[HN Gopher] The Star - Arthur C. Clarke (1967) [pdf]
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The Star - Arthur C. Clarke (1967) [pdf]
Author : Yhippa
Score : 300 points
Date : 2023-12-25 03:08 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sites.uni.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (sites.uni.edu)
| wisemang wrote:
| Quick read. Excellent Christmas content. Thank you for submitting
| @Yhippa
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| Hugo Award winner in 1956. Brilliant story-craft.
|
| This story was first published in 1955 and was collected in
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Sky
|
| The story was reprinted in the author's own collection of his
| favourite work:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God_...
| thrwyexecbrain wrote:
| The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is a great resource
| for publication details of fiction stories. Here is the entry
| for The Star: https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?40913
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| Merry Christmas
|
| Christus natus est
|
| O Khristos gennietai
|
| Khristos razhdaetsia
|
| hmshykh nvld
|
| bn llh ywld lywm
| talonx wrote:
| Merry Christmas
|
| shubh br'din
|
| shubh bdd'din
|
| krisms kii bdhaaii
|
| krisms shubhaakaaNksslu
|
| I'm guessing you wrote in the languages you know (I did).
| antman wrote:
| Which languages are these? Especially the two that look
| similar
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Bangla and... dunno the other one (Assamese?)
| chrismorgan wrote:
| English, Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Telugu.
|
| The first, I expect requires no explanation!
|
| The second and third are in the Bengali script, which is
| used primarily by Bengali and Assamese--but the letter r'
| is no longer used in Bengali.
|
| The fourth is in the Devanagari script, which is used by
| many languages, but Hindi is the biggest one by far.
| (Second comes Marathi at about 1/4 the native speakers,
| then Bhojpuri.)
|
| The fifth is in the Telugu script which is primarily used
| by the Telugu language.
|
| (Sources: personal knowledge of Bengali and Telugu and
| recognition of Devanagari, as an Australian who's spent a
| lot of time in India, mostly in Telangana and West Bengal;
| and affirmation by Google Translate auto-detection of each
| one in turn, though that's not very reliable as you'll
| easily see if you try just pasting the whole lot in, and
| observe how it decides it's Telugu, but still happily
| translates the others as "Merry Christmas"... except the
| Assamese, which it translates as "happy birthday". Google
| Translate makes _huge_ gaffes with Indic languages even if
| you identify the language correctly, and it just gets worse
| when it's trying to translate it from a different
| language.)
| talonx wrote:
| It's technically the "Bengali-Assamese script". There is
| a difference of 3 letters between the written forms of
| these two languages, including the one you pointed out.
|
| Google translate added Assamese recently, that might
| explain the gaffes.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| If you want to be technical, you can call it Eastern
| Nagari. In practice, the name "Bengali-Assamese script"
| doesn't seem to be used outside of Wikipedia and adjacent
| projects: it's overwhelmingly called the Bengali script,
| with Assamese materials calling it the Assamese script.
| The fact that there are almost 20x as many speakers of
| Bengali as there are of Assamese probably contributes to
| this. (There's also Manipuri, but it's smaller still.) I
| find references to some ISO decision from June 2018 to
| recommend renaming the Bengali script to Bengali/Assamese
| script in Unicode (less than they were asking for, which
| was separate encoding due to some pronunciation
| differences), but I can't see that this has happened. But
| I'm not familiar with the matter.
|
| Google Translate has major gaffes in _many_ of its less
| common languages. This is nothing particular about
| Assamese.
| talonx wrote:
| I just tried "shubh br'din" and Google translated it
| correctly as Assamese. Weird.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| gaudete!
| Tistron wrote:
| God jul
|
| Gledileg jol
|
| Glaedelig jul
|
| Frohliche Weihnachten
| talonx wrote:
| I'm no linguist but even I could tell that the first 3 (which
| Google tells me are Norwegian, Icelandic and Danish) belong
| to the same language family.
| Sharlin wrote:
| "Good yule" in English ;)
|
| ----
|
| "God jul" is either/both Norwegian and Swedish. The two
| languages are mostly mutually intelligible; written Danish
| is as well but Swedes and Norwegians usually find Danish
| pronunciation... not so easy to comprehend.
|
| With Icelandic there's already much more guesswork and
| expertise required, mostly because the language has changed
| little since the days of Old Norse, and has not undergone
| grammatical simplification or adoption of (mostly Germanic,
| Romance) loanwords nearly to the same degree as the others.
| talonx wrote:
| Fascinating, thanks.
| Tistron wrote:
| Yeah. My mom is Icelandic and I know enough Icelandic to
| get by. My father is Swedish and I grew up in Sweden. The
| last 5ish years I lived in Denmark and speak the language
| enough that they understand me, and I understand it
| pretty well.
|
| I went to a church with my girlfriend's family the other
| day (by Stockholm, Sweden) and there was a 1000 year old
| rune stone, which was pretty much just Icelandic (https:/
| /sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upplands_runinskrifter_214).
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The Star - Arthur C. Clarke (1967) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29680799 - Dec 2021 (44
| comments)
| pkoird wrote:
| Also check out The Nine Billion Names of God by the same writer.
|
| https://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/WRIT510/readings/The%20...
| cwillu wrote:
| And by a different author, but a similar theme:
| https://unsongbook.com
| bitwize wrote:
| I came across Unsong here on Hackernews, very shortly after
| running across a form of online (mainly TikTok) idiocy called
| Grabovoy codes, which are strings of numbers that supposedly
| amplify the Law of Attraction, each string thought to be a
| command or "cheat code" instructing the universe to give the
| user what they want. They were created by a scam artist and
| convicted criminal called Grigory Grabovoy... who is also an
| anti-Semite.
|
| I thought, none of this is a coincidence because nothing is a
| coincidence.
| bear141 wrote:
| Coincidences exist. Coincidences are real. Saying that
| there are no coincidences stops inquiry. Challenging the
| statement forces us to make sense of its ambiguity and
| explore our potential involvement. You can choose the
| random perspective and with a wave of a mental hand,
| dismiss most coincidences as not worth further attention.
| Or, you can seek out their possible personal implications
| and make life into an adventure of discovery both about
| yourself and the world around you. As you explore, you may
| uncover the latent abilities hidden within you.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The last sentence in the parent comment was a reference
| to UNSONG.
| tomrod wrote:
| "Coincidence" is defined as simultaneously occurring, so
| coincidences definitely exist. Causal relationships may
| not be casually inferred, however.
| jedrek wrote:
| Coincidences exist because human brains are absolutely
| amazing at finding patterns, wether they actually exist or
| not.
| zakki wrote:
| Intrigued by the title, Moslems read The 99 names of God.
| elnatro wrote:
| Have anybody tried to replicate that machine with actual code?
| Would it be possible?
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| I'm in metered internet land here at my mom's so I won't look
| for the link, but there's a pretty decent short film version of
| this (The 9 Billion Names of God) on Youtube.
| sohkamyung wrote:
| YouTube link to that short film [
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtvS9UXTsPI ]
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| The story is well spun, no doubt! I first encountered it in the
| 1990s -- some reposted USENET content (iirc), in one form or
| another, while I was at university.
|
| Then, and now, I thought an interesting retelling could involve
| the protagonists discovering a civilization (Type II+) that had
| learned to tap the energy of their star and (eventually)
| inadvertently triggered a supernova, though that fate took some
| time to unfold and so various laments were left behind on their
| planet's surface.
|
| Upon realization of the above, the principal protagonist (Jesuit
| priest) recollects about his crews' wonderment that one
| civilization's end could, across light years, so precisely signal
| monumental changes in another. Unanswered questions are raised as
| to Redemption and Doom. The story ends with the principal
| protagonist having made a 30-year Ignatian retreat and marveling
| that, among all the myriad unanswered questions, Earth wheat and
| grapes were immediately cultivable in the alien soil, such that
| the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was able to be offered
| uninterruptedly from the day they arrived to the present.
| marstall wrote:
| literally the first words ... "All rights reserved; not to be
| reprinted without permission of the author" and "copyright Arthur
| C Clarke" - so why share it here?
| nine_k wrote:
| Maybe this copy is put out with a permission?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Exactly! From what I can tell, there is no way to tell the
| actually copyright or licensing status of anything you find
| on the internet, you can only guess.
| pjbeam wrote:
| Seems like the University of Northern Iowa's concern, no?
| whythre wrote:
| Better call the police. Seriously though, Clark died in 2008;
| it isn't like he is being victimized.
| bear141 wrote:
| Thank you for your vigilance, Hall Monitor.
| pb060 wrote:
| I know you shouldn't comment about votes, but why downvotes?
| You might be against copyright in certain cases but
| technically, if not legally, the point holds.
| chernevik wrote:
| Because downvotes are heavily used to say "I don't like this"
| rather than "this is not relevant".
|
| I've complained to HN about this and proposed solutions. They
| don't care.
| layer8 wrote:
| The comment seems to assume that most everyone would agree
| that such sharing of the link should not be taking place due
| to copyright reasons. That is an absurd assumption to make,
| to everyone who has been around the internet for a bit.
|
| It would be different if the commenter would be trying to
| make an actual, intelligently argued case why the link
| shouldn't be shared in this instance.
|
| That being said, one could instead link to https://web.archiv
| e.org/web/20080718084442/http://lucis.net/..., where the
| story is "reprinted by permisssion".
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| My ouji board said Arthur was cool with it
| cipheredStones wrote:
| Somehow I've known about supernovas for many years without
| realizing that the word and concept "nova" exists as well. It's
| from the Latin for "new": the appearance of what seems to be a
| new star, because the star going nova brightened enough to become
| visible from Earth. (It got picked up from Tycho Brahe describing
| what we'd now call a supernova, though.)
|
| The mechanism for non-super novas is very interesting: a white
| dwarf in a binary star system steals hydrogen from the other
| star, then heats it until it starts to fuse, which blows it all
| off into space!
| thrwyexecbrain wrote:
| I was about to comment that the correct plural form of nova is
| novae, but it looks like dictionaries say that both novae and
| novas are correct. The irregular case does seem to predominate
| according to google ngram viewer.
| Sharlin wrote:
| As far as I know, it's always valid, and perhaps even
| preferable, to use the regular -s plural with any Latin
| loanword, after all they're English words now even if
| borrowed from another language. Using the original Latin
| plural forms in casual contexts feels a bit pretentious,
| especially when it's not even the _correct_ form, like
| "octopi".
| steve1977 wrote:
| Or words like status, where the correct plural would be
| status, i.e. the same word but a long "u".
| mannykannot wrote:
| It is often the case that as the regular case increases in
| frequency, it becomes accepted as an alternative. It seems
| that lexicologists these days are less likely than formerly
| to insist that the philological roots of a word are the only
| determinant of correct spelling.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| A lovely story. Many Clarke novels strike me as technologically
| wonderful but emotionally dry; not this one.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| Grinch take: I hated the ending. (I get the feeling that that's
| the part everyone else loves.) It's clever in the way that puns
| are clever, which provokes a flash of intellectual recognition
| ("I see what you did there") but kills any emotional response --
| in me, at least.
|
| I think a better way to end it would have been for Dr. Chandler
| or one of the other non-believers, moved by the scale of the
| event, to have a change of heart about religion. Perhaps not all
| the way. Perhaps he comes to the protagonist on the observation
| deck, his face now uncertain, and with difficulty asks what made
| the protagonist start to believe. The protag is faced with trying
| to console this man plainly in need of spiritual support --
| perhaps while at the same time feeling his own religious
| conviction slip away.
| tralarpa wrote:
| I was expecting that at the end it would turn out that the
| records of the lost civilization are full of symbols of a
| certain religion, let's say the "Om" sign or whatever, and that
| the priest would then realize: "Oh shit, religion XYZ _was_
| right all the time " or something like that.
|
| Actually, I like my ending better :)
|
| I guess we had to wait till Douglas Adams for such absurdities.
| Aeglaecia wrote:
| each to their own , to me this exemplifies the twist ending ,
| positioning audiences to expect the opposite , clarke did
| brilliantly to trigger both aha and emotional response , such
| creativity wow
| signal11 wrote:
| In a lot of "twist ending" short stories (a lot of good SF
| stories fall into this bucket) the key is to leave things
| unsaid and let the reader wrestle with the ending and its
| implications, which is what this is doing.
|
| It's a "less is more" strategy that works for many people, but
| of course every reader is unique and it might not work for you
| :)
| throwaway8877 wrote:
| Sorry, but I don't think Clark was into creating warm feelings
| in people who are into nonsense.
|
| "He who built the Universe can destroy it when He chooses. It
| is arrogance--it is perilously near blasphemy--for us to say
| what He may or may not."
| gedy wrote:
| You remind me a bit of the boy (Cory Fieldman) asking "And then
| what happens?" in the movie "Stand By Me"
| mannykannot wrote:
| The thing that gives this story a gravitas beyond that of
| others in a similar vein - such as 'The Nine Billion Names of
| God' - is that it brings to the fore an important
| theological/philosophical issue: the 'problem of evil'. A great
| deal has been said and written about it over the millennia,
| often in abstract, abstruse and sometimes tendentious terms,
| but this story cuts to the heart of the matter. If it makes
| some readers uncomfortable, it is working.
| paulddraper wrote:
| It was a good twist.
|
| I also think yours would have been a good twist.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| If you enjoyed this, and you enjoy video games, you _really_
| should try Outer Wilds. It 's in the same emotional spirit, and
| an absolutely fantastic game. Go in completely blind, don't read
| anything or watch any videos, since this is a game about gaining
| knowledge and can only be played once.
| sl-1 wrote:
| I agree, it is probably the best narrative experience I have
| had with a video game. And easily ruined by spoilers.
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| An absolute masterpiece
| block_dagger wrote:
| I hear the banjo picking when all is silent and dark.
| mock-possum wrote:
| There just aren't any other games like it. At first you're
| like, oh, okay, this is kind of fun but I don't see what's so-
| and then OH
|
| you really just need to make it though the first thirty
| minutes, maybe an hour or so, before you crack the game open
| and realize what it is you're playing - and then it only gets
| better from there.
| poncho_romero wrote:
| Along these same lines, I would recommend _The Sparrow_ by Mary
| Doria Russell. An interesting story about religion meeting
| extraterrestrial life, and the implications thereof. Plus the
| dialogue, characters, and world building are wonderful!
| chambers wrote:
| See the TV Adaptation
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_(The_Twilight_Zone) for a
| different ending, and in my opinion, less edgy ending:
|
| > While Clarke's story ended with the priest in despair after the
| revelation that the alien civilization had perished in order to
| light "the Christmas star," the TV episode added an epitaph by
| the aliens, revealing their acceptance of their place in the
| universe. Brennert later commented that "Over the years I've
| taken a little bit of heat from certain fans in the science
| fiction community for changing the ending of this story. I
| actually maintain that the ending as it is in this episode is
| implicit in the story and is not really at odds with the kind of
| metaphysical work that Clarke did in Childhood's End."[1]
| elnatro wrote:
| As some other comments have already said. This looks like an edgy
| story.
|
| I don't think there was a star in Bethelem at all, most of the
| Bible is metaphorical, and a story of the of a culture, society,
| and religion.
|
| The Bible cannot be interpreted as a historical book, but a faith
| one.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| cf. _Divino afflante Spiritu_ (1943)
|
| https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/docum...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divino_afflante_Spiritu
| elnatro wrote:
| Not sure how this is related to saying that not all content
| in the Bible is 100% true content.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| Oh, well it is, quite.
| haunter wrote:
| > The Bible cannot be interpreted as a historical book
|
| It certainly can to some extent because there are enough 3rd
| party sources about Jesus.
|
| > Today scholars in the field agree that a Jewish man called
| Jesus of Nazareth did exist in Palestine in the 1st century CE,
| on whose life and teachings Christianity was founded.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
| elnatro wrote:
| I'm not saying Jesus cannot had existed. I'm saying that many
| events in the book are actually cathechetical content and not
| real events.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I think what you're saying above is somewhat misleading when
| the Wikipedia article you cite also says, "only two key
| events of Jesus's life are widely accepted as historical,
| namely his baptism, and his crucifixion (commonly dated to 30
| or 33 CE)"
|
| That's like saying Forrest Gump is historical because Vietnam
| is a thing that happened, and JFK was president.
| chernevik wrote:
| It isn't as clever as it thinks.
|
| If an omnipotent God could arrange such an explosion, and we
| presume Him loving of all sentient creatures, He could easily
| arrange His explosion to avoid harming His creatures. Such a
| story wouldn't happen in the first place.
|
| But what if He did? Anyone reading the Bible -- as certainly a
| Jesuit would have -- knows there is no theological requirement in
| Christianity that God value a life as humans value a life. "My
| ways are not your ways, says the Lord." St Paul is explicit that
| the notion that Pharaoh was created entirely for the
| demonstration of God's power by Moses does not contradict the
| justice of God. (Nor does he say Pharaoh was created for that
| purpose; he doesn't know, and treats the possibility as a
| hypothetical.)
|
| Nor need the civilization's members be created simply for some
| demonstration. Perhaps they suffered the judgement of Sodom and
| Gomorrah. Perhaps the nova was the End Of The World for _that_
| civilization, a component of its Second Coming, just as
| (Christians believe) our world will eventually experience.
| Genesis, Exodus, Paul, Revelations each provide precedents for
| such an apparent catastrophe. The priest can easily imagine any
| number of explanations consistent with his faith. (Indeed one
| might be the light of one world's closure illuminating the
| opening of another, reminiscent of the Greek's beacon signaling
| the fall of Troy in Aeschylus' "Agamemnon".)
|
| Whether we look at the story from God's end or the priest's, it
| doesn't make any sense.
|
| The reader doesn't need to _like_ any of those possibilities. The
| point is that the values by which we like or don't like anything
| are not necessarily the same as those of God. C.S. Lewis imagines
| a devil overseeing temptation during WW II saying "I am not in
| the least interested in knowing how many people in England have
| been killed by bombs. In what state of mind they died, I can
| learn from the office at this end. That they were going to die
| sometime, I knew already. Please keep your mind on your work."
| ("The Screwtape Letters".) For Lewis, death doesn't mean the same
| thing to God as it does to us.
|
| Still more, the Christian thinks the perspective by which we
| judge doesn't know all that He does. Many very clever people have
| pointed out that a super-intelligence will think differently than
| we do. Boethius argued (in the sixth century) that God's
| different experience of Time can explain the apparent
| contradictions of omniscience and free will. That lightweight
| Godel argued out that what is logically contradictory for us,
| trapped in sequential thought, can be resolvable by an infinite
| knowledge that is beyond sequence. More recently (and casually)
| Vernor Vinge posits (in "A Fire Upon The Deep") that the study of
| super artificial intelligences will be classified as "theology".
|
| And the reader doesn't even have to buy any of that. That's what
| tolerance is about, we're all free to form our opinions and
| arguments as we think best.
|
| But it is just ignorant to, well, ignore those opinions and
| arguments that we don't agree with.
|
| And it is remarkable how many supposedly intelligent, curious and
| tolerant people become so ignorant of what careful and
| intelligent people have thought when the topic is theology.
| paulddraper wrote:
| This isn't real story, you're overthinking it.
| ganzuul wrote:
| The parameter "life eternal" is rather strict. And what is a
| star but an engine of ascension?
| tetris11 wrote:
| > Would we have done as well, or would we have been too lost in
| our own misery to give thought to a future we could never see or
| share?
|
| Sobering words indeed
| ganzuul wrote:
| If you enjoy the topic of Jesus in Space, the Urantia Book might
| be to your liking.
| gbacon wrote:
| Anticipating social media in 1954: "Perhaps they only showed us
| the best, and one can hardly blame them."
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| Reformatted in epub for reading on mobile device.
|
| Enjoy and happy holidays!
|
| https://filebin.net/8nvuikvpbf64o5ec
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