It's been a whole month!

I swear, I plan on making these posts more frequent.

The first of these works, Against the Fall of Night (AtFoN) is fairly short (more like a draft of the second), so I thought I'd also take notes on what got expanded, left out or added to The City and the Stars (TCatS). Overall, I really enjoyed this story. It felt simple and straightforward, and makes for pretty cozy reading.

Spoilers ahead!

More familiar ground

I've been reading through a list of speculative science fiction works, and as I've been going in chronological order, I feel like Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night and The City and the Stars are the first entries that fall into a more familiar sort of sci-fi, where religion is regarded as being out of place in an advanced society, a tool of manipulation and fear, something to be wary of. The religion-planting, mythos-designing Bene Geserit of the Dune series is one probable culmination of this sentiment.

The spooked populace

The first example of this is the people in the city of Diaspar, where Alvin (the main character) lives. They believe themselves to be the last bastion of humanity on Earth. Their isolation is explained through the threat of the Invaders, beings from outer space that robbed mankind of its galactic empire a billion years prior. This fear is myth in the sense that it does not correspond to any verifiable historical event. The technology that controls and preserves the city might as well be magic, since it's been ages since anyone understood how it works. The knowlege of its designers has been entirely lost to time.

The last remnants of mankind are refuged in a magical bubble (since no one understands how the city operates) against a mythical, demonic force (since no one actually remembers, and there are no historical records of, the Invaders). Thus, what was once the greatest scientific achievement of the race has degraded into a society of religious fear, a hyper-futuristic Dark Age.

Shalmirane

The keeper of Shalmirane, a mountain fortress said to have been the last line of defense against the Invaders at the Dawn of History (before Diaspar was closed to the world) is the last member of a cult led by a man know as The Master, who came to Earth shortly before the shuttering of Diaspar, amassing a following by preaching his faith and performing miracles. He was accompanied by a robot, who survives to meet Alvin. Both believer and robot are waiting for the “Great Ones”, whose return to Earth the Master prophesied before he died.

Alvin regards this belief as nonsense, since there is no proof that the Great Ones exist, and he pities these last two believers for the time they've wasted. He is the spirit of inquisitiveness in a world rendered barren by faith and tradition. He sneers in the face of myth and legend. Such is the role of science in this more modern science fiction.

Pre-cluttered

This novel shares one of the aspects that I really liked when reading The Book of the New Sun, and that motivated me to go through these earlier works: the clutter. Or rather, pre-clutter, things that by their obscurity now stand precariously on the edge of oblivion. As no one understands them anymore, no one could preserve or repair them if the need arose, and their purpose would be forgotten.

No one in Diaspar understands how the moving ways that convey its citizens work, or the manipulation of gravity that enables them to travel vertically without their passengers falling to their deaths. The same goes for telepathy, which is still used by people to communicate with machines. Telepathy between people (as opposed to the telepathic ordering about of machines) fell victim to this forgetfulness of the race, as Alvin discovers, upon venturing out of the city, that the inhabitants of nearby Lys have preserved this ability, and are all the more cohesive for it.

Only the governing Central Computer of Diaspar understands how the city is kept imperishable through the aeons, and even (in TCatS) how its inhabitants are disintegrated at the end of their long lives to emerge again, re-synthesized, thousands of years into the future. The day any of these systems stops working would mark the beginning of the city's end. It is not far-fetched to imagine that after this point, the ignorance of the populace about the technology that surrounds them would increase even further, until the very nature of their gadgets eludes them, like the sun dials (satellite antennas) in the Atrium of Time in The Book of the New Sun. They would then become proper clutter in the background of life.

Changes to the narrative

Of reproduction in Diaspar

People in Diaspar are immortal, with no need for sexual reproduction, as the population of any given moment could last indefinitely. However, people were occasionally born, as Alvin's father is seen to hold up his little son to see the cloud in the prologue to AtFoN. This changes in TCatS, where it is established that people are definitely sterile, and that while technically immortal, they decide to cut their own lives short by returning to the Hall of Creation, where their minds are reintegrated into the city's memory banks, and their bodies destroyed. The machines then spit them back out, after millennia, with newly synthesized bodies in their late teens. Thus, everyone in Diaspar has already had several dozen lives, each lasting about a thousand years.

This is where Alvin differs from the rest of Diaspar, in that he is the first person to have been born there for millions of years. Originally this meant natural birth, but in TCatS, where natural birth is no longer an option, it means he has never lived before. He is a freshly created personality. Whether he lay dormant in the city's memory banks since their construction, or whether he was created just before his body was synthesized, is anyone's guess.

What sets Alvin apart from the rest of the Diasparites is much more profound in the novel, since being a Unique, as they call the rare occurrence, means that he will never recall any past life, something that his peers start to do within a few years of walking out of the Hall of Creation. This also adds depth to his lack of fear towards the Outside. In the novella, this simply means that by genetic accident he is undaunted by the idea of leaving the city, whereas in the novel it is implied that his designers deliberately left this essential fear out of him.

From Keeper of the Records to Jester

The person who helps Alvin find the way out of Diaspar was originally a man called Rorden, who was in charge of the city's public records. He was replaced by the trickster Khedron, the city's Jester, whose periodic incarnations serve as a way of introducing variety into the otherwise stagnating life of the city. Where the Record Keepers of old had repeatedly helped those like Alvin escape the city, it was the first time Khedron did such a thing.

Holograms are more fun.

While Rorden simply asks the city's computer for help and receives a print-out with clues to how Alvin could escape, Khedron the Jester takes Alvin to a room where he can generate a hologram of the entire city at any point in time. By scanning through time to the earlist renditions of the city, they ultimately discover the old transport system under the tomb of Yarlan Zey, the city's chief architect.

The old man and the polyp

The last guardian of Shalmirane was originally an old man, the first that Alvin saw of such apparent age. In TCatS, he is replaced by an extraterrestrial polyp. In AtFoN, only the robots (there is only one robot in TCatS) were alive when The Master walked the Earth, but in TCatS the polyp had also accompanied the Master in his travels, or had at least followed him to Earth from the polyp's home planet. The polyp lived eternally by periodic disintegration into his constituent parts. His mind would release its hold on the little jellyfish-like creatures that formed his body, and he would cease to exist, only to come back together again by some mysterious force of nature, with his identity and memories intact.

Is that you, Yarlan Zey?

The fact that Alvin may have been dormant in the city's memory banks in TCatS allows for the possibility that he is in fact a copy of Yarlan Zey.

The taciturn robot

Alvin succeeds in taking a robot from Shalmirane back to Diaspar, in order to ask the Central Computer to make it talk to him, as his mind is locked by the Master's command. The Computer originally makes a copy of the robot without the lock, and that was that. In TCatS, a much more interesting approach was taken. The robot's command from the Master had been not to talk to anyone until the return of the “Great Ones”, so the Central Computer interfaced with the robot in such a way that it could generate a simulation of what the robot thought the return of the “Great Ones” would look like, thus bypassing the lock and freeing the robot's memories.

You're only tough in your small town

Human beings are impervious to disease in both works, but in TCatS it is suggested that this may only apply to terrestrial pathogens, as we see Hilvar (called Theon in AtFoN) explaining the concepts of bacteria, fungi, and viruses as he advises Alvin not to venture out onto a planet that's particularly rife with strange plant life.

Planet-hopping

The pure consciousness, Vanamonde, originally finds Alvin and his companion from Lys on the first planet that they land on when they reach the constellation of the Seven Suns, whereas in TCatS they try several planets before being overtaken by this being with no anchorage in time and space.

Things that were added in The City and the Stars

A love [dis]interest

Alystra has been Alvin's lover for some time at the point the story takes place. Alvin, however, shows a strange disinterest, as he feels nothing for her. It is expected of the youths in Diaspar to pursue sexual relationships with various partners, but that doesn't quite do it for Alvin. Later on, upon encountering children in Lys, he realizes that what's missing from relationships in Diaspar is love and the prospect of reproduction, once the ultimate goal of sex, and that Diaspar doesn't realize the price it has paid to achieve immortality.

You can open your own door, sweetheart.

The author makes it a point that, since true equality between the sexes had been achieved in Diaspar, there was no more need for chivalry or any preferential treatment towards either sex. When Alvin gives Alystra his coat in the air vent at the Tower of Loranne, it is out of pure sympathy, and she would have done the same, had the roles been reversed.

No sleep till Brooklyn

The citizens of Diaspar never sleep. It is suggested that this may actually depend on a sedentary lifestyle, since Alvin does sleep after trekking through the forests of Lys.

No teeth?

Being born artificially, people in Diaspar have deviated a bit from Nature's original. Some changes include internally stored genitals that emerge only when needed, and apparently a lack of teeth, nails, the navel, and any body hair from the neck down. This makes for a weird visual, especially the absence of teeth and nails, since people in Diaspar do eat, and I would imagine that being able to scratch any surface would still be convenient in day-to-day life.

Not-so-eternal sunshine

Diaspar remains forever sunlit, naturally by day and artificially by night, except for a “rare and unpredictable obscuration” that is sometimes observed over its central park. This is perhaps suggesting that there is in fact moisture in the air outside the city, and that clouds for occasionally over its dome.

The Sagas

Entertainment in Diaspar had to be well planned for, in order to keeps its millions of citizens occupied for the rest of eternity, so the designers of the city created the Sagas, a series of perfectly immersive simulations that function as videogames for the youths of Diaspar.

Fake it till you make it!

In the end it is through the Sagas that the agoraphobia of the Diasparites is cured. We see Jeserac, Alvin's old teacher, being put through a simulation where he is accompanied out of the city by its designer, Yarlan Zey. Zey reasons through the motives of the city's founders in implanting the fear of the outside in the population, hoping that by understanding his fears, Jeserac will be able to exist outside of Diaspar. The experiment succeeds, and Jeserac wakes up to find himself in Lys, unafraid.

We'll blast you into the next millennium, boy!

Although there is no violence or crime in Diaspar, the need for punishment does arise from time to time, in which cases, the culprit is submitted to “the only penalty that Diaspar could impose—that of being banished into the future before their current incarnation had ended”. Imagine pissing people off to the point where they decide to feed you back into the machine and deal with you whenever it decides to spit you back out.

Are you really here?

The people of Diaspar often meet each other through holographic projections so life-like that it is considered rude for first meetings, as one party might be completely unaware that the other is not there in person.

BtrFS really is the future.

Diaspar's memory banks are said to exist in triplicate, so that if a portion of the data becomes corrupted in one unit, the other two enable the system to correct it. This is reminiscent of modern-day self-healing file systems.

A ride through cosmic history

Note: The universe of Star Maker is the same as that of Last and First Men, which I wrote about in a previous post

Star Maker is one of the most wildly imaginative science-fiction books I've read, which is impressive, considering it was published almost a century ago. It gives free rein to evolutionary speculation and delivers entire worlds of fantastic alien creatures. It features interstellar travel that sounds just like every faster-than-light jump from every space epic in modern cinema, with stars becoming rods of light and everything. These elements are not really what the story is about, though. At its core, Star Maker is about the evolution of the human spirit, and its yearning for its creator.

Spoilers from this point on!

The beginning

The narrative starts on an English field, where the narrator contemplates his own little life compared to the immensity of the cosmos, and wonders what it's all for. He looks at a star, and a strange feeling of awe and worship grips him.

Yet what, what could thus be signified? Intellect, peering beyond the star, discovered no Star Maker, but only darkness; no Love, no Power even, but only Nothing. And yet the heart praised.

The narrator is then lifted as a disembodied mind into outer space. What follows is an account of the many planets with human-like species the narrator visits, and how he recruits minds from each planet, who join him in a quest to aggregate as much vital experience as they can, to integrate into an ever-growing group mind. It becomes that the reason they are doing this is to grow enough, spiritually and mentally, to come face-to-face with the Star Maker.

Spiritual crisis!

The first Earth-like world that the narrator visits finds itself facing problems almost identical to the ones that society was facing in the early 20th century. By almost identical, I mean that aside from their biological differences, the society of this Other Earth is a copy of ours in the early 20th century, complete with Jews and pogroms.

In past times the bitter-sweet race had earned a reputation of cunning and self-seeking, and had been periodically massacred by its less intelligent neighbors.

Industrialism was at odds with humanity's well-being, workers were exploited by an insatiable class of capitalists, despots were rising to power, etc.

The reason why the narrator lands on this particular planet first, as he later realizes, is because of this similarity of social unease. He was drawn to a world at a similar stage of social and spiritual progress.

Are we the Other Men?

At this point the book makes me wonder whether humanity has a chance of overcoming the societal evils it faces. Tough I suspect every age may see itself reflected in the first pages of this book, that is all the more reason to think we are inescapably trapped in the cycle of growth and decay the narrator describes. The Other Men (so the narrator dubs them) are similar to us in every aspect. They share our proclivities and vices, the descriptions of which seem almost prophetic of our modern era.

The radio

The Other Men indulged in fantasies transmitted to them via radio waves, and eventually the technology was developed to immerse the listener in a complete sensory environment to supplant reality. There was talk of achieving a state where every task necessary for sustenance would be automated, and every individual would be free to live out an ideal life without ever disconnecting from his radio receiver.

Although the author's imagination is molded by the technology of his time, it doesn't require an absurd leap to think this scenario is what we could be heading towards with the Internet. Technology seems to be heading in a direction that will ultimately isolate us, with less and less of our daily lives requiring interaction with others. Meta's metaverse, where people would work and play with digital assets in their homes, comes to mind. There's no cashier at the fast food joint or the grocery store anymore, your food is drone-delivered, etc.

The radio denouncers

A compounding problem faced by the Other Men was the appearance of cults that denounced the technology that would submerge the world in idiot quiescence, which in theory was a good intention. However, these cults went on to denounce science entirely, and espouse a barbarian ideal. The unscientific man became desirable, and countries where this became mainstream were soon thrown into disarray, as technological progress and understanding stagnated and regressed.

We can draw some paralells to our current time. Social media has amplified the voices of climate change deniers, flat-earthers, conspiracy theorists, etc. Men idolize influencers who appeal to their stunted and repressed masculinity, and pressure them to prove themselves in ways that are ultimately detrimental to them.

The society of the Other Men is appreciably sick, and it's damning that so many paralells could be drawn between us and them, even after leaving the crises of our 20th century behind.They seem to be going in one of two directions: on the one hand, abandonment of reality for a Matrix-like existence; on the other, enshrinement of barbarity and eventual decay into inhumanity.

The crisis repeats itself

Before our narrator moves on, it is hinted that the Other Men have reached this crisis of the spirit many times before, but that this may be the last, as the atmosphere is slowly escaping the planet (which is a phenomenon the author imagines as common throughout the book), and the next generations will be starved of oxygen and die.

This makes me wonder if we will share a similar fate (although I don't think atmospheric depletion is something we have to worry about.). Has the polarization caused by social media ushered in an age of spiritual decay? Will subsequent generations be tasked with lifting us once again from ignorance? Will we oscillate between barbarity and civilization until we run out of the means to do so?

Redemption and advancement of the Human Spirit

Some civilizations, a handful out of thousands, manage to reach this spiritual crisis and push through. On the other side of it lies planetary government, followed by telepathic communion. The telepathically united world turns its attention to other planets, until interstellar travel is achieved. Little by little, entire sectors of a galaxy come together. This process is not without its pitfalls, however. Some civilizations are overcome by a fever of conquest, and galactic conflict ensues, only to be curbed by the action of more highly evolved species.

Eventually a galactic telepathic hive mind is achieved, which seeks to incorporate within itself other spiritually awakened galaxies, until at the zenith of spiritual development, the cosmos itself has one mind, and it is this awakened cosmos that finally comes face-to-face with the Star Maker.

In this supreme moment, intense joy is followed by the harrowing realization that the cosmos is one in an innumerable series of creations, and is in fact neither near the beginning nor the end of the series. Our universe is more refined than the Star Maker's first experiments, but it is also infinitely less complex than subsequent creations. Furthermore, the cosmic mind is apalled at the cruelty in the Star Maker, who in many of his works deliberately sets his creations up for torment. It is shocked to find that more spiritually refined universes harbored beings that suffered more keenly than we can understand.

I caught echoes not merely of joys unspeakable, but of griefs inconsolable. For some of these ultimate beings not only suffered, but suffered in darkness. Though gifted with full power of insight, their power was barren. The vision was withheld from them. They suffered as lesser spirits would never suffer.

In the end (which is not really the end, since the Star Maker ultimately lives outside our experience of time) the perfect cosmos awakens and looks at its creator, and the Star Maker is satisfied with his work.

Last thoughts

This was a great read, and a great follow-up to Last and First Men. The theme that most appeals to me is the concept of worship even through tragedy and despair. When the awakened cosmos sees that there is nothing particularly special about it in relation to all the other universes, when faced with the Star Maker's delight in the suffering of its creatures, it recoils in horror. And yet it is moved to worship!

This is seen all through the book, from the Other Men doomed to strife, to more awakened species who accept their demise with angelic grace. Whatever the Star Maker designs is good.

Oh, Star Maker, even if you destroy me, I must praise you. Even if you torture my dearest. Even if you torment and waste all your lovely worlds, the little figments of your imagination, yet I must praise you. For if you do so, it must be right. In me it would be wrong, but in you it must be right.

Huge let-down

William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land sounded very promising, especially when the wiki page stated it had received praise from Lovecraft. I expected cosmic horror on a level close to the Cthulu mythos. Now I wonder if the book itself was some sort of joke or satire that Lovecraft was in on, maybe some sort of long-winded humor that I didn't catch as a modern reader, like the way Gulliver's Travels was a satire of adventure novels.

The supernatural

The supernatural elements of horror in the novel seem to be begging to be better fleshed out. The Night Land is filled with interesting sketches, from the presumably once-human beasts and giants that roam around its lava pits, to the extra-dimensional, Lovecraftian horrors that come through “windows” in the sky.

A sound of laughter can be heard from the mysterious Northeast; a demonic, huddled giant creeps closer to the last habitation of mankind at an imperceptibly slow rate; on a hill to the North is the House of Silence, whence no one has ever returned; a single road crosses the land, on which “The Silent Ones” walk, like lethal pilgrims on one final crossing.

Each of these concepts, and others I haven't mentioned, feels like it's calling out to be investigated. Yet they are overshadowed and passed over in favor of a love quest that quickly becomes a great bore.

The love story

The love story element seems overly simplistic, a plot device to drive the protagonist onward in his quest. The protagonist's relationship to Lady Mirdath, and later on with her post-cataclysmic incarnation, Naani, is completely one-dimensional and can be summed up as “You know, I loved her. You'll understand if you've ever loved!”

This in itself is not the problem, however. The problem is that for something so superficial and underdeveloped, it occupies a preposterous amount of the book. The reader is presented ad nauseam with nearly identical scenes of affection, where no real depth of emotion is ever probed. The number of paragraphs that I would have snipped simply because they included the phrase: “…for I loved her so utter.” is ridiculous.

There's also the weirdness of his relationship to this young woman, which I think dips a toe in Buffalo Bill territory, even by early 20th centry standards. The narrator never misses the opportunity, after gracing us with the hundredth description of how they slept together (WITHOUT SEX!!!! Let that be clear!!!), to tell us how he is both lover and father figure to this girl, and how she is likewise lover and mother to him. I generally try to keep an open mind when reading stories from relatively long ago. You know, I try to think that some expressions may not have carried the weight or meaning they do now, and how the author can't help but be a product of his times, etc. But I've read my share of old-timey fiction and I don't remember coming across a dynamic quite like this one. I mean, the narrator physically disciplines this girl with a tree branch at one point. It's just weird.

The repetition

The final nail in this novel's coffin is the way it begs for an editor. I think this book today would sensibly be reduced at least in half by any half-competent editor who's earnest about selling it at all. As mentioned above, the author has no qualms about telling you for the seventeenth time in the same chapter how much he loved his reincarnated lover, or how he strove not to hurt her with his armour when hugging her, and a hundred other little situations that honestly make the entire book sound like a dorky teenager jerking off to a self-insertion fanfic in his man-cave.

What bothered me the most while reading this novel, though, wasn't the infantile conception of love depicted by Hodgson, but what its constant presence implied: pages taken away from the more interesting elements of the story. It's fine if the author likes to mention things and then leave them completely to the reader's imagination; tell me there are rifts in the sky that untold horrors come through, then move on and leave me to wonder whether they have tentacles. That's charming, in its own way. What I don't like is that instead of delving into the horrors that inhabit the Night Land, we get to sit and fester with this insipid, discount love story for the whole ride. I'm okay with not getting more than a sip of wine, but did you really have to give me a gallon of piss instead?

Save yourself the displeasure.

All in all, even though the landscape of the Night Land is rife with juicy terrors that really caught my interest, I couldn't in good faith reccommend it. The only way I would give it another read is if someone went in there and hacked off all the stale love story elements and all its tiresome repetition, pretty much cutting the whole thing in half, but at that point you might as well not bother with it. It's sad, I really think it had some potential.

Very pleasant read

This book was surprisingly refreshing to read. It was good, comfy science fiction. Here's what I found most noteworthy. Spoilers ahead!

The Sacred Black Men

The story of the First Men (our species) goes from the end of WW1 to their extinction a few thousand years later. It is here that the author goes into some wild speculation that probably would not be kindly received by today's audience. Namely, he envisions a future in which the classical races have mixed to such a degree that it's a rare occurrence for a person to be born with a “pure” phenotype, looking distinctly White, Asian, Black, etc.

The author envisions a ritual in which a White woman dances with a Black man in front of an audience. The dance increases in fervor and culminates in the ritual rape of the woman. The crowd, driven into a frenzy, gives chase to the Black man. If he is caught, he is torn to pieces; if he reaches sanctuary, he becomes sacred, untouchable for the rest of his life.

This bit was quite a ride to read, as a modern reader, with modern qualms. However, I understand how it could occur to someone. If Suzanne Collins was supposedly inspired to write Hunger Games after watching the Olympics and a commercial showing starving children, it would not be a stretch that Olaf Stapledon would be inspired to turn real-life lynchings into a cultural practice of his globalised First Men. I would think that at some point, someone would do the same with school shootings.

The Martians

I don't think I've ever heard of sentient clouds before, so I was pleasantly surprised by the Martians and thought it was quite creative. The Martians are an interconnected mesh of microorganisms suspended in the air, forming a cloud. Within each cloud are sub-clouds of specialized cells that serve as the cloud's organs. They are coordinated via radiofrequency, to which the cells have become sensitized. By pooling together certain types of cells, the Martians can generate organs on the fly, like bigger and better eyes capable of telescopic observation of space (which is how they noticed Earth lighting up when the First Men fucked around with nuclear energy).

Nuclear energy

It's interesting to note that Stapledon, having published the book before the creation of the atomic bomb, takes this power away from the First Men until the very end of their run. Having been discovered amid international tensions, it is decided by a group of scientists that mankind is not ready for such technology. The weapon (for as such it was first conceived), is destroyed, and the scientist responsible for the breakthrough commits suicide.

Thousands of years later, when all the oil has long run dry, nuclear energy is rediscovered and promptly leads to a mass extinction event, from which eventually the Second men arise.

It is a common theme throughout the story for scientists to make the choices that ultimately save Man from an early extinction. Stapledon even shows the folly of going against scientific thought in the outcome of the schism between a group of survivors from the planetary disaster that wiped out most of the First Men. While the scientifically minded choose to stay in an arctic refuge to repopulate the Earth, the stubborn among them insist in venturing out to find other places to settle down. The former group eventually give rise to the Second Men; the second group devolve into savagery and inhumanity.

Evolutionary tragedy

Stapledon gives us a sense of tragedy in evolution and the struggle of life through both the Martians and the Second men.

The Second Men, though a nobler race by far than the First Men, are ultimately consumed with despair and fall into inaction when faced with their racial doom. Their very sensitivity and empathetic nature saps their vigour and will to survive against the remnants of the Martian microorganisms on Earth, which have become a deadly plague.

The Martians, though they have developed a group mind, cannot reap the benefits of such unity, cannot become more than the sum of their individual parts. Thus they ultimately failed to conquer Earth, as the experiences of individuals separated from the mother cloud on Mars only caused irreconcilable internal strife.

In both species, the capacities with which they were equipped, which should've coalesced into further action, were simply not enough. There was something tragically missing.

The Fifth Men, the Stoics

The Fifth Men were born of Science's admission that pure reason is not enough to make a species advance beyond itself. Having exterminated all life on Earth, including their creators, the purely intellectual Fourth Men, the “super brains”, now set about designing a species of human that would possess as much of their own raw intellectual capacity as possible, but also the emotional insight that they lacked.

Thus were born the Fifth Men, intellectually brilliant, but also sensitive to the sublimity of life. Endowed with telepathy, as the Fourth Men devised a way to combine the radio-sensitive Martian cells with human brain tissue, this new species achieved a level of mutual understanding and communal cohesion never before seen on the planet.

The Fifth Men achieved a dispassionate, not apathetic, outlook on life that reminds me very much of the Stoic ideal. It was this detachment that enabled them to see the beauty in everything, both bad and good. They were able to accept whatever fate befell them as part of a cohesive universal whole, appropriate in the cosmic order of things. It was also this detachment that enabled them to accept their doom and make the necessary preparations when the time came for humanity to abandon its birth planet and venture out in search of another home, thus furthering the existence of sentience in the universe.

The Eighteenth Men

The story reaches its end by explaining why the contents of the book are being transmitted all the way back through time to the First Men. The Eighteenth Men are exerting their influence on the course of history by transtemporally communicating their ideas to mankind, steering their responses to events. They are doing this because they have done it, in the sense that every turning point where an individual made an uncharacteristic choice (the First Men deciding the world wasn't ready for nukes, for example) was due to the mental influence from the future Eighteenth Men.

Just as the Fifth, the Eighteenth are facing extinction, this time on a galactic scale, and they intend to do two things: create a “dust” capable of traversing space and seeding life upon its arrival to a favorably conditioned planet in some other galaxy; and go back through time telepathically to admire and relive all of Man's past, exerting their influence when necessary.

Though the odds appear slim, the Eighteenth still hope that a suprahuman, universal consciousness will awaken before the End of Sentience, as they recognize throughout the fabric of Time an influence that cannot be attributed to themselves, something operating at a higher level, someone looking back through time in a still more distant future, beyond the present galactic extinction, perhaps beyond our space and time altogether.

I absolutely loved everything about this ending, with its subtle suggestion that humanity will meet (or become) God himself in the end. It was all just spectacularly imagined and very well developed.