Episode: 4480
Title: HPR4480: Arthur C. Clarke Becomes Successful
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4480/hpr4480.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 01:05:51

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,480 for Friday 3 October 2025.
Today's show is entitled, Arthur C. Clark becomes successful.
It is part of the series science fiction and fantasy.
It is hosted by Ahouka and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, a look at Arthur C.
Clark's rise to science fiction prominence.
Hello, this is Ahouka for Hacker Public Radio.
Welcoming you to another exciting episode in our ongoing series on science fiction and
fantasy.
And I'm continuing our look at Arthur C. Clark and how he became the prominent successful
science fiction author that he's known as today.
Because while the earlier works that we talked about previously against the fall of
night and the city and the stars have gathered something of a reputation, you know, I think
if he'd stopped there, he would have gined just a footnote at best.
It was the third novel, Childhood's End, which was published in 1953.
That really rocketed him to the top.
Now it is based on a short story he wrote in 1950 called Guardian Angel.
Then in 1952 he started working on expanding it into a full novel.
In the latter part of the 20th century, as this novel takes place, the US and the Soviets
are engaged in a space race.
Now remember, he was doing all of this before Sputnik.
So it was speculative, and he has it towards the end of the 20th century.
It happened faster than he anticipated, I think.
Well, all of a sudden alien spaceships arrive and station themselves above Earth's major
cities.
They announced that they are taking control over all international relations in order to
prevent the extinction of the human race.
This was at the height of the Cold War when nuclear annihilation seemed imminent and was
right around the same time that Asimov was writing novels where the surface of the Earth was
largely radioactive.
So it was in the air at the time.
These aliens became known as the overlords, and in time people become used to them.
But they never show themselves.
They say they will when the time is right, some time in the future.
This does make some people suspicious of their intentions, though.
But the overlords are clearly more technologically advanced than the humans, so there really isn't
anything the humans can do.
Now the overlords show a particular interest in psychic research, though they are interested
in learning everything about humanity.
By eliminating war, the overlords have created an age of prosperity for the whole planet,
and people start to relax and enjoy its benefits.
The curiosity still exists in humanity, and some people figure out the home planet of
the overlords, and one man stows away on a supply ship heading back to their planet.
Now finally, the overlords do reveal themselves, and they reason they hid this for so long
becomes apparent.
Their appearance resembles the classic pictures of demons in Christian mythology, with
cloven hooves, leathery wings, horns, and barbed tails.
But they waited long enough that this does not cause an uproar now because we are in
a golden age of prosperity.
Now about a century after the overlords' first appearance, human children begin to display
mental powers, such as clairvoyance and telekinesis.
And the overlords finally reveal their true purpose.
They serve something called the overmind, a vast galactic intelligence.
Their role is to serve as a bridge, to other species, to help them develop to the point
of eventual union with the overmind.
But the overlords themselves will never be able to join, that is their sad fate.
Meanwhile, the time when humans were individuals is coming to an end.
The children of humanity are already starting to merge into a collective consciousness.
For their safety, they are moved to a continent of their own, segregated from the rest of humanity.
But the parents left behind start to die off, many of them commit suicide, and no more
children are being born.
Now the overlords are still watching and monitoring.
And as this happens, that stole away returns, he is now the last human on earth.
And when the merged children start manipulating the moon and the planets, the overlords decide
it is too dangerous to stay, and they are getting ready to leave.
They offer to take the stole away with them, but he refuses and stays to report to the end.
This is still considered a classic, and it was nominated for a retro Hugo for Best
Novel in 2004, though it lost to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
Well, it was in good company, because it also nominated that same year with Asimov's
Caves of Steel.
So that is the brakes, you know, you are up against some other really good novels, and
Fahrenheit 451 is certainly a classic.
Now Stanley Kubrick actually expressed interest in filming Childhood's End, but instead
decided to go with 2001 Space Odyssey, we'll be getting to that shortly.
Childhood's End also had an audio adaptation by the BBC.
And that can be found at the Internet Archive.
In fact, there's a lot of these BBC radio shows that you can find on the Internet Archive.
So it's something to take a look at.
And as I mentioned before, I think the Internet Archive is also deserving of support.
In 2015, the sci-fi channel did a three-part ministeries adaptation of Childhood's End, which
can be purchased as a DVD.
I've put links to the DVD, the Internet Archive, etc. in the show notes, so you can access
any of this if you are interested.
Now this holds up much better as a novel than the City and the Stars.
But while it's better novel, I again find little in it to support Clark's reputation
as a writer of hard science fiction.
Now I've enjoyed reading it several times.
But while telepathy, group consciousness and the galactic overmind are clearly speculative,
it is hard to claim that there is much science to it.
The overlords clearly have advanced science and technology, but we never really see anything
more than the effects of it.
The science behind this technology has never brought up and is really not part of the
plot to any degree.
But the next story remedies this.
And that story is called a Fall of Moon Dust, published in 1961.
Now Clark published other stuff between those two, but we're just trying to look at the
highlights of this.
One of the dangers in writing hard science fiction is opposed to fantasy is that the facts
can change as new science comes in.
For instance, when Giovanni Shaparelli described what he called the Canali of Mars in 1877, he
used a word which meant channels in Italian, but which later got translated as canals.
And those are two very different things.
You know, a channel is a natural formation.
A canal is something that has been built by somebody.
And well into the 20th century, these canals were seen by astronomers.
And since they were obviously built by somebody that meant there had to be inhabitants of
Mars who constructed them.
So HG Wells could use these inhabitants as characters in his The War of the Worlds, 1897.
But like canals, science fiction writers developed a whole mythology about this.
The canals were clearly built to transport water.
They could see the polar ice caps expanding contract seasonally.
So the canals must have been to carry water from the poles to the inhabited areas.
Of course, now we know that the polar ice caps were real, are really made of carbon dioxide
that freezes out of the atmosphere and then sublimates back into the atmosphere seasonally.
Now in Well's story, Mars was starting to dry out.
And that's why they invaded Earth.
And I'll mention how all those stories look after we have been to Mars, robotically at this
point, but we've been there, and discovered that there never were any canals.
It was all an optical illusion caused by the human brain's tendency to look for patterns
in random data.
And there are no Martians.
Similarly, Venus was covered in clouds, so writers imagined a planet that was swampy
and humid, thus causing the clouds.
And thus it would be filled with inhabitants adapted to swamp conditions.
Now we know that Venus' clouds are made of sulfuric acid, and the surface temperature
is 464 degrees centigrade.
Well, let me bring this up.
At one time there was a theory that large parts of the Moon's surface were covered in
deep layers of dust.
We know now that that's not the case.
There is a layer of dust, it's not particularly deep, and every land or spacecraft to touch
down is landed on a solid surface.
But Clark, like many science fiction writers, went with what was clearly a possibility
at that time, and extrapolated from it, you know, what if the Moon was covered in deep
layer of dust?
So he's let down a little by the advance of knowledge, but you got to get him a pass.
He didn't know what we now know, and his extrapolations were legitimate given the then
state of knowledge.
So in this story, the Moon has been inhabited at this time by scientific missions for a while,
and now tourists have started to come.
One company offers a tour of a lake full of dust on which a boat floats.
The dust is so fine, it behaves like water, so this is working, it's possible.
Then the disaster strikes, a cave in below the boat causes it to sink into the dust, and
now it is a race against time to find a way out.
In the boat, they are mostly waiting to be rescued, they are in a sealed vessel, and
are fine for the moment, but problems are looming.
The dust is a very efficient insulator, and the heat starts to build up.
Air supply is limited.
Communications are impossible, so they have no way of communicating.
On the outside people know the ship has been lost, but they don't know exactly where
it is.
They might have to abandon the search.
But then an astronomer in a satellite above the Moon says he has found a heat signature.
Well, they send out a rescue vessel and are able to make contact, but time is running
out.
They do finally succeed in running a pipe into the ship to deliver oxygen, but the heat
build up is still going on.
They know they have to get the people out, and hit on a plan to drop a case on onto the
buried ship with the tube running back to the rescue vessel, so the people can climb
out.
But then the sunken ship lurches into an angle instead of being level.
They have to try a different approach.
But another problem arises when the holes they have cut are leaking in dust, which gets
into the batteries and shorts them out.
This starts a slow burn that will ultimately create an explosion.
Now in the end everyone is saved, but the suspense is maintained throughout.
This is a really enjoyable story that keeps you on the edge of your seat all the way through.
And this is exactly the kind of story people mean when they talk about hard science
section.
The problems they face are perfectly reasonable from a scientific and engineering perspective.
And they are solved one by one through the application of science and engineering.
There is no use the force luke going on here, no made up imaginary future science.
The fiction, once you give Clark a pass on the idea of deep moon dust, is entirely the
location.
It is happening on the moon.
Now this story was adapted for radio by the BBC in 1981.
It is available for purchase.
It was released as a CD audio, but it is out of print.
So you'd have to look for it.
But it is also available again at the internet archive.
And I've put a link to that in the show notes.
So you can get the audio adaptation if you want.
And so this is a hook up for hacker public radio signing off and is always encouraging you
to support free software.
Bye bye.
On the Sadois status, today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International
License.
