Re: The Great Models of SF


"Anthony Nance" <nance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:h08fto$pfp$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mike Schilling <mscottschilling@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
In article <mIzVl.5226$fD.928@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Mike Schilling <mscottschilling@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:05:17 -0400, Sean O'Hara
<seanohara@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In the Year of the Earth Ox, the Great and Powerful Derek Lyons
eclared:
"Mike Schilling" <mscottschilling@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Space travel being the answer to human restlessness seems to
crop
up all over.

Which is interesting given how rare that quality is. Most
people,
historically, tended to stay near home.

And people in the Middle Ages burned millions of women for
witchcraft.

And the southern states seceded to protest Lincoln's conduct of the
Civil War.

That's like the story, once (AIUI) overheard in a Tokyo bar,
that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in retaliation for
the bombing of Hiroshima.

IIRC, Childhood's end posited that humans feared and hated devil-like
creatures because we "remembered" that they would rule us at the end
of the world.

Yeah, that stuck in my craw a bit, actually. A few summaries I've seen
since then mention textev that implies the Overlords had visited thousands
of years earlier, and the failure of that visit had stuck as some sort of
racial memory.

Actually, that idea is specifically denied in the next-to-last chapter (at
least, if we believe Rashaverak). Here's a summarized quote:

"When your race first came to Earth, back in the distant past, what went
wrong? Why had you become the symbol of fear and evil to us?"

"No one ever guessed. There was only one event that could have made such an
impact upon humanity. And that event was not at the dawn of history, /but
at its very end/."
"When our ships entered your skies a century and a half ago, that was the
first meeting of our two races. And yet you feared and recognized us, as we
knew you would. It was not precisely a memory. For that memory was not of
the past, but of the /future/ - of those closing years when your race knew
that everything was finished. And because we were there, we became
identified with your race's death. Call it not a memory, but a
premonition."

[I elided quite a bit, but I believe I captured the essence, it's on page
207 in my paperback]

So, we feared them not because they would rule us, but because they would be
there at the end.

It may help that, in CE, humanity does have unrecognized and
hard-to-understand psychic powers, and so this explination is not
inconsistent with the rest of the book.




Tony


.

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