.
Well, now I figured that Clarke was not a modern Thomas More. If he thought that today’s religions could be so thoroughly dispelled overnight, then my ability to relate to the golden-age mentality was bound to be limited. Nevertheless, the book’s jacket included praise from C.S. Lewis, so it couldn’t be too offensive to a Christian mindset. By the time there came evidence of something we’d call supernatural, I knew that it wasn’t all in praise of the triumph of science as we know it. I was prepared to accept the optimism and proceed.
Another common complaint about this book is boredom. For me, the pace was never too slack (in contrast with a certain movie based on another Clarke novel), it never got too jargony, and there was a quiet sort of excitement from the get-go. Oh my, a utopia? I could hardly wait to see how it would turn out unfavorable and the Overlords proved to fit their devilish appearance after all. Even if we were to get extinct, I felt it was going to be juicy. The fact that we could get only so close to the humans in the progressing century -- and even the lead Overlord’s wonderful diction revealed only so much individual inner character -- didn’t bother me like in Foundation.
Late in the book, when I still had very little idea what might happen in the end, I started to worry. There were only a few visible downsides to the golden age, like a decline in artistic creativity and news quality. The looming onslaught of boredom looked like a small price to pay for the benefits, and I had yet to be convinced that I would not prefer that age to any other. What’s more, if the Overlords were to be believed (and they usually were honest), humanity soon would have bombed itself to oblivion without intervention. What could they possibly have in store for us that was worse?
Truly, the better part of my joy while reading had been in anticipation. It was a risky investment, for if I didn’t like the final revelation, it would be impossible to revisit the story with much of any joy.
The revelation came... and perplexed me too much at first. I could see no clear connection between the cataclysm which the Overlords knew would come soon and the utopia, or even the more direct actions of the Overlords. Eventually I started to make sense of it, but the author pretty much guaranteed that it defied human imagination, sorta like the ending of that aforementioned movie.
I won’t say exactly what I understand to have happened, but it blew away my hope of a useful fable. For that matter, it blew away hope in general, from the standpoint of everyone about whom I ever cared, including the Overlords. Clarke’s text suggested that it could not be classified as fortunate or unfortunate, good or evil, enviable or pitiable. But I am no big-picture atheist, and this was the most dismal ending I had encountered in a long time. I had not expected the worst after all. I could barely think of anything to take my mind off the gloom. At least Philip K. Dick had the consideration to make the gloom basically uniform throughout his works.
And that is why I should avoid sci-fi books as bedtime approaches. Just to be safe, I’ll hold off on Neuromancer for a while.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Forcing people to fit neatly into a utopia will inevitably turn them into worthless, enslaved sheep. If you want people to be truly alive, they need freedom, which creates chaos, which destroys the utopia.
no subject
So I can believe. But to me, Clarke does an insufficient job of convincing us that the sheep would regret their path. The worst thing about the ending is that it says we don't want a utopia because... we could find an outrageous, unsuspected fantasy premise coming true. You could make the same case against anything: "If we allow gay adoption, the psionic bogeyman from the Snickers Galaxy will have all he needs to devour us all!!!"
no subject
I think that this conclusion is why the novel can be seen as pessimistic. The new humans are born from us but we have no place in their world -- so little place, in fact, that the new humans destroy us casually in the process of leaving the Earth.
no subject