Childhood's End: The Stars Are Not For Man
Taking a look at Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 sci-fi novel.
Good Morning and Happy Friday Everyone!
Something a little different today. Instead of the usual Five Bullets this week, I’m taking a look at Childhood’s End. I included the book in last week’s bullets and finished it this week.
Last year when I formed a plan to read more science fiction and picked up a copy of Childhood’s End. Below are concepts presented by Clarke that I’ve been grappling with.
If you haven’t read the book ,there will be spoilers!
If you have read the book, please leave a comment!
This post is a discussion and is likely a rambling soliloquy with more questions than answers. I’m interested in everyone’s thoughts.
If you’re into sci-fi, check out Roadside Picnic:
Reading ROADSIDE PICNIC.
“If ants in an ant hill detect a 10-lane superhighway being built near them, would they understand how to communicate with the workers? Would they assume that the workers communicate only on ant frequencies? In fact, the ants are so primitive that they would not even understand what a 10-lane superhighway was. “
It is a bitter thought, but you must face it.
The planets you may one day possess.
But the stars are not for man.
- Supervisor Karellen to the people of Earth.
In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 science-fiction novel Childhood’s End, Supervisor Karellen of the Overlords, an alien race tasked with watching over mankind, says: “The stars are not for man.”
Not for man indeed.
Karellen’s words reverberate in my mind. I found the novel’s ending to be unexpectedly bleak and sad. I can’t say exactly why. Except that I, like some of the humans in the novel, still have a wandering spirit, an artistic mind, and a romantic heart. I’m human. In our present era we see glimpses of a future where humanity may merge with advanced A.I. or venture to the stars.
But I ask: Why? Why must we become more than? Can we not become greater humans but remain earthlings and be happy with that? What does that look like 100 years, 1000 years, 10,000 years from now? Does ‘nirvana’ or ‘heaven’ mean the end of humanity? Can we reach nirvana and still remain human?
Childhood’s End is a slow-moving story stretching across a century beginning with the peaceful invasion of Earth by the Overlords. The book is divided into three parts: Earth and the Overlords, The Golden Age, and The Last Generation. Not much is known about the Overlords or their ultimate intentions behind shepherding humanity through the nuclear age and into a peaceful and prosperous era. Upon their arrival, the Overlords hide their appearance. Supervisor Karellan, the Overlord in charge of Earth, tells humanity that after a period of 50 years, it will be safe for them to reveal themselves without frightening humans. When the Overlords finally reveal themselves, humanity is presented with a race of beings resembling devils or demons, with wings, horns, and red skin. Humanity accepts their peaceful overlords and so begins the Golden Era.
The crux of the story occurs at a party where friends gather at the home of their host. The host has a large collection of books on human psychology and an Overlord, Rasheverak, visits the library to read them. The host insists that everyone play a psychic game similar to Ouji. Jan asks the spirits where the Overlord star is located. Miraculously, Jean speaks the answer. Rasheverak and Karellan realize that something important has happened - Jean’s psychic abilities allowed her to interact with something which gave her the location of their star. Jan, a scientist with a wanderlust to visit the stars, takes matters into his own hands and hatches a scheme to stow away on an Overlord ship back to their planet. The journey will take four months, but if he ever returns to Earth, it will be 80 years in the future.
During the last part of the novel, the psychic abilities of Jean’s two children grow while the Overlords watch and protect them. On the Overlord planet, Jan sees a strange colorful ring of light surrounding a mountain. The Overlords explain their ultimate goal for humanity - they serve their master the Overmind, a hive-mind consciousness which enlists the Overlords to guide psychically-able species throughout the galaxy to join the Overmind. When Jan returns to Earth, he finds that he is the last man. Humanity is gone except for children which are part of the Overmind. The zombie-like children act as one mind and exert their psychic abilities on the moon and the Earth. The Overlords abandon their Earthly posts while Jan stays to describe what he sees as they leave. The Overmind exert their power on the Earth. Jan once again sees the same strange colorful ring of light extending to the heavens, like a giant aurora. Earth explodes in a “silent concussion of light”. Humans and Earth were the incubators for the Overmind and the Overlords their guardian angels. Humanity reached it’s pinnacle and is now extinct.
Clarke’s story is slow-moving and patient. There is some beautiful writing, but it’s not high-tech or complicated like many sci-fi stories. At times the writing is so human as to be boring - Clarke doesn’t take great pains to describe or explain the Overlords, or their technology. This is a human-centric story. Clarke’s writing artfully balances between entertainment and provoking profound truths and questions about the nature of humanity and our place in the cosmos.
Humanity’s union with the Overmind comes at the expense of ultimate extinction of our race and destruction of Earth. I found found this to be extremely sad. Clarke presents union with the Overmind as a miraculous event, the creation of something better, of serving something greater, that all of our human suffering serves this one event. I cannot know whether the Overmind is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps this is just the way of the Universe, of Nature. We humans feel special but we are still just a small part in the a grand design of the Universe. Science fiction is mostly a commentary on the present. What is Clarke saying here? Perhaps that humanity cannot become anything greater until it acts and thinks as one, becomes one species. Until then, we’re just lost in the darkness.
To understand the ending, I’m going to take another look at some previous passages.
Halfway through the book is a scene in which a group of people at a party gather around a kind of Ouija board. First they ask, ‘is there anyone here?’ The reply is ‘YES’. Next they ask, ‘Who are you?’ The reply: ‘IAMALL’.
The whole experience gave George an uncanny impression of being in contact with some purposeful, independent mind. And yet there was no conclusive proof one way or the other. The replies were so trivial, so ambiguous. What for example, could one make of:
BELIEVEINMANNATUREISWITHYOU.
Yet sometimes there were suggestions of profound, even disturbing truths:
REMEMBERMANISNOTALONENEARMANISCOUNTRYOFOTHERS.
Finally, Jan Rodricks asks, “Which star is the Overlord’s sun?” The answer: “NGS 549672”. Jean Morrel faints.
Since this information hadn’t been revealed to humanity, the incident catches the attention of Overlord psychologist Rasherverak and supervisor Karellan:
This is the most exciting feature of the entire affair. Jean Morrel was, almost certainly, the channel through which the information came. But she is twenty-six - far too old to be a Prime Contact herself, judging by all our previous experience. It must, therefore, be someone closely linked to her. The conclusion is obvious. We cannot have many more years to wait. We must transfer her to Category Purple: she may be the most important human being alive.
This passage is the first hint that the Overlords are working towards a plan which has not been revealed to humanity. Revisiting this passage after finishing the novel, it’s clear that humanity is developing psychic abilities - the beginning of the end of the humanity’s Golden Age.
In Part Three, Jean’s son and daughter develop telepathic powers. They can communicate without words and move objects with their minds. Jean’s husband George learns from Rashaverak, the Overlord psychologist, that their children are no more special than anyone else, just that the development of telepathy had to happen to someone. The Overlords call it Total Breakthrough. When the name of the Overlord’s star was revealed by the Ouija board, it was done so with the help of Jean’s unborn son.
Imagine that every man’s mind is an island surrounded by ocean. Each seems isolated, yet in reality all are linked by the bedrock from which they spring. If the ocean were to vanish, that would be the end of the islands. They would all be part of one continent but their individuality would have gone.
The overlords are guardians, “mid-wives attending a difficult birth. We are helping to bring something new and wonderful into being.”
But yet the Inspector sent to keep an eye on Jean’s children says to Supervisor Karellen: “I grow more and more sorry for these people.”
Man didn’t put up a defense against the Overmind. Is this destiny or imprisonment? Is the Overmind a parasite?
The Overlords feel that joining the Overmind is a beautiful and wonderful thing but at the same time value their own individuality, their unique souls and feel sorry for the humans which will soon be extinct. As Karellen leaves Earth, he salutes all the men he once knew.
This story can be taken two ways: that the Overlords set the stage for the propagation of a mind-virus which destroys humanity OR we are reading about beautiful transformation of man into something better. We are returning to Nature.
But is this really nature as the Ouija board ‘spirit’ suggested?
MAN IS NOT ALONE. NATURE IS WITH YOU.
Is this true? Was the transformation of humanity into something completely alien evolution or destruction? Clarke’s ending feels…wrong: the supremely advanced Overmind-children destroy all living plants and animals and later destroy the Earth itself. Why?
This ending left me incredibly perplexed. Is the destruction of humanity in order to create the Overmind a divine event? It doesn’t feel all that miraculous. I’m not sure what Clarke was going for here. Perhaps he wished to show that all of humanity’s hopes and dreams mean nothing, or conversely, he wished to show that if we create peace and work together we can control our destiny rather than be subject to the fate of the stars. We can choose to remain human while understanding we can never be more.
Supervisor Karellen reminds humanity:
…there are powers and forces that lie among the stars - forces beyond anything you can ever imagine…The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.
The answer is clear: man must transform. Become more than. Beyond our wildest imaginations.
But is this what we want for ourselves? Or would we rather be peaceful inhabitants and stewards of our planet rather than becoming more than? I choose the former. I am a human of Earth. I want to be a better human. I do not wish to become more than human. That feels wrong, unnatural. I believe we already have everything we need for peace, love and prosperity.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Clarke co-wrote with director Stanley Kubrick, again we see man becoming something more than human when astronaut David becomes a star-child.
In the prologue to 3001: The Final Odyssey, Clarke describes the Firstborn, a race of aliens which left monoliths on Earth and other planets:
And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped…Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into dust.
Now they were Lords of the Galaxy, and could rove at will among the stars, or sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. Though they were freed at last from the tyranny of matter, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea. And their marvellous instruments still continued to function, watching over the experiments started so many ages ago.
But no longer were they always obedient to the mandates of their creators; like all material things, they were not immune to the corruption of Time and its patient, unsleeping servant, Entropy.
I think about the signals, satellites and earthly ephemera we may be carelessly sending into space. Finding other forms of life would be incredibly exciting but one of the potential explanations of the Great Filter is that advanced life-forms are out there but remain hidden - perhaps there’s something out there we don’t want to discover. Maybe we shouldn’t broadcast our location to the cosmos.
Sometimes it seemed to him that men were like children amusing themselves in some secluded playground, protected from the fierce realities of the outer world.
One of my favorite details in the book is the reason why the Overlords hid themselves upon arrival. The reason: Overlords resemble the Devil.
Stormgren gets a sneak peak at Karellen and figured that the Overlords must have visited humanity before but something went incredibly wrong:
It must have been a failure indeed, thought Stormgren, for its echoes to roll down all the ages, to haunt the childhood of every race of man. Even in fifty years, could you overcome the power of all the myths and legends of the world?
When the Overlords finally reveal themselves 50 years later, humanity overcomes the issue of their appearance but is left putting the pieces together:
The leathery wings, the little horns, the barbed tail - all were there. The most terrible of all legends had come to life, out of the unknown past. Yet now it stood smiling, in ebon majesty, with the sunlight gleaming upon its tremendous body; and with a human child resting trustfully on either arm.
There was something strange here, something beyond all reason or logic. In the Middle Ages, people believed in the Devil and feared him…It was, of course, universally assumed that the Overlords, or beings of the same species, had come into violent conflict with ancient man. The meeting must have lain the remote past, for it let no traces in recorded history.
Near the end of the book Jan asks Karellen to explain what went wrong:
There was only one event that could have made such an impact upon humanity. And that event was not at the dawn of history, but at its very end…When our ships entered your skies a century and a half ago, that was the first meeting of our two races, though of course we had studied you from a distance. And yet you feared and recognized us, as we knew that you would. It was not precisely a memory. You have already had proof that time is more complex than your science ever imagined. For that memory was not of the past, but of the future - of those closing years when your race knew that everything was finished…And because we were there, we became identified with your race’s death. Yes, even while it was ten thousand years in the future. It was as if a distorted echo had reverberated round the closed circle of time, from the future to the past. Call it not a memory, but a premonition.
Was humanity’s psychic ability simply innate but dormant or did it spring forth only with the Overlords arrival? If the ability was always there, did humans ever have free will? If this is true then maybe we never had a choice. But if the psychic ability only came forth under the right conditions with the help of the Overlords, then we still had a choice to make - remain human or merge with the Overmind.
Given the religious themes at play, the Overmind can be viewed as similar to the Christian God whereby all souls are lifted up and join Him in heaven during the Rapture. In fact, the whole book can be read in this interpretation. Through the lens of Buddhism, perhaps joining the Overmind is similar to Nirvana.
Clarke sets up the ending to be a miraculous, extraordinary event when mankind ascends to its rightful place in the stars. After humanity is extinct and the Earth is destroyed, I can’t help but wonder why. What’s the cosmic reason? Why is this good? Did we go out with a bang or a whimper?
I found it depressing. Maybe I’m just human.
This was a great read. Thank you!