***MILD SPOILERS*** This concerns the SyFy Channel's treatment of the book originally written by Arthur C. Clarke in 1953. It's very much a story in the style of Arthur C. Clarke during the heyday of Golden Age Science Fiction. It completely lacks a modern cynicism as regards our innate selves as a species and how we would genuinely react to an "uplift" situation, were such a thing to happen. It's idealized into a sort of essence where most of humanity accepts the Golden Era of Man that is offered by the Overlords and only an idiosyncratic few hide away in a city called New Athens where life is lived the old way, dirty and hectic, but vibrant. A similar theme was explored in his The City and the Stars (1956), where Diaspar was the city of eternal life, perfect, yet sterile; the city of Lys, its hidden counterpart, is natural and imperfect, but alive. In the end, it's a privileged story, in the modern sense of that word, where the genuinely ugly things that would no doubt take place a million times a day across the globe in this scenario are screened out and only alluded to. In the real-real world, I think we would have destroyed ourselves long before Jennifer was born. I don't think we would have really made it that far. Perhaps it was because of when this story was written, just after WWII, that Clarke's work shows a kind of denial of the things that were seen and experienced during that era. Had I lived through that, perhaps I too would want to sell my message with as soft a shoe as I could. Don't know.
