Techniques for Impact
In his entry on Clarke for Science Fiction Writers, David. N. Samuelson notes that ‘‘some of his early stories were essentially jokes’’ and that these stories were ‘‘whimsical.’’ However, Samuelson notes in his entry that ‘‘Clarke could also write stories of a more somber, even melancholy tone—far-future tales in which man’s science and technology seemed to lead to a dead end.’’ ‘‘‘If I Forget Thee, O Earth . . . ’’’ is definitely one of the latter. In the story, Clarke sends a dark message to the world’s inhabitants, urging them not to use atomic bombs. By depicting a post-holocaust scenario, in which a group of humans is stranded for centuries on the moon, he offers a vivid example of what could happen if an atomic World War III ever happens. In his essay ‘‘The Cosmic Loneliness of Arthur C. Clarke,’’ Thomas D. Clareson notes the cautionary message and calls Clarke’s story ‘‘one of his finest.’’ However, Clarke does more than show an example. He amplifies the chilling impact of his antiwar message by using specific imagery, emphasizing the idea of silence, and choosing specific words to describe the radioactive aftermath.
The story begins, appropriately enough, with an image of life. Marvin, the ten-year-old main character who has grown up in the lunar colony, is drawn to the vegetation that he observes in the colony’s farmlands. ‘‘The smell of life was everywhere, awakening inexpressible longings in his heart: no longer was he breathing the dry, cool air of the residential levels.’’ After this brief image of life, however, the rest of the story emphasizes death. During his trip to see the earthrise, Marvin sees only hard, rocky landscapes; there is no vegetation: ‘‘Ahead, as far as the eye could reach, was a jumbled wasteland of craters, mountain ranges, and ravines.’’ After viewing the ruined earth, Marvin realizes that the vegetation of the farmlands is the only plant life that he will ever see. Worse, he realizes that he is missing much more by not being able to see the natural lands of earth. ‘‘He would never walk beside the rivers of that lost and legendary world, or listen to the thunder raging above its softly rounded hills.’’
The absence of life is made even worse by the pervasive darkness on the moon. As soon as Marvin leaves the confines of the colony, he sees many examples of darkness. Unlike earth’s, the moon’s thin atmosphere does not feature blue sky. Instead, the landscape burns ‘‘beneath the fierce sun that crawled so slowly across the jet-black sky.’’ Although the moon is lit by sunlight, the sky remains black. This blackness gets even worse when Marvin and his father drive through mountains that block out the sun. Says the narrator, ‘‘Night fell with a shocking depicting a post-holocaust scenario, in which a group of humans is stranded for centuries on the moon, he offers a vivid example of what could happen if an atomic World War III ever happens. In his essay ‘‘The Cosmic Loneliness of Arthur C. Clarke,’’ Thomas D. Clareson notes the cautionary message and calls Clarke’s story ‘‘one of his finest.’’ However, Clarke does more than show an example. He amplifies the chilling impact of his antiwar message by using specific imagery, emphasizing the idea of silence, and choosing specific words to describe the radioactive aftermath. The story begins, appropriately enough, with an image of life. Marvin, the ten-year-old main character who has grown up in the lunar colony, is drawn to the vegetation that he observes in the colony’s farmlands. ‘‘The smell of life was everywhere, awakening inexpressible...
(This entire section contains 2066 words.)
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longings in his heart: no longer was he breathing the dry, cool air of the residential levels.’’ After this brief image of life, however, the rest of the story emphasizes death. During his trip to see the earthrise, Marvin sees only hard, rocky landscapes; there is no vegetation: ‘‘Ahead, as far as the eye could reach, was a jumbled wasteland of craters, mountain ranges, and ravines.’’ After viewing the ruined earth, Marvin realizes that the vegetation of the farmlands is the only plant life that he will ever see. Worse, he realizes that he is missing much more by not being able to see the natural lands of earth. ‘‘He would never walk beside the rivers of that lost and legendary world, or listen to the thunder raging above its softly rounded hills.’’
The absence of life is made even worse by the pervasive darkness on the moon. As soon as Marvin leaves the confines of the colony, he sees many examples of darkness. Unlike earth’s, the moon’s thin atmosphere does not feature blue sky. Instead, the landscape burns ‘‘beneath the fierce sun that crawled so slowly across the jet-black sky.’’ Although the moon is lit by sunlight, the sky remains black. This blackness gets even worse when Marvin and his father drive through mountains that block out the sun. Says the narrator, ‘‘Night fell with a shocking abruptness as they crossed the shadow line and the sun dropped below the crest of the plateau.’’ Even when the darkness is alleviated, the lighting has negative connotations. Marvin does not know at this point that they are going to view an earthrise, but he does realize that something is strange when they come out of the mountains: ‘‘The sun was now low behind the hills on the right; the valley before them should be in total darkness.’’ However, the valley is lit by the ‘‘cold white radiance’’ of the earth. At this point, Clarke has his narrator use imagery that suggests there is something wrong with earth. As the narrator notes, ‘‘no warmth at all came from the silver crescent.’’ Unlike the sun, a bright planetary body that does provide warmth, this bright world does not. As Marvin realizes that earth is dead, his initial assessment of its lack of warmth seems fitting.
Clarke also employs images of isolation to magnify the effect of despair in the story. Not long after they drive away from the airlock, Clarke reveals that Marvin and his father are alone. ‘‘There was no sign of the colony: in the few minutes while he had been gazing at the stars, its domes and radio towers had fallen below the horizon.’’ They do see another sign of civilization—‘‘the curiously shaped structures clustering round the head of a mine’’— after they have driven for about a mile. However, after this, they travel for a long time without seeing any other signs of humanity: ‘‘For hours they drove through valleys and past the feet of mountains whose peaks seemed to comb the stars.’’ In fact, the next sign of civilization is ‘‘the skeleton of a crashed rocket.’’ The image of a crashed rocket symbolizes the failure of science. In addition, by using the word, ‘‘skeleton’’ Clarke once again underscores the idea of death. Clarke could have placed the colony anywhere on the moon, even right on the edge of the valley where Marvin views the earthrise. However, by placing it at a distance from the viewing point, he is able to emphasize the isolation of the colony members. He sends Marvin and his father on a long, lonely trip, during which the only sign of civilization outside the colony’s plateau is the remains of a long-dead rocket. The ultimate isolation, however, comes when Marvin sees the earth and remembers hearing the stories of how the colony members learned of earth’s destruction. As the narrator says, ‘‘they were alone at last, as no men had ever been alone before, carrying in their hands the future of the race.’’
In addition to imagery, Clarke’s story is also marked by a conspicuous absence of sound. There is no dialogue in the story; discussions are only referred to. For the most part, the story is narrative description, as Marvin remembers his trip to see the earthrise. However, at one point in the story, the narrator indicates that Marvin’s father has spoken, but the reader does not hear Marvin’s father’s words. Instead, they too, become part of the narration: ‘‘And now Father began to speak, telling Marvin the story which until this moment had meant no more to him than the fairy tales he had heard in childhood.’’ Even before this point, few sounds are described in detail. In the beginning, when they are inside the colony, the narrator observes that Marvin’s father ‘‘started the motor,’’ the ‘‘inner door of the lock slid open,’’ and he listened to the ‘‘roar of the great air-pumps fade slowly away.’’ During the drive across the desolate landscape, however, the narrator does not describe the sounds that Marvin and his father might be hearing. In fact, the only other sound comes when Marvin’s father stops the vehicle so they can view the earth, when Clarke draws attention to the silence: ‘‘It was very quiet in the little cabin now that the motors had stopped.’’ The only sounds are ‘‘the faint whisper of the oxygen feed’’ and the occasional noise of the metal walls of the vehicle as it ‘‘radiated away their heat.’’ These obvious uses of silence in the story help illustrate a point. The human race has been largely silenced, diminished from billions on earth to only a handful of survivors on the moon.
Samuelson, in the same entry mentioned above, notes these ‘‘static’’ qualities of the story, saying that it has ‘‘little or no plot complications.’’ Stories are often defined by the development of their plots. However, in this story, Clarke focuses on imagery and silence and relegates the main plot complica tions to the backstory—the events that have taken place before the story begins, in this case the destruction of earth’s inhabitants and the subsequent stranding of the moon colony. As readers become aware of what is going on, they feel what Samuelson identifies as the ‘‘elegiac’’ effect of the story, and, like Marvin and his father, they are drawn in to mourn for the lost earth.
This tragedy is amplified by the word choice that Clarke uses, particularly when describing the radioactive aftermath. The atomic war that claims the earth’s inhabitants and extends the colony exile is viewed as evil and unnecessary. When describing Marvin’s first realization that the earth is contaminated, the narrator says that ‘‘the portion of the disk that should have been in darkness was gleaming faintly with an evil phosphorescence.’’ The use of the word ‘‘evil’’ is a direct commentary on the nature of atomic weapons. Clarke also chooses words that have destructive associations, such as fire. As Marvin continues to observe earth, he realizes that he is ‘‘looking upon the funeral pyre of a world—upon the radioactive aftermath of Armageddon.’’ Poison is another potent word that Clarke uses. Marvin realizes that the earth will eventually clean itself, that the ‘‘winds and the rains would scour the poisons from the burning lands and carry them to the sea.’’ It is here, in the oceans, that the radioactive poisons will ‘‘waste their venom.’’ Poisonous snakes are another negative image, so by associating the radioactive contamination with them, Clarke is implying in yet another way that atomic weapons are lethal.
In the end, Clarke is demonstrating that nothing is good for the people in this moon colony. Even the good aspects like the vegetation in the farmlands and the light from earth ultimately have negative connotations, since they illustrate what the colony is missing. Clarke also depicts life as a frail entity and saturates his story with references to the death, darkness, isolation, and silence of a post-holocaust world. By building his story with these techniques and by using words with evil connotations to describe the aftermath of atomic war, Clarke gives his antiwar message a greater impact. When the story was published in 1951, this message was particularly important. At the time, the United States government was trying to quell public fears with propaganda that downplayed the consequences of atomic weapons. Clarke, like other science fiction writers, was engaged in a battle of words, trying to appeal to the public to cry out against atomic bombs, even as the government was teaching people to accept and not fear them.
Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on ‘‘‘If I Forget Thee, O Earth . . . ,’’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, 2003.
Theme of Science Fiction
A major theme of science fiction has been the destruction of earth. In addition, the manner in which science fiction writers have approached and developed this theme has evolved. Advances in space-related technology and in general knowledge have been factors leading to this change. Science fiction itself has done more than mirror these advances in technology and knowledge; imaginative stories in this field have helped to change people’s perceptions and expectations about the world.
In this story, published in 1951, Clarke uses very few words and only two characters, a ten-yearold boy named Marvin and his unnamed father. The story has a vague and unearthly setting from the start. The setting is described as a ‘‘jumbled wasteland of craters, mountain ranges, and ravines,’’ and the night comes with ‘‘shocking abruptness.’’ As his father takes him on his first tour of the area ‘‘outside’’ the human dwellings, Marvin realizes ‘‘that something very strange was happening in the land ahead.’’ This sense of foreboding adds drama to the realizations that the characters, and the reader, will make later in the story, when it is revealed that earth and the human society upon it have been destroyed and that the characters are living in an isolated moon colony.
The story is permeated with a sense of longing and sadness, because the characters are misplaced and can only look into space at a planet that was their former home. Marvin and his father know that they will never ‘‘walk beside the rivers of that lost and legendary world, or listen to the thunder raging above its softly rounded hills.’’ Referring to the story of how they arrived there, the narrator states, ‘‘they were alone at last, as no men had ever been alone before, carrying in their hands the future of the race.’’ The story ends with Marvin and his father together in their lunar scout car, looking out upon the distant, unobtainable, and ruined earth. Marvin and his father know that it will be many hundreds of years before earth will be free of its deadly poisons. Together with the other survivors of the colony, they are all that remain of the human race. It is interesting to note that the narrator refers to the ‘‘radioactive Armageddon’’ that has destroyed earth. This science fiction story, taking place in the future, is still dependent upon the ancient biblical story of the apocalypse. However, in Clarke’s apocalypse, human beings and their nuclear technology are responsible for the destruction.
Just as Clarke’s main character, Marvin, is a child, it can be argued as well that in this story, humanity is still in a sort of childhood. Humans, stranded in an inhospitable place, have not moved farther out into space and are waiting for that future day when earth will be able to support human life again. Clarke’s characters are looking backwards, down the gravity well to their past, to their womb, and are unable to move independently from their current place. Clarke’s people are yearning only to walk once again upon earth, which they only know through stories and ‘‘fairy tales.’’
At the same time, Clarke’s story contains glimmers of hope and hints of changes that may be germinating in people’s ideas about space exploration. The adult in the story, Marvin’s father, is full of a zest for pushing Marvin beyond his usual boundaries. When Marvin thinks that his father is behaving as though ‘‘he were trying to escape from something,’’ the narrator interjects that this is ‘‘a strange thought to come into a child’s mind.’’ The adult in the story longs for change and freedom, while the child is apprehensive and passive about those changes. For the child, the tales in which he had once believed are now replaced with stark visions of reality.
Clarke was not the only author of his era to write about earth’s destruction. Caves of Steel (1954) by Isaac Asimov, The Green Hills of Earth (1951) by Robert Heinlein, and A Canticle for Leibovitz (1959) by Walter M. Miller, Jr., all deal with the same theme of an innocent humankind being nearly overwhelmed by the partial or complete destruction of earth.
Later writers of science fiction have portrayed humankind as having already grown past its childhood and as being no longer dependent upon earth. It is not unusual or exceptional for later science fiction writers and their characters to view earth as a nest that has become used up and boring and a suitable home only for those too timid for the adventure of space. For example, in Charles Sheffield’s well-received 1995 novel, The Ganymede Club, a woman says, ‘‘if you ask me, the war [that destroyed much of earth] was a blessing in disguise. It moved the center of power of the solar system from earth out here to Jupiter, where it rightfully belongs.’’
Some later science fiction writers, including Sheffield (often touted as the new Arthur Clarke), Spider and Jeanne Robinson, Greg Bear, and Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, among others, present characters who look outwards toward Mars and Venus, toward the asteroid belt, and to the outer planets with their many moons. For these writers, escaping from the gravity of earth for space, while there are still sufficient resources to do so, is the next adventure and collective goal for humankind and the next theme for science fiction.
Sheffield, in particular, shows how humankind could fill the entire solar system, using the various resources of the asteroid belt as well as those of both the inner and the outer planets. He shows how this would be much simpler and more economical than dragging resources up out of the gravity well of earth. When he recounts, in several of his novels, including Cold As Ice, Dark As Day, and The Ganymede Club, that much of earth has been destroyed by a war between the people of the asteroid belt and those of earth, the focus isn’t upon the tragedy. Instead, the focus is upon the future of the human race, which is living freely and productively in space.
Thus, science fiction has developed different ways of relating to the theme of the destruction of earth. On the one hand, Clarke and other early writers saw it as a disaster for humanity. In Clarke’s story, his characters have reached the moon, but with earth destroyed, they have let their ‘‘great ships’’ lie idle rather than use them to explore further. They have decided to save them for the possibility of an eventual return many hundreds of years later to their old home. On the other hand, later writers have shared a different vision of the human race, which is at home in space and living throughout the solar system and beyond. It is notable that Clarke further developed this theme of earth destruction and the resulting human travel into space. In his novel Childhood’s End, Clarke again shows the destruction of earth. But this time aliens are involved and are helping humanity grow up and evolve to its next level of existence. When earth is finally destroyed, it is merely a by-product of this evolution.
Why were the early science fiction writers so pessimistic? Why did the characters in Clarke’s story stay huddled beneath their domed and underground city and yearn always for earth? Why were they not out in their ‘‘great ships’’ exploring the rest of the solar system? Why, for Clarke, did the human race have to be helped by aliens to grow past its childhood? Why, on the other hand, are Sheffield, Robinson, and other later writers much more optimistic, with characters always looking outward toward the next frontier?
In Clarke’s day, human beings had not yet reached space, let alone touched down upon the moon. Aircraft and computers were primitive compared to those of today. Perhaps that is why, in Clarke’s story, the technological aspects are left completely vague. There is a moon colony, sheltered beneath a pressurized plastic dome. There are the lunar scout cars. There are the ‘‘great ships . . . still waiting here on the silent, dusty plains.’’ However, they are merely mentioned, never described, and are not essential to his story. What does figure prominently in Clarke’s story is directly related to the technology of that time period: the nuclear bomb, which has made earth uninhabitable. For Clarke, scientific discovery has ruined the nest but has not yet given humankind the wings to fly to a new home.
Given the state of technology in the early new millennium, human beings are better prepared for venturing out into space than in Clarke’s day. Since the late 1940s, there have been major advances in spaceship design and safety and in computers and guidance systems, for example. The space shuttles really work. An international space station is being built. There have been proposals to send humans to Mars. The Hubble telescope and other successful space probes have given new and exciting details of the universe. The moons of Jupiter have attracted interest as sources of water, and asteroids have been proposed as rich sources of water and minerals. Humanity has become more confident in its ability to leap into space. Science fiction has mirrored these changes in technology, creating new stories of space travel and adventures. At the same time, adventurous science fiction stories have spurred people to raise their sights on new possibilities. In the half century since Clarke wrote his wonderful and basic story, science fiction has attracted many writers with inspiring visions of humanity’s future in space. These visions often have been coupled with understanding of biology, psychology, physics, astronomy, and other related disciplines.
When Marvin looks up at that ‘‘great silver crescent that floated low above the far horizon,’’ he realizes that his father had shown him earth so that he would pass on this yearning for humankind’s home to his own sons and daughters. Marvin knows that he will never reach earth himself, but he sees that ‘‘yet one day—how far ahead?—his children’s children would return to claim their heritage.’’ Marvin understands that unless this last remnant of humanity barely existing upon the moon had ‘‘a goal, a future towards which it could work, the Colony would lose the will to live.’’
Clarke’s story ends as a starting place for other science fiction writers, declaring that it is human nature to have a goal and a vision of the future. Building upon Clarke’s vision of the future and connecting that with the ever-increasing body of scientific knowledge, science fiction continues to tell new stories of great adventures into space.
Source: Douglas Dupler, Critical Essay on ‘‘‘If I Forget Thee, O Earth . . . ,’’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, 2003.