Reading Log, no. 6-1

Rachel even had to ask me in one of her emails whether I stopped reading
too. No, no, I replied. I still read. It's just that I stopped blogging
about reading -- and everything else, for that matter.

But the days are getting noticeably shorter. Lately, the weather has
turned, and I'm no longer cursing Phoenix but instead anticipating the
ensuing forty-six weeks of easy times. School is back in session, and
that means the city has plenty of school zone speed limits ripe for
breaking. Things reset; old routines reassert. It's only fitting I write a
reading log.

Like with a procrastinated school project, this catch-up reading log is
a monster. It's too long to expect even my most bored readers to slog
through, and so I'm breaking it up into separate posts for each book.

* * *

By the standards of all earlier ages, it was Utopia. Ignorance, disease, poverty, and fear had virtually ceased to exist. The memory of war was fading into the past as a nightmare vanishes with the dawn; soon it would lie outside the experience of all living men.

With the energies of mankind directed into constructive channels, the face of the world had been remade. It was, almost literally, a new world. The cities that had been good enough for earlier generations had been rebuilt--or deserted and left as museum specimens when they had ceased to serve any useful purpose. Many cities had already been abandoned in this manner, for the whole pattern of industry and commerce had changed completely. Production had become largely automatic: the robot factories poured forth consumer goods in such unending streams that all the ordinary necessities of life were virtually free. Men worked for the sake of the luxuries they desired: or they did not work at all.

It was One World. The old names of the old countries were still used, but they were no more than convenient postal divisions. There was no one on Earth who could not speak English, who could not read, who was not within range of a television set, who could not visit the other side of the planet within twenty-four hours...

Crime had practically vanished. It had become both unnecessary and impossible. When no one lacks anything, there is no point in stealing. Moreover, all potential criminals knew that there could be no escape from the surveillance of the Overlords. In the early days of their rule, they had intervened so effectively on behalf of law and order that the lesson had never been forgotten.

Crimes of passion, though not quite extinct, were almost unheard of. Now that so many of its psychological problems had been removed, humanity was far saner and less irrational. And what earlier ages would have called vice was now no more than eccentricity--or, at the worst, bad manners.

Arthur C. Clarke
Childhood's End

The quick version: A race of extraterrestrials seemingly possessing omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence enter into earth orbit, establish contact with humans, and direct changes for human affairs to improve conditions for everyone and everything on the planet. Humans learn to deal with their new paternalistic masters.

What would such a utopia look like?

Apparently it would involve people watching a lot of television, people having a lot of sex, and people spending a lot of time driving cars. But I assure you such a world is totally different from ours -- the cars are flying cars. But are the cars carbon-free, too? Unknown.

Clarke wrote Childhood's End half a century ago, back when the world was still infinite. What would the novel be like if it were written today, now that the world is becoming annoyingly finite? That's a question I repeatedly asked myself throughout the book.

Ignoring technological obsolescence for the moment, overall the image Clarke paints of utopia is convincing. People separate into two groups: the passive consumers and the active self-actualized (ineffectual though they may be). Either way, people are instilled with a unqualified happiness that belies a certain emptiness, a certain non-humanity. This is chillingly denoted in a passage describing the head Overlord's foreboding assessment of the utopic world he manages:

They would never know how lucky they had been. For a lifetime, mankind had achieved as much happiness as any race can ever know. It had been the Golden Age. But gold was also the color or sunset, of autumn: and only Karellen's ears could catch the first wailings of the winter storms.

And only Karellen knew with what inexorable swiftness the Golden Age was rushing to its close.

Perhaps we in the 21st century are living in the Golden Age and all without the assistance of those devilish Overlords.