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VII: The Chief End of Man
Nov. 20th, 2025 04:38 pmandrew_rilstone_feedPrevious Section
What on Earth or Uranus does Hugh Walters think he is doing?
I don’t think the God-talk can be written off as window dressing or plot machinery. You could write a perfectly good story about benevolent aliens without recourse to theology. First Contact? might work better if the Alien was an ambassador from a secular Galactic Federation, as opposed to the emissary of God Almighty. But Walters takes quite a lot of trouble to go through the religious arguments at a pace nine-year-olds will be able to keep up with. I think that the Supreme Being interests him in a way that fast than light tachyon gravity networks really don’t.
Could he be pushing back against Star Trek? The BBC's first run of the original series had come to an end in 1971. Gene Roddenbury’s humanist message was that you should always reject any being with theological pretensions. It is a far, far better thing to die in an atomic war or a plague than to acknowledge that Apollo has some claim over you. Perhaps this is why Chris Godfrey’s American friend makes the reckless decision to nuke the site from orbit? It’s exactly what James T Kirk would have done.
You can see why an Anglican writer of boys’ space-adventures might want to tell the kids that science and religion are not in conflict. But is Walters seeking to inject some spirituality into science — to say that the feelings we feel when we think of Jesus and the Angels could equally well be directed towards Aliens and flying saucers? Or is he trying to drag religion down to science’s level — by saying that all those Bible stories and Norse sagas have perfectly rational explanations?
The great attraction of Von Daniken is that he gives us permission to believe that the Bible is literally true. Ezekiel really did see a wheel in a wheel, way up in the middle of the air. A sweet chariot really did come for to carry Elijah home. But it does this at the cost of removing their specifically religious significance. The chariots of fire are really only very advanced aircraft. Angels' halos are really only space helmets. When Von Daniken asks “Was God an astronaut?” he means “Was God merely an astronaut?”
And that is the problem that Hugh Walters thinks he has solved. Advanced extraterrestrials are by definition closer to God than humans. God is the most advancedist extraterrestrial of all. If the Uranus Alien is literally an emissary of the Supreme Being, then he is as near to being an actual Angel as makes no difference. Moses and Gabriel were under-cover agents of the Supreme Being. So, presumably, was Gautama. It wouldn’t be difficult to fit J.C into the picture: maybe he’s literally the Supreme Being’s son. Or the Supreme Being travelling incognito.
Joyful all ye nations rise, God and Science reconciled.
Rev Beckwith’s God (in the Doctor Who book) is a deist demiurge whose job is to explain the complexity of the universe. Walters sees, correctly, that science has made an explanatory God redundant. In principle, you can understand how the universe works without recourse to a supernatural creator. But he also sees that a purely scientific world-view throws out the teleological star-baby with the explanatory bath-water. His Supreme Being doesn’t tell us how the Universe works, but what it is for: its purpose and objective. Rev Beckwith’s God is a moral force: he’s there to reassure us that the goodies will always beat the baddies in Episode Six. Walters’ Supreme Being is only indirectly moral. He certainly wants humans to be wise and sensible because if they blow themselves up they will stop evolving. But the Supreme Being doesn't specially want us to be good. The objective of evolution is to evolve. Walters' religion is the worship of progress per se. Walters stated several times that he wrote science fiction “to inspire the young people of today to be the scientists and technicians of tomorrow.” And it seems that this is the meaning of life: the whole purpose for which the universe was invented.
If Chris had not met the Alien, might he have decided that space-exploration was pointless and the human race might as well stagnate? After his memory was wiped, did he feel the urge to drop out of UNEXA and go and live in an arts-and-crafts commune? Walters’ has created a truly Anglican Supreme Being. He is the God Who Makes No Difference; the God who enjoins you to carry on doing exactly what you would have been doing in any case.
What on Earth or Uranus does Hugh Walters think he is doing?
I don’t think the God-talk can be written off as window dressing or plot machinery. You could write a perfectly good story about benevolent aliens without recourse to theology. First Contact? might work better if the Alien was an ambassador from a secular Galactic Federation, as opposed to the emissary of God Almighty. But Walters takes quite a lot of trouble to go through the religious arguments at a pace nine-year-olds will be able to keep up with. I think that the Supreme Being interests him in a way that fast than light tachyon gravity networks really don’t.
Could he be pushing back against Star Trek? The BBC's first run of the original series had come to an end in 1971. Gene Roddenbury’s humanist message was that you should always reject any being with theological pretensions. It is a far, far better thing to die in an atomic war or a plague than to acknowledge that Apollo has some claim over you. Perhaps this is why Chris Godfrey’s American friend makes the reckless decision to nuke the site from orbit? It’s exactly what James T Kirk would have done.
You can see why an Anglican writer of boys’ space-adventures might want to tell the kids that science and religion are not in conflict. But is Walters seeking to inject some spirituality into science — to say that the feelings we feel when we think of Jesus and the Angels could equally well be directed towards Aliens and flying saucers? Or is he trying to drag religion down to science’s level — by saying that all those Bible stories and Norse sagas have perfectly rational explanations?
The great attraction of Von Daniken is that he gives us permission to believe that the Bible is literally true. Ezekiel really did see a wheel in a wheel, way up in the middle of the air. A sweet chariot really did come for to carry Elijah home. But it does this at the cost of removing their specifically religious significance. The chariots of fire are really only very advanced aircraft. Angels' halos are really only space helmets. When Von Daniken asks “Was God an astronaut?” he means “Was God merely an astronaut?”
And that is the problem that Hugh Walters thinks he has solved. Advanced extraterrestrials are by definition closer to God than humans. God is the most advancedist extraterrestrial of all. If the Uranus Alien is literally an emissary of the Supreme Being, then he is as near to being an actual Angel as makes no difference. Moses and Gabriel were under-cover agents of the Supreme Being. So, presumably, was Gautama. It wouldn’t be difficult to fit J.C into the picture: maybe he’s literally the Supreme Being’s son. Or the Supreme Being travelling incognito.
Joyful all ye nations rise, God and Science reconciled.
Rev Beckwith’s God (in the Doctor Who book) is a deist demiurge whose job is to explain the complexity of the universe. Walters sees, correctly, that science has made an explanatory God redundant. In principle, you can understand how the universe works without recourse to a supernatural creator. But he also sees that a purely scientific world-view throws out the teleological star-baby with the explanatory bath-water. His Supreme Being doesn’t tell us how the Universe works, but what it is for: its purpose and objective. Rev Beckwith’s God is a moral force: he’s there to reassure us that the goodies will always beat the baddies in Episode Six. Walters’ Supreme Being is only indirectly moral. He certainly wants humans to be wise and sensible because if they blow themselves up they will stop evolving. But the Supreme Being doesn't specially want us to be good. The objective of evolution is to evolve. Walters' religion is the worship of progress per se. Walters stated several times that he wrote science fiction “to inspire the young people of today to be the scientists and technicians of tomorrow.” And it seems that this is the meaning of life: the whole purpose for which the universe was invented.
If Chris had not met the Alien, might he have decided that space-exploration was pointless and the human race might as well stagnate? After his memory was wiped, did he feel the urge to drop out of UNEXA and go and live in an arts-and-crafts commune? Walters’ has created a truly Anglican Supreme Being. He is the God Who Makes No Difference; the God who enjoins you to carry on doing exactly what you would have been doing in any case.
VI: The Most Tremendous Tale of All
Nov. 20th, 2025 04:30 pmandrew_rilstone_feedPrevious Section
Chariots of the Gods (published in 1968) set out to debunk religion. Primitive Man saw spaceships and aliens and mistook them for angels and deities. Christianity and Judaism are on precisely the same level as a Pacific Island cargo cult.
But not everyone who read or heard about the book took it that way. Von Daniken intended to say that what we thought were divine beings were really only extraterrestrials. But his effect on the popular imagination was to give extra-terrestrial visitors the aura of the divine. UFOs could sit alongside leylines and astrology as part of the smorgasbord spirituality of the Age of Aquarius.
Arthur C Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. The corollary is that any fanciful story about magic might turn out to be a perfectly true story about advanced science. And for some people, this is a comforting thought. There might, after all, be a Santa Claus: it’s just that we slightly misunderstood his nature. If God was an Astronaut, then Astronauts may be a kind of god.
2001: A Space Odyssey (published in the same year as Von Daniken) leans heavily into the space-god mythos. Arthur C Clark would, I assume, have regarded “intelligent design” as pure pseudo-science. But the movie uses the idea of paleocontact to salvage some human exceptionalism from the Darwinian wreckage. Humans aren’t just clever monkeys that happened to have evolved in a particular way. They were deliberately taught tool-making by an enigmatic alien visitor. And the visitor had a purpose in mind: it wants humans to find their way to Jupiter so it can force them to evolve again. Natural selection isn't the whole story: there has to be Something Else. The movie, at any rate, gives no hints as to the nature of that Other Thing it just shows us an enigmatic blank slab, onto which we are free to project God or Science or Magic or Whatever The Heck We Like.
You might think that the idea that Aliens gave rise to the idea of Angles — that Moses came up with the idea of YHWH because he didn't know what a spaceship was —would be roundly condemned by theists as blasphemy of the highest order. But it seems that some Christians and even some clergymen just stroked their dog-collars and said “Maybe so.”
Chariots of the Gods (published in 1968) set out to debunk religion. Primitive Man saw spaceships and aliens and mistook them for angels and deities. Christianity and Judaism are on precisely the same level as a Pacific Island cargo cult.
But not everyone who read or heard about the book took it that way. Von Daniken intended to say that what we thought were divine beings were really only extraterrestrials. But his effect on the popular imagination was to give extra-terrestrial visitors the aura of the divine. UFOs could sit alongside leylines and astrology as part of the smorgasbord spirituality of the Age of Aquarius.
Arthur C Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. The corollary is that any fanciful story about magic might turn out to be a perfectly true story about advanced science. And for some people, this is a comforting thought. There might, after all, be a Santa Claus: it’s just that we slightly misunderstood his nature. If God was an Astronaut, then Astronauts may be a kind of god.
2001: A Space Odyssey (published in the same year as Von Daniken) leans heavily into the space-god mythos. Arthur C Clark would, I assume, have regarded “intelligent design” as pure pseudo-science. But the movie uses the idea of paleocontact to salvage some human exceptionalism from the Darwinian wreckage. Humans aren’t just clever monkeys that happened to have evolved in a particular way. They were deliberately taught tool-making by an enigmatic alien visitor. And the visitor had a purpose in mind: it wants humans to find their way to Jupiter so it can force them to evolve again. Natural selection isn't the whole story: there has to be Something Else. The movie, at any rate, gives no hints as to the nature of that Other Thing it just shows us an enigmatic blank slab, onto which we are free to project God or Science or Magic or Whatever The Heck We Like.
You might think that the idea that Aliens gave rise to the idea of Angles — that Moses came up with the idea of YHWH because he didn't know what a spaceship was —would be roundly condemned by theists as blasphemy of the highest order. But it seems that some Christians and even some clergymen just stroked their dog-collars and said “Maybe so.”
“If we ask ‘what has religion got to do with science fiction’, the answer is ‘everything’
I am afraid Dicks wanted us to draw rather anti-scientific conclusions from all this. We shouldn’t laugh at the sailors who thought the world was flat because some of our ideas might be wrong too. If we can be surprised by four-dimensional cubes and the geometry of curved surfaces, then might there not be all sorts of perspectives from which even more surprising things could be true? So, Daleks and sonic-screwdrivers — why not? It is a hand-wave which has turned up often enough in Doctor Who scripts. Bumblebees would be unable to fly if they were fixed winged aircraft, therefore aerodynamics is false, therefore you can believe anything you want to believe about anything.
The essay also introduces young readers to Femi’s paradox. Space is big, right? So “lets be gloomy” and assume that only one star in a hundred has a planet going round it and only one planet in a hundred as life on it and only one life-form in a hundred is intelligent and only one intelligent life form in a hundred has space ships….then (what with space being so big) that’s still a thousand space-going civilisations in Our-Galaxy-Alone.
So where the hell are they?
Dicks has two theories.
1: Those thousand space faring civilisations have got a hundred thousand million stars to check up on (in Our-Galaxy-Alone). And it takes an awfully long time to travel between them. (Did I mention that space was big?) So doubtless they’ll get around to visiting Earth in the next thousand years.
2: Maybe they have visited us in the past, but we didn’t spot them, because we weren’t “scientific enough”.
As evidence, Dicks points, not to the Pyramids or the Nascar lines, but to a book he calls The Holy Bible (in italics). He quotes the passage about the Four Living Creatures of Ezekiel. Aliens, obviously. He could also have pointed to the “wheel in the wheel” which “went up on their four sides and turned not when they went.” No less a person than Eugene H Peterson thinks that sounds a lot like a gyroscope.
And surely this is why they found a Vicar to say some nice things about Doctor Who on the final pages of the book? We have just, pretty blasphemously, claimed that one of the people who wrote the actual Bible — one of the people who, according to Christians, foretold the coming of Jesus — was an ignorant savage who couldn’t tell a four-headed ET from a Seraphim.
So here is the Reverend Beckwith to provide some balance.
Human beings have always looked up at the sky and made up stories, right? So Greek and Roman myths about the sun and the moon are in a very real sense a kind of olden days science fiction. And scientists and science fiction writers wonder what the universe is like, don’t they? Which is in a very real sense the same thing as the people of the Old Testament “looking for god in the heavens”. And get this — Christians think that Time and Space was made by God! So exploring Time and Space is in a very real sense the same as learning about God, isn’t it? And you know who else talked about Time and Space? Jesus! He told his followers that “God can be found and seen in everything around them” and also that “it is no good looking for God way out in space if we don’t recognise him in our familiar surroundings.” (Er…Citation needed.) Space exploration is a Good Thing, because it helps us understand that the Universe “can only have been planned by something greater than Man himself.” If we discover non-human sentient beings in Space, then God made them as well. The Bible totally says there are angels, who are certainly non-human and certainly sentient. So you could say that they are in a very real sense, “the first spacemen”. “Some people” even think the idea of angels came from alien visitations. And Doctor Who fights bad guys, which “proves that there is one basic Truth in God’s creations, and this is that the most valuable and worthwhile thing is goodness”. That is, in a very real sense, the point of Christianity, that good things are good and bad things are bad and good will win out in the end. We will now sing hymn number 425, All Things Bright and Beautiful…
Dicks’ essay was entitled “Could It All Be True?” But perhaps “It” doesn’t just refer to Zarbi and Silurians and boxes that are bigger on the inside than the outside, but the burning bush and the manna from heaven and the star of Bethlehem as well? The transition from Dicks talking about Ezekiel on page 108 and the Rev. saying that science fiction and Christianity were basically the same thing on page 109 doesn’t amount to a coherent argument: but it planted the idea in my head. The answer to both questions might very well be “Yes”. It evoked a mental mood in which watching Doctor Who on Saturday and going to Sunday School on Sunday were not incompatible and that reading Chris Godfrey stories and reading Every Boys Book of Bible Stories were not contradictory. I think that for the next decade (from the age of about nine to the age of about nineteen) I pretty much took it for granted that Kubrick’s Dawn of Man was more or less the literal truth; and that that literal truth was more or less what the book of Genesis “really meant”.
As has been said before: it was not a very healthy state of mind to be in. I was one of the Brainy People who the Man in the Street looked down on; but I was also one of the enlightened modern scientists, free from the arrogance of the pharisaical Victorians. I could listen to the preacher preaching and say “Aha; he doesn’t know he is really talking about aliens”, but I could read a science fiction writer talking about aliens and say “Aha, but the writer doesn’t know he is really talking about God.”
In 1963, the Rev JAT Robinson famously conceded that science had proven that God did not exist, but that it was okay to carry on worshipping a non-existent being because “God” really meant “whatever is most true and most important.” When you say that “God is love” you really mean that love is the most really, really, real thing that there is and you are definitely in favour of it" Robinson’s book was entitled Honest to God. Rev Beckwith’s essay was rather pointedly entitled “Honest to Doctor Who”.
Next Section.
So wrote one Rev John D Beckwith in a 1972 paperback called The Making of Doctor Who. We have talked about this momentous little publication before: it was the first Whovian reference book ever published; the only source of information on the early years most of us had before Jeremy Bentham started cranking out xeroxes.
Why on earth was a C of E vicar asked to contribute an essay to a book which was mainly about special effects, Bill Hartnell’s CV and how they filmed the Sea Devils? I think that there is a pretty clear answer to that question.
The Making of Doctor Who also contained an earnest little essay, presumably by Terrence Dicks, about the “science” in “science fiction”. It explains the TARDIS’s dimensions in terms of flat-landers, cubes and tesseracts; and points out that strange things happen to time when you approach the speed of light. It tells us, wrongly, that people in olden times believed that if you sailed far enough you would fall off the edge of the world: but it makes the much better point that although we know the world is round, we largely feel that it is flat. It blows our mind by telling us about non-Euclidian geometry: if you travel a hundred miles East, a hundred miles South, a hundred miles West and a hundred miles North, you don’t end up back where you started, because the surface of the earth is curved! And if you cut an orange into eight segments, you end up with “a triangle with a square corner”. (Rather delightfully, my copy of the book has half-century old orange juice stains on the pages!)
The Making of Doctor Who also contained an earnest little essay, presumably by Terrence Dicks, about the “science” in “science fiction”. It explains the TARDIS’s dimensions in terms of flat-landers, cubes and tesseracts; and points out that strange things happen to time when you approach the speed of light. It tells us, wrongly, that people in olden times believed that if you sailed far enough you would fall off the edge of the world: but it makes the much better point that although we know the world is round, we largely feel that it is flat. It blows our mind by telling us about non-Euclidian geometry: if you travel a hundred miles East, a hundred miles South, a hundred miles West and a hundred miles North, you don’t end up back where you started, because the surface of the earth is curved! And if you cut an orange into eight segments, you end up with “a triangle with a square corner”. (Rather delightfully, my copy of the book has half-century old orange juice stains on the pages!)
I am afraid Dicks wanted us to draw rather anti-scientific conclusions from all this. We shouldn’t laugh at the sailors who thought the world was flat because some of our ideas might be wrong too. If we can be surprised by four-dimensional cubes and the geometry of curved surfaces, then might there not be all sorts of perspectives from which even more surprising things could be true? So, Daleks and sonic-screwdrivers — why not? It is a hand-wave which has turned up often enough in Doctor Who scripts. Bumblebees would be unable to fly if they were fixed winged aircraft, therefore aerodynamics is false, therefore you can believe anything you want to believe about anything.
The essay also introduces young readers to Femi’s paradox. Space is big, right? So “lets be gloomy” and assume that only one star in a hundred has a planet going round it and only one planet in a hundred as life on it and only one life-form in a hundred is intelligent and only one intelligent life form in a hundred has space ships….then (what with space being so big) that’s still a thousand space-going civilisations in Our-Galaxy-Alone.
So where the hell are they?
Dicks has two theories.
1: Those thousand space faring civilisations have got a hundred thousand million stars to check up on (in Our-Galaxy-Alone). And it takes an awfully long time to travel between them. (Did I mention that space was big?) So doubtless they’ll get around to visiting Earth in the next thousand years.
2: Maybe they have visited us in the past, but we didn’t spot them, because we weren’t “scientific enough”.
As evidence, Dicks points, not to the Pyramids or the Nascar lines, but to a book he calls The Holy Bible (in italics). He quotes the passage about the Four Living Creatures of Ezekiel. Aliens, obviously. He could also have pointed to the “wheel in the wheel” which “went up on their four sides and turned not when they went.” No less a person than Eugene H Peterson thinks that sounds a lot like a gyroscope.
And surely this is why they found a Vicar to say some nice things about Doctor Who on the final pages of the book? We have just, pretty blasphemously, claimed that one of the people who wrote the actual Bible — one of the people who, according to Christians, foretold the coming of Jesus — was an ignorant savage who couldn’t tell a four-headed ET from a Seraphim.
So here is the Reverend Beckwith to provide some balance.
Human beings have always looked up at the sky and made up stories, right? So Greek and Roman myths about the sun and the moon are in a very real sense a kind of olden days science fiction. And scientists and science fiction writers wonder what the universe is like, don’t they? Which is in a very real sense the same thing as the people of the Old Testament “looking for god in the heavens”. And get this — Christians think that Time and Space was made by God! So exploring Time and Space is in a very real sense the same as learning about God, isn’t it? And you know who else talked about Time and Space? Jesus! He told his followers that “God can be found and seen in everything around them” and also that “it is no good looking for God way out in space if we don’t recognise him in our familiar surroundings.” (Er…Citation needed.) Space exploration is a Good Thing, because it helps us understand that the Universe “can only have been planned by something greater than Man himself.” If we discover non-human sentient beings in Space, then God made them as well. The Bible totally says there are angels, who are certainly non-human and certainly sentient. So you could say that they are in a very real sense, “the first spacemen”. “Some people” even think the idea of angels came from alien visitations. And Doctor Who fights bad guys, which “proves that there is one basic Truth in God’s creations, and this is that the most valuable and worthwhile thing is goodness”. That is, in a very real sense, the point of Christianity, that good things are good and bad things are bad and good will win out in the end. We will now sing hymn number 425, All Things Bright and Beautiful…
Dicks’ essay was entitled “Could It All Be True?” But perhaps “It” doesn’t just refer to Zarbi and Silurians and boxes that are bigger on the inside than the outside, but the burning bush and the manna from heaven and the star of Bethlehem as well? The transition from Dicks talking about Ezekiel on page 108 and the Rev. saying that science fiction and Christianity were basically the same thing on page 109 doesn’t amount to a coherent argument: but it planted the idea in my head. The answer to both questions might very well be “Yes”. It evoked a mental mood in which watching Doctor Who on Saturday and going to Sunday School on Sunday were not incompatible and that reading Chris Godfrey stories and reading Every Boys Book of Bible Stories were not contradictory. I think that for the next decade (from the age of about nine to the age of about nineteen) I pretty much took it for granted that Kubrick’s Dawn of Man was more or less the literal truth; and that that literal truth was more or less what the book of Genesis “really meant”.
As has been said before: it was not a very healthy state of mind to be in. I was one of the Brainy People who the Man in the Street looked down on; but I was also one of the enlightened modern scientists, free from the arrogance of the pharisaical Victorians. I could listen to the preacher preaching and say “Aha; he doesn’t know he is really talking about aliens”, but I could read a science fiction writer talking about aliens and say “Aha, but the writer doesn’t know he is really talking about God.”
In 1963, the Rev JAT Robinson famously conceded that science had proven that God did not exist, but that it was okay to carry on worshipping a non-existent being because “God” really meant “whatever is most true and most important.” When you say that “God is love” you really mean that love is the most really, really, real thing that there is and you are definitely in favour of it" Robinson’s book was entitled Honest to God. Rev Beckwith’s essay was rather pointedly entitled “Honest to Doctor Who”.
Next Section.
V: Who Mourns for Adonis?
Nov. 20th, 2025 04:01 pmandrew_rilstone_feedPrevious Section
If this were an adult science fiction novel — and I fully grok that it is not — I think we would expect it to develop in one of the following directions.
A: The Aliens are monstrous, with horrifying personal habits and weird Lovecraftian names. The astronauts assume they are evil: but it turns out that Whiskers is right and they are super-evolved space Christs.
B: The Aliens are beautiful and perfectly good: so much so that they regard humans as a blight on the Universe and intend to wipe us out.
C: The Aliens appear to be beautiful and perfectly good, But in fact they are so advanced that they regard humans as moderately interesting bacteria, and their long term plan involves turning us into perfume and baking the remains into pies.
D: The Aliens really are good and beautiful. But they have no concept of ethics, no moral code, and positively deny the existence of God, leaving everything theologically confused.
But this is a kids' book: and within a few pages of their encounter, the Alien confirms that all Whiskers speculations are true. Life really exists on millions of planets. There really is a quality called “development” and older worlds have more of it and younger worlds don’t have so much. And development really does have an end-point and a destination.
“At the apex of all this, somewhere, is what we can call the Supreme Intelligence, directing and guiding your World, my World, and countless others too.”
“That—that’s God!” gasped Colin.
“Then there is a Deity?” Chris burst out.
But the Supreme Intelligence is not a Creator or a Designer, although it is indirectly influencing and guiding evolution. The Ultimate Question which he can answer is not "how?" but "why?"
“All are evolving towards the Ultimate: towards the Supreme Intelligence. Otherwise, why should Life evolve at all?”
Why should life evolve at all?
Back on their human's spaceship, Walters introduces us to what might be called Chris’s Wager: "God exists because I would like God to exist." Or, less cynically “It is desirable that there should be a God; therefore I might as will proceed as if there is one.” (Socrates, in fairness, said very much the same thing.)
“The scheme of things as outlined by the Alien was so attractive and exciting, made life so worthwhile and logical, that if it wasn’t true Chris didn’t want to know. If life was just a chance development amid universal chaos, it seemed a waste. If it had no purpose or objective then all the highest incentives to progress were just self-deception. How flat everything would now seem if all that [the Alien] had said were untrue.“
But wasn’t Chris already a pious church-goer before he encountered the Alien? What new element does rebranding God as the Supreme Intelligence add to his life?
The Alien has one more tbombshell to drop. This is not the first time his race has visited our solar system:
“We have sent our emissaries to live among you. They have been as you are and have lived as you do. Of course your people did not realise that we were from another world. Usually they thought we were the prophets and teachers of your own world.”
Tony immediately connects this with UFO reports, and theorises that “the ancients” might have mistaken aliens for divine beings. He goes so far as to say that there are passages in the Bible which might refer to spaceships.
When asked to explain human religious beliefs to the Alien, Chris admits that among “civilised” people, theism is in decline. He does not say that the better we have understood the Universe, the less we have relied on God for explanations. He doesn’t say that we stopped believing in Adam and Eve once we understood natural selection; or that once we knew about microbes and viruses, we stopped attributing sickness to the devil. He looks at it in terms of a cosmic hierarchy of Greatness. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, humans rejected God because they believed that humans now knew everything and would soon be all-powerful. We're invited to look at Victorian scepticism about God in the same light as the Man in the Street's scepticism about extraterrestrial life: a hubristic belief that Man Is Tops.
“As we thought we were wresting Nature’s secrets away from her, so belief in God began to crumble. Given time, man could know everything and would be all-powerful.”
But it is again the Brainy Chaps who have seen the fallacy of this:
“For every new discovery that was made, complete understanding seemed to have become further away. Gradually, I think we are losing the arrogance that made us see Man as the be-all and end-all of creation.”
Atheism is the arrogant believe that the human mind is supreme; theism, the humble acknowledgement that it is not. Chris's story is a variation of the one in the Bible. Pride is the root of every sin. Man tastes the fruit of the tree of knowledge and believes that he can become as gods, knowing good from evil.
A: The Aliens are monstrous, with horrifying personal habits and weird Lovecraftian names. The astronauts assume they are evil: but it turns out that Whiskers is right and they are super-evolved space Christs.
B: The Aliens are beautiful and perfectly good: so much so that they regard humans as a blight on the Universe and intend to wipe us out.
C: The Aliens appear to be beautiful and perfectly good, But in fact they are so advanced that they regard humans as moderately interesting bacteria, and their long term plan involves turning us into perfume and baking the remains into pies.
D: The Aliens really are good and beautiful. But they have no concept of ethics, no moral code, and positively deny the existence of God, leaving everything theologically confused.
But this is a kids' book: and within a few pages of their encounter, the Alien confirms that all Whiskers speculations are true. Life really exists on millions of planets. There really is a quality called “development” and older worlds have more of it and younger worlds don’t have so much. And development really does have an end-point and a destination.
“At the apex of all this, somewhere, is what we can call the Supreme Intelligence, directing and guiding your World, my World, and countless others too.”
“That—that’s God!” gasped Colin.
“Then there is a Deity?” Chris burst out.
But the Supreme Intelligence is not a Creator or a Designer, although it is indirectly influencing and guiding evolution. The Ultimate Question which he can answer is not "how?" but "why?"
“All are evolving towards the Ultimate: towards the Supreme Intelligence. Otherwise, why should Life evolve at all?”
Why should life evolve at all?
Back on their human's spaceship, Walters introduces us to what might be called Chris’s Wager: "God exists because I would like God to exist." Or, less cynically “It is desirable that there should be a God; therefore I might as will proceed as if there is one.” (Socrates, in fairness, said very much the same thing.)
“The scheme of things as outlined by the Alien was so attractive and exciting, made life so worthwhile and logical, that if it wasn’t true Chris didn’t want to know. If life was just a chance development amid universal chaos, it seemed a waste. If it had no purpose or objective then all the highest incentives to progress were just self-deception. How flat everything would now seem if all that [the Alien] had said were untrue.“
But wasn’t Chris already a pious church-goer before he encountered the Alien? What new element does rebranding God as the Supreme Intelligence add to his life?
The Alien has one more tbombshell to drop. This is not the first time his race has visited our solar system:
“We have sent our emissaries to live among you. They have been as you are and have lived as you do. Of course your people did not realise that we were from another world. Usually they thought we were the prophets and teachers of your own world.”
Tony immediately connects this with UFO reports, and theorises that “the ancients” might have mistaken aliens for divine beings. He goes so far as to say that there are passages in the Bible which might refer to spaceships.
When asked to explain human religious beliefs to the Alien, Chris admits that among “civilised” people, theism is in decline. He does not say that the better we have understood the Universe, the less we have relied on God for explanations. He doesn’t say that we stopped believing in Adam and Eve once we understood natural selection; or that once we knew about microbes and viruses, we stopped attributing sickness to the devil. He looks at it in terms of a cosmic hierarchy of Greatness. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, humans rejected God because they believed that humans now knew everything and would soon be all-powerful. We're invited to look at Victorian scepticism about God in the same light as the Man in the Street's scepticism about extraterrestrial life: a hubristic belief that Man Is Tops.
“As we thought we were wresting Nature’s secrets away from her, so belief in God began to crumble. Given time, man could know everything and would be all-powerful.”
But it is again the Brainy Chaps who have seen the fallacy of this:
“For every new discovery that was made, complete understanding seemed to have become further away. Gradually, I think we are losing the arrogance that made us see Man as the be-all and end-all of creation.”
Atheism is the arrogant believe that the human mind is supreme; theism, the humble acknowledgement that it is not. Chris's story is a variation of the one in the Bible. Pride is the root of every sin. Man tastes the fruit of the tree of knowledge and believes that he can become as gods, knowing good from evil.
Next Section
IV: Life, the Universe and Everything
Nov. 20th, 2025 03:54 pmandrew_rilstone_feedPrevious Section
On page 89 of the book old “Whiskers”, the comic relief ex-Battle of Britain duffer tells Lord Benson, out of the blue “I think there must be a God.”
Benson does not reply “Well, of course you do, you’re British, dammit.”
Neither does he reply “Since we have attended Holy Communion together, I rather took that for granted.”
On the contrary, Benson is rather embarrassed. He thinks that religion is “something which one didn’t talk about” — despite having literally knelt down and prayed out loud with the teenage Chris in the first volume. One wonders who all those silent prayers that he keeps uttering have been directed at?
Whiskers explains his thinking.
On page 89 of the book old “Whiskers”, the comic relief ex-Battle of Britain duffer tells Lord Benson, out of the blue “I think there must be a God.”
Benson does not reply “Well, of course you do, you’re British, dammit.”
Neither does he reply “Since we have attended Holy Communion together, I rather took that for granted.”
On the contrary, Benson is rather embarrassed. He thinks that religion is “something which one didn’t talk about” — despite having literally knelt down and prayed out loud with the teenage Chris in the first volume. One wonders who all those silent prayers that he keeps uttering have been directed at?
Whiskers explains his thinking.
“...the universe is older and more complicated than the human mind can conceive. It’s older than we can imagine even if we accept the big bang theory of its creation….”
and so on at some length. In summary, his argument goes like this:
1: The Universe is big.
2: The Universe is old.
3: The Universe is complex.
4: The Universe is ordered.
5: Humans do not understand the Universe.
6: Therefore Humans are not the greatest thing in the Universe
7: Therefore something greater than Humans must exist.
I am not sure he actually needed to bother with stages 1-6. If there is extraterrestrial life, then it must by definition be either a: greater than humans b: less great than humans or c: about equal to humans. And if there are a huge number of extraterrestrial life forms, then it is highly probable that at least one of them must be our superior. The proposition is actually “If we are not the only thing in the universe, then we are almost certainly not the greatest thing in it.”
But is there any extraterrestrial life at all? Walters explains that someone called “the man in the street”, relying on something called “common sense” is entirely skeptical about it.
“If these brainy chaps wanted to believe that, then let them. Mr Ordinary Man knew better. He felt in his bones that he was ‘the tops’. How could there be a higher form of life, he asked himself proudly as he looked around at his pubs and bingo halls, his motor cars and tinned foods, his palaces and slums.”
The Man in the Street does not point to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or King Lear as proof of man’s superiority: this is the voice of grammar school educated British Interplanetary Society member sneering at the plebs who only made it to Secondary Modern. But It’s a decent enough device for getting readers on side. Obviously, we all want to be on the side of the Brainy Chaps.
We aren’t told what the man-in-the-street thinks about religion: but we get a brief insight into what Brainy Chaps think. Benson, it turns out, is strictly agnostic. He thinks that the universe has three qualities
1: Complexity
2: Beauty
3: Infinite wonder.
It isn’t clear if he thinks that complexity is intrinsically beautiful, or if there could have been a universe was beautiful and simple, or one which was complicated but ugly. It also isn’t clear if “wonder”, “complexity” and “beauty” are intrinsic properties that the universe has, or merely descriptions of human beings reaction to it. But he does think that they might imply that there is a “thing” that “lies behind” the universe.
He does not think that this Thing, if it exists, would have explanatory power. He does not say that the universe is so complicated, beautiful and wonderful that some Thing even more complicated, beautiful and wonderful must have had a hand in the design of it. But if such a Thing exists, we can reasonably ask what the Universe is for. The existence of the Thing implies that the universe has a “meaning” and that there is a “direction in which it is moving.”
It is trivially true that if Man is not the greatest thing in the universe, then something greater than Man must exist. And if there are many things in the Universe and many degrees of greatness, one Thing must necessarily be the greatest of all. But it is by no means the case that "the greatest thing which happens to exist" is also the "greatest thing which could possibly exist". But we seem to have agreed that "the greatest thing which happens to exist" can reasonably be given the name "God".
Whiskers reasoning goes beyond Benson’s
1: A race with more complicated machines and greater scientific understanding can be said to be more advanced than one without those things.
2: An older race must have been developing longer than a younger race.
3: An older race must have been evolving for longer than a younger race — indeed, it must be "more evolved".
4: Advancement, development and evolution all imply an increase in greatness.
5: The thing with the most greatness is called God.
6: Therefore older races must be closer to God than younger ones.
7: God is by definition good.
8: Therefore older races must necessarily be more good than younger ones, and our heroes have nothing to fear from the aliens.
Whiskers is, in fact, conflating “greatness” with “goodness”: he is assuming that “more advanced” is synonymous with “better”. We could label this Taylor’s Fallacy: “Somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man”.
Sir Billy, who has replaced Sir George as head of UNEXA, points out that evolution is not a matter of linear improvement: “many other things” apart from the human mind has evolved. But Whiskers refutes this — there have been “set backs and side tracks” but the “trend” has always been towards greater intelligence. The arc of evolution is long, but it bends towards Prof Albert Einstein.
1: The Universe is big.
2: The Universe is old.
3: The Universe is complex.
4: The Universe is ordered.
5: Humans do not understand the Universe.
6: Therefore Humans are not the greatest thing in the Universe
7: Therefore something greater than Humans must exist.
I am not sure he actually needed to bother with stages 1-6. If there is extraterrestrial life, then it must by definition be either a: greater than humans b: less great than humans or c: about equal to humans. And if there are a huge number of extraterrestrial life forms, then it is highly probable that at least one of them must be our superior. The proposition is actually “If we are not the only thing in the universe, then we are almost certainly not the greatest thing in it.”
But is there any extraterrestrial life at all? Walters explains that someone called “the man in the street”, relying on something called “common sense” is entirely skeptical about it.
“If these brainy chaps wanted to believe that, then let them. Mr Ordinary Man knew better. He felt in his bones that he was ‘the tops’. How could there be a higher form of life, he asked himself proudly as he looked around at his pubs and bingo halls, his motor cars and tinned foods, his palaces and slums.”
The Man in the Street does not point to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or King Lear as proof of man’s superiority: this is the voice of grammar school educated British Interplanetary Society member sneering at the plebs who only made it to Secondary Modern. But It’s a decent enough device for getting readers on side. Obviously, we all want to be on the side of the Brainy Chaps.
We aren’t told what the man-in-the-street thinks about religion: but we get a brief insight into what Brainy Chaps think. Benson, it turns out, is strictly agnostic. He thinks that the universe has three qualities
1: Complexity
2: Beauty
3: Infinite wonder.
It isn’t clear if he thinks that complexity is intrinsically beautiful, or if there could have been a universe was beautiful and simple, or one which was complicated but ugly. It also isn’t clear if “wonder”, “complexity” and “beauty” are intrinsic properties that the universe has, or merely descriptions of human beings reaction to it. But he does think that they might imply that there is a “thing” that “lies behind” the universe.
He does not think that this Thing, if it exists, would have explanatory power. He does not say that the universe is so complicated, beautiful and wonderful that some Thing even more complicated, beautiful and wonderful must have had a hand in the design of it. But if such a Thing exists, we can reasonably ask what the Universe is for. The existence of the Thing implies that the universe has a “meaning” and that there is a “direction in which it is moving.”
It is trivially true that if Man is not the greatest thing in the universe, then something greater than Man must exist. And if there are many things in the Universe and many degrees of greatness, one Thing must necessarily be the greatest of all. But it is by no means the case that "the greatest thing which happens to exist" is also the "greatest thing which could possibly exist". But we seem to have agreed that "the greatest thing which happens to exist" can reasonably be given the name "God".
Whiskers reasoning goes beyond Benson’s
1: A race with more complicated machines and greater scientific understanding can be said to be more advanced than one without those things.
2: An older race must have been developing longer than a younger race.
3: An older race must have been evolving for longer than a younger race — indeed, it must be "more evolved".
4: Advancement, development and evolution all imply an increase in greatness.
5: The thing with the most greatness is called God.
6: Therefore older races must be closer to God than younger ones.
7: God is by definition good.
8: Therefore older races must necessarily be more good than younger ones, and our heroes have nothing to fear from the aliens.
Whiskers is, in fact, conflating “greatness” with “goodness”: he is assuming that “more advanced” is synonymous with “better”. We could label this Taylor’s Fallacy: “Somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man”.
Sir Billy, who has replaced Sir George as head of UNEXA, points out that evolution is not a matter of linear improvement: “many other things” apart from the human mind has evolved. But Whiskers refutes this — there have been “set backs and side tracks” but the “trend” has always been towards greater intelligence. The arc of evolution is long, but it bends towards Prof Albert Einstein.
This is indeed the view of evolution promulgated in 1970s school text books which tended to show chimpanzees turning into stockbrokers and codfish turning into triceratops as automatically as kittens turn into pussy cats and tadpoles turn into frogs. A scientific theory about change and adaptation has morphed into a narrative about inevitable improvement. This provided Creationists with a convenient stick with which to beat Charles Darwin: since the "inevitable improvement" theory was obviously silly, the whole idea of evolution was obviously fake news.
“What you are saying,” Lord Benson interposed “is that because [the Alien] must come from an older race, it must necessarily be from a more advanced and intelligent race. That evolution is always towards a higher plane, is always an advance.”
“Something like that.” Whiskers agreed…”Evolution has a definite direction and objective” he declared firmly. “I believe it is towards God himself.”
And later
“So what you are saying is that because this Alien comes from a far more technically advanced civilisation than ours, from a race that must have been evolving far longer than ours, they must be nearer and more like God than we are?” Lord Benson enquired.
So: we have a hypothesis. Because the Alien is technologically superior to humans, it must necessarily be morally superior to humans as well.
“Something like that.” Whiskers agreed…”Evolution has a definite direction and objective” he declared firmly. “I believe it is towards God himself.”
And later
“So what you are saying is that because this Alien comes from a far more technically advanced civilisation than ours, from a race that must have been evolving far longer than ours, they must be nearer and more like God than we are?” Lord Benson enquired.
So: we have a hypothesis. Because the Alien is technologically superior to humans, it must necessarily be morally superior to humans as well.
And back on the surface of Planetty McPlanettface, we see the hypothesis being tested.
Next Section
Next Section
III: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Nov. 20th, 2025 03:45 pmandrew_rilstone_feedPrevious Section
The boffins have detected peculiar signals coming from...Planetty MacPlanetFace. No-one can listen to the signals for very long without getting a blinding migraine. Since it is unlikely that something so mindbogglingly annoying could have evolved purely by chance, the boffins conclude that Someone must be trying very hard to get our attention. So not one but two space ships are sent to investigate.
The previous volume, Nearly Neptune, ended on a small cliffhanger: Chris Godfrey was offered the job of deputy director of UNEXA on condition he gave up being an astronaut. We have already been told that astronauts retire at the age of forty, and it is very hard to see how he can be less than thirty-seven at this point. First Contact? begins in media res with the mission already well under way. It turns out that Chris is in command for one last trip. The American One, the Russian One, and the Working Class One from the previous volumes are all present and correct, and the empty spaces are filled by The Welsh One, the Scots One, the Bald One and the Not-Bald One. They really aren’t characterised beyond this. Mervyn Williams (really) has a poetic soul. During a space walk he intones “Beautiful it is, like a great black mantle with diamonds sewn all over it”. This is very much the kind of book in which people "intone" things. They also "splutter" them, "gasp" them and "murmur" them. But they hardly ever just "say" them.
A charming sense of amateurism pervades the proceedings. No-one seems to have given a moment’s consideration to what Chris will actually do if he encounters Aliens. You might think some diplomats, heads of state, anthropologists and even philosophers would be on hand to advise him, but everyone is fine with the chaps on the rocket-ship just winging it.
The unstated assumption seems to be that astronauts are a special class of human being, and that only someone who is good at “being an astronaut” can possibly be sent into space. It’s a little like the idea that there is a quality called “the right stuff” — quite distinct from aptitude — and it is that which makes someone a great test-pilot. Certainly our heroes have technical know-how — we are told that the ship has banks of hard to understand controls — but plot points always turn on things which the boffins on Earth and Tony (the Working Class one) on the space ship have cobbled together. When the strange sounds being emitted by Planetty McPlanetface render communication between the two ships impossible, Tony improvises a morse code machine from bits and pieces on the ships. The Boffs on earth borrow one from a museum. Sir George Benson (the outgoing director) works out how the signals work by playing them to himself in his back garden, moving his wheel chair to various distances to calculate the range of the migraine effect. He has to go down the road to the electrical shop to buy an extension cable!
These kinds of details make it easy for us to put ourselves in the heroes' place, and imagine that we ourselves are out there enjoying all the diamonds and black velvet. During the communication crisis, Tony decides that the best thing to do is make a space-walk to the other ship and explain the problem to them face-to-face; and Walters takes us slowly through him putting on the space suit, stepping out of the air-lock, navigating his way through empty space... It’s not the only way of writing for kids, but it works. It’s very much the technique which makes Enid Blyton and JK Rowling so compelling for anyone under the age of eleven and so unbearable for anyone older.
So: the boys land on Planetty McPlanetface. There really is an Alien space craft there — all knobbly and un-aerodynamic and without a proper door. Communications are established and the Alien invites a delegation aboard for a face-to-face meeting.
The ship turns out to come from another solar system, where there is no death, no gravity, and a different shaped gear-stick on the Mini Metro. It doesn’t need doors because Aliens have mastered the art of walking through walls. It travels faster than the speed of light along concentrated gravity beams that criss-cross the galaxy. The Alien itself is aloof, but friendly and humanoid and good looking. The Not-Bald-One thinks he looks like an archangel, although the Bald-One points out the Lucifer was a fallen angel.
Chris takes the Alien at its word. But Morey (the American one) thinks Chris has trusted the angelic extraterrestrial far too easily and probably been mind-controlled. When Chris and the others do not return from their second sojourn on the vessel, he decides that the most sensible course of action would be to blow up the Alien Spaceship and return home. He plans to take control of one of the Earth ships and go kamikaze. Nothing we know about Morey has given us any reason to think that he would be this reckless. I was kind of waiting for the revelation that he was the one who had been hypnotised.
The Alien of course, knows what is happening immediately. He takes control of the suicide ship and it bounces harmlessly off his force-field. But far from sending Morey to stand outside the headmaster’s office, the Alien pats him on the head and tells him that he has been a very brave boy. After all, he truthfully thought the Alien was evil, and was courageously prepared to lay down his life to protect the human race. But clearly, humans are not yet ready to join the wider galactic community, so everyone is sent back to earth with a jolly good mind-wipe. The amnesiac astronauts tell the boffins that although they believe they saw an Alien spaceship, by the time they landed, it had disappeared; so they turned around and came straight home.
The story ends on another dot-dot-dot moment: George Benson realises that they were actually on the planet for several days and something is being concealed.
The previous volume, Nearly Neptune, ended on a small cliffhanger: Chris Godfrey was offered the job of deputy director of UNEXA on condition he gave up being an astronaut. We have already been told that astronauts retire at the age of forty, and it is very hard to see how he can be less than thirty-seven at this point. First Contact? begins in media res with the mission already well under way. It turns out that Chris is in command for one last trip. The American One, the Russian One, and the Working Class One from the previous volumes are all present and correct, and the empty spaces are filled by The Welsh One, the Scots One, the Bald One and the Not-Bald One. They really aren’t characterised beyond this. Mervyn Williams (really) has a poetic soul. During a space walk he intones “Beautiful it is, like a great black mantle with diamonds sewn all over it”. This is very much the kind of book in which people "intone" things. They also "splutter" them, "gasp" them and "murmur" them. But they hardly ever just "say" them.
A charming sense of amateurism pervades the proceedings. No-one seems to have given a moment’s consideration to what Chris will actually do if he encounters Aliens. You might think some diplomats, heads of state, anthropologists and even philosophers would be on hand to advise him, but everyone is fine with the chaps on the rocket-ship just winging it.
The unstated assumption seems to be that astronauts are a special class of human being, and that only someone who is good at “being an astronaut” can possibly be sent into space. It’s a little like the idea that there is a quality called “the right stuff” — quite distinct from aptitude — and it is that which makes someone a great test-pilot. Certainly our heroes have technical know-how — we are told that the ship has banks of hard to understand controls — but plot points always turn on things which the boffins on Earth and Tony (the Working Class one) on the space ship have cobbled together. When the strange sounds being emitted by Planetty McPlanetface render communication between the two ships impossible, Tony improvises a morse code machine from bits and pieces on the ships. The Boffs on earth borrow one from a museum. Sir George Benson (the outgoing director) works out how the signals work by playing them to himself in his back garden, moving his wheel chair to various distances to calculate the range of the migraine effect. He has to go down the road to the electrical shop to buy an extension cable!
These kinds of details make it easy for us to put ourselves in the heroes' place, and imagine that we ourselves are out there enjoying all the diamonds and black velvet. During the communication crisis, Tony decides that the best thing to do is make a space-walk to the other ship and explain the problem to them face-to-face; and Walters takes us slowly through him putting on the space suit, stepping out of the air-lock, navigating his way through empty space... It’s not the only way of writing for kids, but it works. It’s very much the technique which makes Enid Blyton and JK Rowling so compelling for anyone under the age of eleven and so unbearable for anyone older.
So: the boys land on Planetty McPlanetface. There really is an Alien space craft there — all knobbly and un-aerodynamic and without a proper door. Communications are established and the Alien invites a delegation aboard for a face-to-face meeting.
The ship turns out to come from another solar system, where there is no death, no gravity, and a different shaped gear-stick on the Mini Metro. It doesn’t need doors because Aliens have mastered the art of walking through walls. It travels faster than the speed of light along concentrated gravity beams that criss-cross the galaxy. The Alien itself is aloof, but friendly and humanoid and good looking. The Not-Bald-One thinks he looks like an archangel, although the Bald-One points out the Lucifer was a fallen angel.
Chris takes the Alien at its word. But Morey (the American one) thinks Chris has trusted the angelic extraterrestrial far too easily and probably been mind-controlled. When Chris and the others do not return from their second sojourn on the vessel, he decides that the most sensible course of action would be to blow up the Alien Spaceship and return home. He plans to take control of one of the Earth ships and go kamikaze. Nothing we know about Morey has given us any reason to think that he would be this reckless. I was kind of waiting for the revelation that he was the one who had been hypnotised.
The Alien of course, knows what is happening immediately. He takes control of the suicide ship and it bounces harmlessly off his force-field. But far from sending Morey to stand outside the headmaster’s office, the Alien pats him on the head and tells him that he has been a very brave boy. After all, he truthfully thought the Alien was evil, and was courageously prepared to lay down his life to protect the human race. But clearly, humans are not yet ready to join the wider galactic community, so everyone is sent back to earth with a jolly good mind-wipe. The amnesiac astronauts tell the boffins that although they believe they saw an Alien spaceship, by the time they landed, it had disappeared; so they turned around and came straight home.
The story ends on another dot-dot-dot moment: George Benson realises that they were actually on the planet for several days and something is being concealed.
Next Section
The Bringer of Dreams
Nov. 20th, 2025 04:52 pmandrew_rilstone_feedFirst Contact?
by Hugh Walters
The latest instalment of my occasional series looking back on a series of science fiction novels you almost definitely read if you were at school in the 1970s.
This volume raises some weightier than usual questions, and I respectfully suggested the long-than-usual essay may be of interest to people who don't remember the Chris Godfrey series.
II: The Road Less Travelled
Nov. 20th, 2025 03:38 pmandrew_rilstone_feedPrevious Section
Science fiction is about opening doors and looking at things from new angles. I remember the first line of 2001: A Space Odyssey — “behind every human being there stands three ghosts; that is the ratio in which the dead outnumber the living” — far better than I remember the nonsense about monoliths and mad computers. Many young minds were blown by Phillip K Dick or the Matrix long before they knew that grown-up philosophers worried about the mind/body problem. Even a silly schoolboy writer like Edgar Rice Burroughs could be life-changing; not because his science is good — his science is non-existent — but because he gives you permission to imagine what the world would look like from a completely different perspective.
Sometimes you return to a place, or person or a book you knew a long time ago and say: “Oh: that’s where I learned that particular idea. I thought that it was just what I always believed.”Or, of course “That’s the moment at which I took the wrong turning.”
First Contact? is the twelfth book in the children’s science fiction saga which began with Blast Off At Woomera. The books contain a little bit of engineering, a little bit of popular astronomy, a lot of narrow escapes and a light seasoning of muscular Christianity. But they have thus far been largely devoid of anything that could be called “ideas”.
But First Contact? contains the biggest possible idea. The book literally reveals the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. And it isn’t a joke or a punch-line. I am pretty sure that Hugh Walters believed it, and wanted his readers to believe it. And for a decade, at least, from the age of eight to the age of eighteen, I did believe it. I had completely forgotten the source: but I took it for granted.
It’s Holy Blood and Holy Grail for infants.
It’s Olaf Stapleton for Year 4.
It’s complete codswallop.
Next Section
I: Current Puns
Nov. 20th, 2025 03:33 pmandrew_rilstone_feedStrange noises are coming from Uranus. The boffins decide they want a very close look at Uranus. Because no-one has ever seen Uranus before. But it turns out that Uranus is being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's, yet as mortal as our own.
I don’t think I got the joke when I first read First Contact? There was zero sex-education at primary school: I don’t think I even knew words like “anus” or “penis”. There were the words that were used at home and the words that were used in the playground. And if anyone had laughed I would have priggishly pretended not to understand, because science fiction was very serious and important and grown up.
It’s a very silly joke, because the correct pronunciation isn’t Your Anus; it’s Urine Us.
I don’t think I got the joke when I first read First Contact? There was zero sex-education at primary school: I don’t think I even knew words like “anus” or “penis”. There were the words that were used at home and the words that were used in the playground. And if anyone had laughed I would have priggishly pretended not to understand, because science fiction was very serious and important and grown up.
It’s a very silly joke, because the correct pronunciation isn’t Your Anus; it’s Urine Us.
Continues.
Digital Legacy - Who Do You Trust? | International Journal of Digital Curation
Nov. 20th, 2025 09:07 am
Wyoming library director fired amid book dispute reaches $700,000 settlement
Nov. 20th, 2025 07:40 amThis week's work newsletter:
Nov. 20th, 2025 01:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistMaking [workplace] a great place to work involves us all. It's about everyone playing their part, and of course that includes myself and the Executive Leadership Team.
It's important that we lead by example and that's why we've signed up to some important commitments following your feedback via the recent Colleague Voice survey and listening groups.
Thanks to my involvement with EDI via helping run one of the protected-characteristics staff networks, I know this has been a big fucking deal for our EDI lead, she's been working a lot and trailed this to us earlier this week, so I'm intrigued (if not overly optimistic...) to finally see what results from this.
I've recorded a five-minute video (link) to talk about these commitments, or you can read the transcript (link).
I'm a transcript person. So I click on that and... Sharepoint tells me "You don't have access."
Our internal communication people are good and work hard and with the amount of stuff they put out it's inevitable that every so often a link is gonna go wrong or a file won't have the right permissions like this.
But it had to be this one about how we're all in this together, didn't it.
I did laugh, bitterly.
Health: COVID symptom whack-a-mole?
Nov. 20th, 2025 02:46 amelisem tl:dr Silly body is silly.
I continue resting LIKE A POTATO.
Whatever's going on in there, COVID (or something) has apparently been playing with the sliders and the lit-up buttons on my disabilities and chronic ailments. The good leg because the bad leg for several days. Really bad, pain-wise. Now that seems to be easing up a lot. The bad leg is doing something with sensations on the part of the leg where some nerve rerouting/regrowth happened after surgery 16 years ago; I did not need it to play with pins-and-needles, burning, freezing, and shocks on that leg below the replaced hip. Also, the sudden decrease in my hearing was distressing, though that seems to be mostly back where it was now.
Am using what skills I have to treat everything as temporary, and not decide This Is How It Will Be From Here On Out. (Fibromyalgia has a ton of temporary things happening, at least for me, that seem like a Big Deal and then suddenly shift or go away.)
So yeah, silly body is silly.
Not as much pain in the temporarily bad leg today, so that is a huge win. I'll take it.
Does your body ever tell you something like "Augh, my toe is broken!" and then go "just foolin'! It's fine!" a while later?
I continue resting LIKE A POTATO.
Whatever's going on in there, COVID (or something) has apparently been playing with the sliders and the lit-up buttons on my disabilities and chronic ailments. The good leg because the bad leg for several days. Really bad, pain-wise. Now that seems to be easing up a lot. The bad leg is doing something with sensations on the part of the leg where some nerve rerouting/regrowth happened after surgery 16 years ago; I did not need it to play with pins-and-needles, burning, freezing, and shocks on that leg below the replaced hip. Also, the sudden decrease in my hearing was distressing, though that seems to be mostly back where it was now.
Am using what skills I have to treat everything as temporary, and not decide This Is How It Will Be From Here On Out. (Fibromyalgia has a ton of temporary things happening, at least for me, that seem like a Big Deal and then suddenly shift or go away.)
So yeah, silly body is silly.
Not as much pain in the temporarily bad leg today, so that is a huge win. I'll take it.
Does your body ever tell you something like "Augh, my toe is broken!" and then go "just foolin'! It's fine!" a while later?