What Sci-Fi?

Earlier this month I was asked by Penguin Ltd to present my thoughts about a book that I think is relevant to modern fiction. I chose a novel that, although it was originally published in the 1950s, has recently been republished in digital format: Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. Published as part of the SF Gateway series by Gollancz.

Although the book itself is 70 years old, it remains remarkably prescient in its depiction of human behaviour. Accurately predicting (albeit for supernatural reasons), such societal concerns about entirely automated industries, or the consequences of hundreds of hours of instantly accessible consumable entertainment. Both in our modern world and in Clarke’s vision—where the human race is no longer the dominant intelligence—the central question is: what is our species’ purpose?

It is this symmetry that I found fascinating, despite some of the attitudes or ideas of the 1950s inevitably becoming undone through time and perspective, most of the central theories are still relevant. To some extent this is addressed in the introduction to this digital version, which adds that Clarke himself rewrote some of the book in the 1970s for fear it was dated. I think it was right to preserve and digitally “reprint” this book, if only to show that some themes transcend history.

Today, we are moving further into a digital age, where education, jobs, and everyday activities are increasingly intertwined with the internet; where we are surveilled by security or social algorithms whose purpose is, ostensibly, to improve our lives. It could be argued that in Childhood’s End, the “Overlords” are allegorical of how the internet, in a relatively short time, has changed our lives. Both represent a vast accumulation of knowledge with the means to dispense it, and ultimately, a gateway to our future.

Our world, like in the early part of the book, is fractured across many planes: political, financial, ethical, religious beliefs, gender and ethnic equality, and so on. Yet unlike the book, in which the Overlords have ended such divisions, the internet can often be the source of conflict—providing echo chambers for every conceivable opinion, fomenting discord and intolerance.

Regardless of the difference between our world and Clarke’s imagined future, we are nonetheless experiencing similar crises of identity and challenges to dated world views. We see it in youth movements that demand a safer, cleaner environment for them to inherit; in developing countries that no longer want to be the dumping ground of the wealthy. We are on the verge of a seismic paradigm shift for global equality and acceptance; the sense of which Herman Hesse perfectly describes in a preface to his 1927 novel Steppenwolf, republished in 1961:

Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap ... Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, between two modes of life and thus loses the feeling for itself, for the self-evident, for all morals, for being safe and innocent.

I believe it is vital that we keep fiction at the forefront of cultures across the world. We learn from the past, from those early dreamers and speculators to present day adventurers in words. That is the power of stories. As a genre, science fiction and fantasy has come to represent a search for answers about ourselves that we, as a race, are perhaps unable to reconcile with our daily, logical perspective of “real life”. Our search for purpose is too often encumbered by practical realities. The role that science fiction and fantasy plays—at its best—is to let us step into a skewed reflection of our own world, to examine the flaws and the beauty of what we are, what we were, and what we could achieve: once unfettered from what we think is possible.