So hook yourself up to an airshipStrap on your mask and your knifeFor the wide open skies are a-callingAnd oh, it’s a glorious life!
—Conductors Recruitment Advertisement, 1890I really enjoyed this short story about airship conductors in Lightspeed Magazine. The magazine is quickly taking my attention away from the likes of Omni and Analog.
Childhood’s End was published in 1953. It’s a truly classic science fiction novel, and a deeply influential one, and one of the books that makes Clarke’s reputation. It’s also a very very strange book. It does as much as any half dozen normal books, and all in 218 pages, and it does it by setting up expectations and completely overturning them, repeatedly.
The prologue of Childhood’s End is brilliant, and it stands completely alone. It’s 1975. There’s an ex-Nazi rocket scientist in the U.S. worrying that his old friend the ex-Nazi rocket scientist in the U.S.S.R. will reach the moon before him. You’ve read this story a million times, you know where it’s going, you settle in to a smooth familiar kind of ride. Then quietly without any fuss, huge alien ships appear over all of Earth’s major cities. And this is just the first surprise, the first few pages of a book that goes about as far from the standard assumptions and standard future of SF as it’s possible to go.Spoilers! Everyone dies!
People talk about SF today being too gloomy — my goodness, Childhood’s End has all of humanity die and then the Earth destroyed. It’s not even relentlessly upbeat about it, it has a elegaic tone.
Blockbuster film designer and creature creator Neville Page talks about the unlikely influences he used to create the engineer in Prometheus. Page is currently designing elements of Ridley Scott's new Blade Runner.
Peter Capaldi, who played the character "W.H.O. Doctor" in World War Z, will be taking over for Matt Smith as the 12th Doctor Who this fall. Only time will tell if he will fill the role as well as his predecessors.
