Thank you very much for this short but content-full and valuable lessons from great books! i subscribed immediately to your channel! please tell me a little more about the wonderful and beautiful paintings presented in this lecture - who painted them and where i can buy them?????
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My biggest takeaway from the novel was to destroy a foe so thoroughly that no future battles would be necessary, as he demonstrated back on Earth with the bully he killed and again at Battleschool with Bonzo's death. Hells even Bean kills another student in his novel Ender's Shadow by essentially tricking him to fall into a drop inside the ventilation
Great video! I really enjoyed how you break down complex topics and make them understandable. It's always interesting and informative to watch your blog. Keep up the excellent work!
"On the new planet Ender finds an area that he realizes looks just like the mind game and he realizes that the buggers had prepared for his coming-they had looked into his mind and knew he would defeat them. He finds a queen pupa, left behind for him to find a place for the buggers to live again. Ender can think to the queen, and sees that the buggers did not truly wish to fight the humans and feels their sorrow for all that happens. Ender decides to make it his mission to find a place for the buggers to live." www.sparknotes.com/lit/endersgame/summary/
@@LexiconVitae interesting. But it could be interpreted as the buggers tricked him into saving them to fight again. Tbh the variant with "evil humans genociding buggers for no reason" sounds like bs.
IIRC the bugs were nor aware that all humans are sentient (and not just their queens) so they though killing them is not a big deal. The conflict come from misunderstanding because of how bugs and humans biology differs. This is also one of the themes in Ender's Game (and many other sci-fi books): the difficulty in understanding aliens (other a metaphor for how hard is for people to understand each other).
When I was a kid, I saw humanity's fate as transcendence, but then it hit me that we'd been eaten. Is the Overmind a telepathic cancer spreading through the stars, the thing the Overlords said they were trying to prevent? Clarke sayeth not, but I have suspicions. Maybe the Overmind is just trying to protect itself from competitors. Maybe utopia is bad for people, but we don't seem able to try it. The useful life lesson from the book is that when the ocean heads for the horizon, run the other way.
I read "Childhood's End" a long time ago, and I have to be honest, that it really creeped me out. Near the end the "children" are experimenting with their telekinetic powers and causing the Moon to move about in its orbit resulting in massive earthquakes that kill people, if I remember right. If the "children" had just gone off into space then that would have been one thing. But to wreak so much havoc on Earth before leaving seemed unconscionable. I didn't get that they had merged into a single consciousness, but I might have stopped reading at that point. It's one thing for individuals to sacrifice their personal egos to work with others in a community, but another thing entirely to merge into a single consciousness like the Borg. I always preferred the SF writings of Ray Bradbury who was much more personable. His "Dandelion Wine" is a beautiful and poetic remembrance of childhood from which much better lessons can be gleaned.
Hard to imagine that Clarke was tackling such ambitious themes way back in 1953, and was always so impressd, that the larger 'meaning' never occurred to me...Thx Much! BTW, humanity reaching 'Utopia' also kinda reminds me of why ideas like the Universal Basic Income ('UBI'), might not be such a good idea after all. And not for any 'ideological' reasons, but that perhaps Clarke's right, and most humans would probably stagnate in the absence of any 'meaning' or a greater purpose (even if it's just to survive).
I loved 'Childhood's End'. Presciently, Clarke explored themes that would be bedrock inspirations for the generation of love beads and flowers that preceded mine by only a few years. I will return to this later. I doubt we will need to worry about any negative or unintended consequences of UBI. I first pondered that question about eight years ago. At the time news was popping that made it clear the immanence of an Artificial Labor Force was beginning to move from CADCAM to reality. I asked questions in the comments section of the internet, and nobody, including commenters with more formidable backgrounds than mine, could answer the big question. How do we keep money moving when tech is no longer replacing the buggy whip makers, but is instead replacing the horses, the horses being us. And while I waited for some discussion of the problem from the political class, perhaps prematurely, knowing that they function according to their own version of the quarterly report, presumably constrained by the necessity of elections, disappointingly I heard a roaring silence. The short version is that in lieu of a discussion about the impact of a dwindling jobs market on the little guy, here in the U.S. the party that has posed for generations as the defender of the oppressed and powerless, and assigned to itself the role of being conscience to the middle class, has in a very short, few years abdicated that throne and turned to spending its political capital purely on further dividing the middle class along existent fault lines (with a few recent fashionable add-ons). In no uncertain terms, the predictable populist awakening to the dismantling of our standard of living has become the enemy in a war being fought with the elected's weapon of choice: parseltongued misdirection. Far from being the protectors of equality, today's crop of politicians and their astroturf marionettes have little in common with the idealists who started the civil rights movement, and whose mission they claim to be completing. Rather, it seems, Western governments are in the pay of Masters who determined years ago that they will soon have no use for the existence of a manufacturing middle class that outnumbers them by magnitudes, the one fact of life that can give them the occasional sleepless night. Which brings me back to 'Childhood's End'. Back in the '60's and '70's it was one of the precious books, revered for the interplay between idealism, moral warning, and the hope that war and conflict could ultimately be nothing more than evolutionary growing pains. But today's children have little in common in their world view with the post war generation that saw in the new abundance the chance to right the world's wrongs on a scale never before seen. Instead, Generation Z, and it's heirs, come from a world where education and culture are knowingly controlled by ideologues who have switched loyalties from the poorest to the wealthiest of patrons while dispensing tried and true cliches as they play the Three Card Monte of Social Justice on us all. Also, X, Z, and beyond have have been conditioned more than the rest of us by the power of the Submit button. Customer service as dispensed by today's 3rd assistant peons ain't what it used to be. (Am I right?) I'm not so sure I'm comfortable with that book being in the hands of our posterity. And no, I don't advocate book burning or censorship of any kind, an ethic which currently seems to have the cooler heads among us at a disadvantage. ** ps: Gee, W-Wally, it seems like there's never a race of benevolent, superior alien beings around when you really need one.
