|
|
|
|
|
|
paradoxically, the Overlords are present in order to cut man off from entering their "evolutionary cul de sac," to insure that he takes the other road, paralleling the mystical return of the soul to God. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
David N. Samuelson, "Childhood's End: A Median Stage of Adolescence" (1973), Arthur C. Clarke, ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg (New York: Taplinger, 1977), pp. 19698 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Clarke provides us handily with but one of countless examples of powerful science fiction based on older literary and cultural forms. The Lion of Comarreis the first of a number of his books in which the hero must break down the separation between a self-contained city and a more pastoral area surrounding it. In this novel the dwellers in the city are lulled by artificially created dreams fed them through surgical connections with their nerves. Clarke uses the term "Lotus Eaters," reminding us of Homer and Tennyson perhaps; his surgical motif had already been used by Fletcher Pratt and Laurence Manning in "City of the Living Dead" (1930). This pleasure-dome image of the dangerously deadening allurements of technology and self-indulgence is worked out again by Clarke in the story "Patent Pending" (1954) (. . .) The protagonist of The Lion of Comarre has a typically central position, "no longer a man, but a symbol, one of the keys to the future of the world.'' His solution to the stagnation of Comarre rests on the active egocentrism we associate with the immature, a perfect carelessness that the Gallant Tailor would approve: "First he would disconnect the circuits, then he would sabotage the projectors so that they could never again be used. The spell that Comarre had cast over so many minds would be broken forever." Although he does need some help from the superlion he had earlier fed, Richard Peyton III manages to save the world. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Clarke's most notable later versions of this story are Against the Fall of Night (1953) and its revision, The City and the Stars (1956). The latter begins with this description so clearly dependent upon the style we have associated with fairy tales: |
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
Like a glowing jewel, the city lay upon the breast of the desert. Once it had known change and alteration, but now Time passed it by. Night and day fled across the desert's face, but in the streets of Diaspar it was always afternoon, and darkness never came. The |
|
|
|
|
|