I
recently blogged about "Guardian Angel" by
Arthur C. Clarke, which was published in
1950 as well as his story "
The Sentinel", published in 1951. I've also previously mentioned Clarke's short novel,
Against the Fall of Night, which I first read in book format (a Pyramid Science Fiction edition, see the cover art shown to the right on this page) in the early 1970s. According to
this article, Clarke began writing
Against the Fall of Night in 1937.
Here in this blog post, I'm going to return to the November 1948 issue of Startling Stories where "Against the Fall of Night" was first published.
I say "return" because one year ago I read Jack Vance's short story "The Unspeakable McInch" which was also in that issue. Jack Vance was born in 1916, one year before Clarke, but Clarke began publishing science fiction stories in 1937 (if you count this fanzine), when he was 20. Vance's first published story arrived at magazine stands in 1945.
You can read Clarke's 1937 fanzine story about teleportation ("
Travel by Wire") as reprinted in
Vector in 1960. That issue of
Vector also has some discussion of the "
Hieronymous Machine".
I know of one early Clarke fanzine story that was later re-published in a "pro" magazine: "The Awakening". Originally published in the year 1942 in a fanzine called Zenith, the story was later re-published in the January 1952 issue of Future Science Fiction Stories.
I have fun imagining that in some other Reality, science fiction story tellers like Clarke lived somewhat different lives. I'll give credit to Clarke for making one major character in Against the Fall of Night be a female (Seranis of Lys), but somehow he could not even be bothered to include Alvin's mother in the story. In an alternate Reality where women dominated science fiction genre, Arabella Clarke wrote other styles of science fiction stories, quite different than what Arthur Clarke produced here in our Reality.
If you ignore the fanzines, then Clarke's first professional published science fiction was in the April 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, putting him on the same professional publishing schedule as Vance (being first paid for a story at age 29).
Both Vance and Clarke were bu$y working and earning a living by conventional means before they became full time fiction writers. Clarke and Vance also shared the experience of being separated from their fathers at a young age.
Clarke served in the military during WWII working on radar systems and Vance was in the merchant marines. Clarke graduated from Kings College in 1948 after studying math and physics. Vance studied some science topics like physics and geology in college.
In addition to publishing fiction, Clarke also wrote nonfiction about rocketry and space exploration. By 1948, Clarke had already served his first term as president of the British Interplanetary Society (1946-1947).
"The Awakening" is interesting and its existence is the one thing that makes me believe that Clarke began work on Against the Fall of Night many years before it was published.
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| in Future Science Fiction Stories |
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dry Earth of the far far far far future
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In "The Awakening", readers are introduced to Marlan, a dude who is tired of living in a future utopia, a far future Earth where people live in idyllic cloud-piercing cities while most of the planet's surface exists in wild, pristine splendor below. This is a future of the space age at a point in time after which the entire Solar System has been completely explored, but practical interstellar travel has not become possible. Marlan puts himself into a state of "suspended animation" so that he can be awakened in the far far far far future and have a chance to see the ultimate fate of Humanity.
In Clarke's imagined far far far far far future, Earth's oceans are gone and the Moon has been reduced to a ring of rubble that orbits the desiccated planet Earth. Life remains on Earth in the form of some sort of intelligent descendant of the insects. Humanity is long gone. "The Awakening" was an early demonstration of Clarke's ability to put we humans into the context of a vast and ancient universe. There is no good reason to suspect that any recognizable remnant of the human species will remain a billion years from now, but for Against the Fall of Night, Clarke allowed humans to survive through vast stretches of time.
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The adventures of the atavistic Alvin of Lotosland.
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| Figure 1. interior art for Against the Fall of Night |
For his story
Against the Fall of Night, Clarke imagined a far future in which interstellar travel had become quick and easy. However, readers must wade through dozens of pages before Alvin gets his hands on a spaceship.
Yes, the main character is named Alvin, a boy who grows up in the city Diaspar with his dad Convar. Diaspar has mile high buildings and a population that has lost its fear of heights, but the people of Earth have a new fear: fear of the Invaders. Cultural memories of the Invaders have lasted the past 500,000,000 years, since the ancient days when there was an active spaceport at Diaspar. In Alvin's time, the spaceport lies lost and buried under the drifting sands of a world-spanning desert. As in "The Awakening", Earth's oceans are long gone from the face of the planet.
Diaspar is home to one of the two human cultures that Clarke imagined could last for half a billion years. The other is Lys, a rural community of telepaths. However, the entire first part of the story is about Alvin living in the "prison of Diaspar" and trying to get out. Alvin is educated by his tutor, Jeserae and sessions with a hypnone, a futuristic learning machine. It is easy for me to imagine that the hypnone and other machines of this far future are based on sophisticated nanotechnology.
When Alvin completes a session with the hypnone, it dissolves and disappears from sight until it is needed again. Clarke attributes the long survival of Diaspar's urban civilization to their machines. Humans in Alvin's time have forgotten how these super-sophisticated machines were created, but the futuristic machines of Diaspar endlessly repair themselves and keep the city functioning for its human occupants across a span of many hundreds of millions of years.
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only Alvin looks at the stars
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The people of Diaspar have long lifespans. We are told that Alvin is the first child born into this city of millions of residents during the past 7,000 years and that his youth will last for "long centuries". Alvin is not content to devote himself to conventional concerns such as spending 1,000 years to learn the complexities of futuristic music. No, Alvin is obsessed with the world outside of Diaspar. Alvin is atavistic in that only he, among all the remaining people, has curiosity and a desire for knowledge.
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unimaginable and forgotten (and wrong)
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I think Clarke was correct to suggest that in order for an isolated city like Diaspar to exist unchanged for half a billion years, the people would need to have a strange inhuman lack of initiative. In "The Awakening", Clarke depicted people of the future being bored with their utopian existence. Here in
Against the Fall of Night, almost the entire population of Diaspar is content to lead long lives without adventure and discovery; they are totally uninterested in the outside world and only know the streets and towers of the city.
Telepathy. The machines of Diaspar can "read the thoughts" of humans and respond to unspoken commands. When Alvin finally reaches Lys, he discovers that the people there have retained the ability to "read minds", an ancient trait that the people of Diaspar lost. Clarke also talks about other biological changes to the people of Diaspar such as losing and gaining teeth several times through the ages.
The word "genetics" appears in Against the Fall of Night, but Clarke remained mostly focused on future physical science advances and technologies like interstellar spaceship drives and anti-gravity devices. I suspect that Clarke wanted to make it easy for his readers to relate to Alvin and other characters in the story, so he abandoned that path taken in "The Awakening" of depicting humans as being replaced during the course of continued biological evolution in the future. The ruler of Lys, a woman named Seranis, can not only read Alvin's thoughts, but also place her own speech-like thoughts directly into Alvin's mind.
Lys has lakes and forests and even non-human animals, including pet insects. Seranis claims that the oceans of Earth still exist, underground. Lys is a mostly forested park-like territory, surrounded by mountains and thus it is protected from the drifting sands of the desert that covers the rest of the planet's surface. Seranis also claims that it was the people of Lys who long ago defended Earth against the Invaders.
The people of Lys are not long-lived and there are many children there. Traveling with the son of Seranis, Alvin treks to the edge of Lys where there is a large black crater like a scar in the forest. At the center of the crater is the scene depicted in the image at the top of this blog post: a jumble of large blocks, the ruins of an ancient fortress: Shalmirane.
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Alvin meets robot
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Alvin meets the three flying robotic drones of the Master (see
Figure 1, above). According to ancient legend, the Master came to Earth long ago from "the planets of eternal light", the planets of the Seven Suns. While visiting Lys, Alvin hears tales of the Great Ones who had gone off on some great adventure, but who would eventually return to Earth.
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Clarke's description of the Master's robotic drones
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After the death of the Master, cult-like followers remained in Lys to carry the legend of the Great Ones down through the passing eons. The last cult member, an old man living in the ruins of Shalmirane, allows Alvin to take control of one of the three robots.
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the drone takes Alvin back to Diaspar from Lys
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Seranis does not want Alvin to return to Diaspar, claiming that in the past, all residents of Diaspar who came to Lys remained there. However, Alvin makes use of one of the Master's robots to escape from Lys and return to Diaspar.
Using her telepathic powers, Seranis takes control of Alvin's mind and she makes Alvin order the robotic drone to halt. However, Alvin had ordered the drone to take him back to Diaspar and ignore all his further orders until they are back in Diaspar.
Musical Interlude. In the story, Clarke suggests that the experience of Alvin being subjected to the telepathic powers of Seranis is similar to hearing the Song of
Sirens. The uncredited artist who made illustrations for the story was inspired to make the illustration shown to the left.
Safely back in Diaspar, the Master's robot leads Alvin to the Master's long-abandoned spaceship, which had been sitting at the spaceport of Diaspar for millions of years where it was eventually covered by drifting sand. That spaceship carries Alvin to the mysterious Seven Suns, which Clarke tells us lie at the center of the universe. However, using some sort of hyper-spatial drive, Alvin's journey takes only half a day.
I like the idea that the system of the Seven Suns was constructed by means of some advanced technology. For my fanfiction stories such as
The Alastor Network and
Meet the Phari I imagine that the
Alastor star cluster was artificially assembled.
On a planet in the system of the Seven Suns, Alvin meets an entity named Vanamonde: "a pure mentality". Vanamonde can move effortlessly through outer-space at great speed and has telepathic powers, but it has no clear understanding of its ancient origins. Vanamonde is like an oracle: an information source that holds vast knowledge without really understanding anything.
Clarke asks readers to look upon Vanamonde as still being an infant, although Vanamonde is half a billion years old and has spent that time wandering through the universe.
By telepathically sifting through Vanamonde's memories, the people of Lys learn that in the distant past, people created beings of "pure mentality", but one such, "The Mad Mind", went on a rampage and destroyed the interstellar empire of the ancients, which included humans and many alien species from other worlds. After a long struggle, the Mad Mind was locked inside the Black Sun.
After dealing with the Mad Mind, most of the remnant peoples of the empire (the Great Ones of Earthly legend) "departed from our universe", leaving behind a few remnant civilizations like Diaspar and Lys. What about the feared Invaders? They are nothing but legend. What about the ancient fortress, Shalmirane? It's energy transmitter had been used to destroy the Moon when it came too close to Earth.
Against the Fall of Night was one of the first science fiction stories that I read as a young boy. I was intrigued by Clarke's attempt to imagine the fate of Earth at a time more than a billion years in the future. In the story, Clarke included the idea that after humans colonized all the planets and moons of our Solar System, Earth was contacted by aliens from other planets who were vastly more technologically advanced. However, in Clarke's imagined future, humans were able to learn from the aliens and "catch up" technologically. It was human ingenuity that eventually led to the creation of "pure mentalities" like Vanamonde and the Mad Mind.
For stories set in my own Exodemic Fictional Universe, I prefer to imagine that alien beings have visited Earth long ago. My biggest disappointment in reading Against the Fall of Night is that Clarke turned it into a "humans only" club with no aliens given a significant role in the story.
Unimaginable.
Against the Fall of Night is set about 1,500,000,000 years in our future. Clarke included several advanced technologies in his story that make possible faster-than-light space travel, immortality, telepathy and matter duplication. However, teleportation is not used during the events depicted in
Against the Fall of Night. This seems like an odd choice for Clarke since his 1937 story "Travel by Wire" and his 1946 publication "
Loophole" both have plots that are built around the use of teleportation technology.
Next: game of the future
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