A gift, very belatedly read, from the lovely Lauren after she came to visit us in London en route to a meditation retreat, which is a very short way of summarizing one of my very fascinating friends.
What a wild book that ended up popping up in conversation with friends much more than I expected! I’ve been in a mood asking people about what they’d do if we were in a Star Trek world where it’s post-scarcity and everyone can do whatever it is they want, and that is in fact what a good portion of this book is about. It has some pretty…interesting takes on what happens though.
Basically, recall the first part of Independence Day (the film) where the giant saucers show up–except instead of FIRE and EXPLOSIONS and MICHAEL BAY you have a chill voice that tells everyone to calm down, the Earth is under receivership, we’re going to have a fun time and you won’t have to worry anymore. Religion has been nullified, war is useless, peace is the order of the day. What the strange Overlords want or even what they look like is unknown, but very quickly everyone realizes that their technological superiority means that their rules go.
On the whole, the book is strongest when it imagines what a world run by a truly benevolent truly omnipowerful dictator would look like, and weakest when it starts to explain the ‘true’ purpose of the Overlords and place the story within Clarke’s larger mythos. Part of that is because the book is rather short and so much of the latter exposition is done without artifice as “tell, don’t show” — conversations with Karellen (the main Overlord, often referred to as the Supervisor) and our human stand-in. It’s one thing to build up to metaphysical dimension and galaxy spanning collective consciousnesses that represent the final evolution of homo sapiens, it’s another to just…hear it explained in a few paragraphs.
I actually wish that the book had chosen to instead work up to my favorite bit–honestly one of the better twists that I’ve read in a while–when Karellen reveals his physical form 50 years after arriving [as being what we on Earth associate with the devil, i.e., arrowhead tail and horns and wings]. The subtle clues that “this has all happened before” and “myths have a grounding in reality” and “racial memory” (more on this in a second) laid the groundwork perfectly, such that I actually had a moment of GASP when he opens the door to the spaceship and walks down the gangplank. But then you might not have gotten the ongoing humor and interesting bits after said reveal, wherein you live in a world of plenty with other members of the Overlord species wandering through humanity and playing bemused roles.
As with any book of this era, there are some genuine head scratchers re: throwaway lines. The best (and, in hindsight, the second best twist in the book after the above) is definitely when a handful of world governments refuse to kowtow to the idea of equality that the Overlords demand without exception. The South African government tries to fight, is immediately shown a display of overwhelming power (e.g., everyone is frozen in time for 15 seconds, demonstrating that the Overlords have absolute control over humanity) and then backs down…and offers equality to the white minority, a reveal that made me literally laugh out loud. There’s also moments where the characters use the British colonization of India as an analogy to the Overlords’ control of Earth, making the observation that both powers came and made great improvements to the lives of their subjects vis-a-vis technology and order, but the difference is that the Overlords were not ‘asked’ to come. It’s very much like, White Man’s Burden which tracks given the time but is jarring to read in the present.
