Speaking of Arthur C. Clarke I came across this today,

http://insidetv.ew.com/2014/09/03/syfy-childhoods-end-6-hour-miniseries/

I'm curious to see how they play out the end of it. The end of the book is quite unusual compared to mainstream SF. The first half we've seen before.

Only thing that will have to change is Clarke makes the aliens look like devils but totally downplays the problems that would cause. He mistakenly believed only a tiny minority would see it as a problem as opposed to what I would estimate at 50% of the world's population today!




The Jedi Master

<sarcasm>
So, will it be Sharknado vs. The Overlords?
</sarcasm>

Jedi, it's been a long time since I read the book, but as I recall, he kind of took that into account, by having the Overlords wait until they'd been around for a generation before showing themselves, thinking all the people alive at that point would have never known a time they weren't around, and would be used to them and not feel they were a threat. I thought the idea behind waiting like that was so that people would be so used to them that they wouldn't be too freaked out by their appearance.

Not much at the syfy site.

http://www.syfy.com/childhoodsend

There's no way people would accept waiting a generation for them to show themselves. That's the 1950s mentality of "believe what the gov't tells you is for your own good," that's not 21st century.

As soon as a week went by people would be proclaiming loudly all over the networks that the secrecy is obviously part of a hidden agenda and they shouldn't be trusted and blah blah blah and it wouldn't stop. Then when it WAS revealed the excuse of "well, we didn't want to upset you" would not be accepted, either another DEEPER agenda would be suspected, or the simple idea that they just must be devils would be accepted.




The Jedi Master

...but if they chose to stay outside of the range of our own robotic probes - the Kuiper belt is large enough - it wouldn't require government intervention. Besides, I think one can safely assume that a galactic civilization that has mastered the technological challenges of interstellar travel will probably be smart enough to approach our system under emission control, and the observe from a distance for as long as possible before initiating contact.
Remaining anonymous at first is in any case a smart strategy as it retains a maximum of options to the visitor - even if he decides to initiate an active communication (which would already be somewhat of a success at it would signal that they are actually interested in some form of exchange).

Initiating direct contact with an alien species is probably at least as big a risk as the creation of autonomous, self-replicating artificial intelligences. You would probably do it only if you felt vastly superior and/or invulnerable, or if you were incredibly naive and more curious than the proverbial cat ... or guided by entirely alien or irrational motivations.

Ssnake, I don't know if you read Childhood's End, but the aliens coming to Earth is a big part of the story, so they wouldn't have stayed undetected.

JM, they're highly advanced aliens, not the government. If they didn't want to show themselves, there's nothing the population on Earth could do about it. I thought 50 years was too short of a time, but I think the idea of waiting a generation has merit, especially if nothing bad happens because of the aliens. Yes, it's a different world now, but I think the aliens could get away with not showing themselves.

I didn't mean that they could be forced to, just that I think people wouldn't believe that the gov't did NOT know what they looked like.
So while the aliens wouldn't suffer, I could see serious political consequences as conspiracy theorists gain traction and public "we haven't seen them either" denials would not be accepted.

The problem with a lot of SF is often not the science, it's not the situations, it's the reactions of the people in the stories. The very traits that make these authors good at SF makes them weaker in characterization. How would you describe David Bowman's character? There's really not much there.

Besides, let's face it, these guys aren't known for their characters. Who's Asimov's most memorable human character? Eliminate those you think of purely because of their importance to the story like Seldon or Calvin and you realize his characters were there to move the story forward vs the story being about what happened to them.
I think his Robot novels, which were basically just SF murder mysteries, did the best because they stuck with the mystery formula.

I will give George RR Martin this--his characters are well fleshed-out and memorable, regardless of what you think about fantasy and dragons and such.




The Jedi Master

I agree on the characters. In fact, something I have told people about Clarke's works since high school is that his main characters were usually pretty bland, and I actually kind of liked it because his stories were more about events than people, and a strong character may have distracted from the events. Without a strong character, I can actually insert myself into that situation, which makes the store more of a vicarious experience, than just being told a story.

Science fiction has always been more about ideas than characters or drama. It's not impossible to create both, but ideas were always more important in the genre. Some critics seem to be incapable of accepting that and to still appreciate the unique angle that SF can offer to some problems.
Then again, there are few SF novels to which I would attribute that they are "immortal". On the other hand, which literature can claim to survive more than a few hundred years - I guess the (original) Odyssey is the only story that is older than two millenia, was never truly forgotten, and is still somewhat popular today ... though hardly in Homer's semi-original hexameter/ancient Greek writing style.

That brings up an interesting question I've never
thought about before: I wonder how Homer in the
original comes across for modern greeks. Is it so
far removed as to be unintelligible, or would it
be no more opaque than Chaucer is for us? How far
has greek permuted? Perhaps less than english has
in a third the time, due to the different degrees
of foreign influences. English speakers are deprived
of a deep depth of time in their literature, which
natives of some other languages may perhaps enjoy.

And what would be the least permuted language, I wonder.
Is there a dialect in India which is very similar to
sanskrit? I guess with the east asian languages with
ideographic rather than syllabic writing, we'll never
know how far their spoken language has drifted over the
millennia. I wonder about egyptian language; again it
is somewhat ideographic, but the hieroglyphs encode
some consonants, and they persisted for some 3k years,
perhaps the longest stretch, though it apparently was
somehow lost between the greek and arab invasions 1700
years ago or so.

...according to wiki, egyptian goes back to at least
3400BC, and eventually evolved into coptic, which was
spoken until the 17th century. Now there's a depth of
time in literature!

From discussing 2001 and Clarke to discussing Homer and how languages have changed over time.

Only on SimHQ.

Yeah,how did we get from 2001 to The Simpsons?

Homer flew on the space shuttle.



The Jedi Master

Hail Space Ants!

(Forgive the Hulu advertisements. Good reason to never bother with 'em!)

In Asia, there are ancient epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana (roughly the same time as Homer) that are very well known to hundreds of millions. Then again, not all parts of the world have been affected (yet) by the modern plague of goldfish-like attention spans and addiction to high-speed disposable stimuli.

For my part, if any modern sci-fi is going to survive long term, it will be Wells and Orwell.

Uh...I think your term of "modern" is overbroad if you put Wells in there.



The Jedi Master

Depends if you count "Frankenstein" as the fist work if science fiction or not.

Besides, we were discussing stories from 2500 years ago, so everything seems modern in that light.

Compared to those, yes! However, the tone of SF in the past 40 years is certainly different from mid-20th which is different again from late 19th/early 20th.



The Jedi Master