Refiner’s Fire: Arthur C. Clarke: Humanism in Science Fiction

Francis Schaeffer claims that Michelangelo’s David, with its heroic size and disproportionately large hands, is a quintessential statement of humanism. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke suggests an ideal man with a hypertrophied mind—a modern statement of the same philosophy.

Clarke has been called the best publicized writer of science fiction. His career began almost thirty years ago. In addition to science fiction, he has written nonfiction books and articles, and is the first person to have suggested the synchronously orbiting communications satellite. He is a writer of “hard” science fiction; scientific knowledge is an important part of his settings and plots. But Clarke’s stories have not been mere explorations of the applications of technology. He has tried to deal with what that means.

This is seen in two short stories and five novels. “The Star,” which won Clarke the 1956 Hugo award for best science fiction short story, is told in first person by a Jesuit astrophysicist who narrates a tale of exploring the remains of a supernova. The exploration team found that the explosion destroyed an advanced civilization, which had anticipated the disaster and left records. The point is that this supernova was the Star of Bethlehem. The protagonist closes the story with the agonizing question “Why?” posed to a God he clearly believes in.

In “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953), which is included in two collections of religious science fiction, some Tibetan monks hire a computer to print permutations of words of up to nine letters to automate their task of listing all the names of God. They tell the computer operators that when their task is complete, the universe’s meaning will be fulfilled, and God will end it. The westerners don’t believe them, but as they leave the monastery the stars are quietly disappearing one by one.

2001: A Space Odyssey is familiar to more people than any of Clarke’s other works, because it is based closely on the movie of the same name written by Clarke in collaboration with Stanley Kubrick. In the book (and movie) man has been intelectually guided since his ape-man days. A superhuman intelligence has used rectangular slabs as combination mental probes and guides for certain persons at various strategic points in our history. This concept of superhuman guidance, though not original with Clarke, is worth noting.

An encounter with superhuman intelligence takes place again both more remotely and more closely in Rendezvous With Rama, which won the 1973 Nebula Award for best novel. (The Hugo Award is voted on primarily by science fiction fans, the Nebula by writers only.) The contact is remote; there is no evidence that the inhabitants of a spaceship passing through the solar system are ever aware of man at all. Yet, the contact is close, because a team actually enters it. Rama, the spaceship, is ametaphor for an atheist’s view of existence. It is big, imperturbable, and inexplicable, coming from who-knows-where and going who-knows-where for who-knows-what purpose.

The religious element in Imperial Earth is brief, but it portrays a religious experience:

“He had experienced that indescribable shock a man may know only once in a lifetime, when he is in the presence of the transcendental and feels the sure foundations of his world and his philosophy trembling beneath his feet.… It was as if he had caught a momentary glimpse in the Mirror of Time, reflecting something that had not yet occurred—and something that must be awesomely important for it to have succeeded in reversing the flow of causality” (Doubleday, 1976, p. 267).

If I understand Clarke correctly, this experience is supposed to have been sent to Duncan Makenzie from the future. The future race needs to have established communications with beings from outer space by a certain time, so Makenzie is to build the communications system in the present. He is the cloned “son” of a cloned “son,” and he has been sent to earth to bring back a replica of himself. Instead, he elects to have his dead archrival cloned and to make the baby his own legal son, for the good of his world.

The theme that humanity has a capacity to evolve into a supermind recurs in several of Clarke’s stories. It is perhaps the ultimate expression of what Christopher Derrick has called “Manichaeanism [which is] to suppose that our corporal or animal nature is evil in itself.” Further, Derrick says that the “Manichaean heresy” contains a belief in evolution as an entity, which works to purge us of our corporal and animal nature.

Surveys of science fiction published before 1973 rank Childhood’s End (1953) as Clarke’s best novel. The basic plot: Man is now ready for his next evolutionary step, which is to become part of the great Overmind that controls the universe. In order to prepare human children for this evolutionary jump (adults cannot change to become part of this purely mental being), a race of “sheperds” are sent to earth. These shepherds have wings, horns, tails, and cloven hooves. They look like demons, but they are depicted as entirely beneficent. Clarke explains our horror of demon form by a racial memory that operates backwards in time. For the adults, the loss of their children and the realization that they cannot become units of a disembodied supermind, is so traumatic that this imprints previous generations with a loathing for the demon forms associated with the experience.

In Against the Fall of Night (1948), his first novel, and The City and the Stars (1956), Clarke has written what amounts to two versions of the same story. In both, the history of man over billions of years is recounted at the climax. Man was the major participant in a galactic effort to create pure mentalities: beings with no bodies. The effort succeeded, twice. The first attempt, however, produced an immortal Mad Mind that despised all material things, left gaping rents in the galaxy, and was finally destroyed. The second attempt produced a benevolent being with enormous mental powers and an immortal lifespan. Clarke has written that the second book is a new novel, and that only one-fourth of the first one remains in it, that is, the story of the creation of the pure mentalities, bodiless beings of incalculable potential. But in 2001, rather than all the children of the earth joining a pure intellect, or the intelligent races of the galaxy creating a pure intellect, an astronaut becomes one, transmuted by some hidden superintelligence.

Clarke presents a seductive idea. Man’s physical being is temporary: He will become, or create, a purely mental being, immortal and practically omniscient and omnipotent. (The idea is not original with Clarke, of course. For example, C. S. Lewis’s villain, Weston, proposed it in Perelandra.) However, we must reject Clarke’s vision. Man is not now, and never can be, the measure of himself.

Martin LaBar is chairman of the division of science, Central Wesleyan College, Central, South Carolina.

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