1990: Fusion power
2010: Weather control; robot mining vehicles
2030: Mining the moon and planets; contact with extraterrestrial intelligences
2050: Gravity control; artificial breeding of intelligent animals
2100: Actual meeting with extraterrestrials; human immortality
The last prophecy sends a shiver up the spine, coming as it does at the end of that list of technical achievements. Does he really mean immortality? Has he heard about the Struldbruggs (see Swift, Gulliver’s Travels)?
Profiles of the Future is a fine book, maybe the best of its kind. A better book, and perhaps the best of its kind—although its kind is much grander than a set of technological forecasts—is Childhood’s End. Clarke, like many of his colleagues in the science-fiction field, is a wooden, rather inept writer. His characters are one-dimensional, his episodes melodramatic, his conflicts neither very important nor very credible. But he has a good mind, full of big ideas. He is not afraid to follow his imagination as it ranges through the possibilities of space and time.
Childhood’s End is set some fifty years in the future—that is, since the book was written in 1953, just about now. The human race, quarrelsome as ever but now in possession of weapons with which it can destroy itself, is on the edge of doing just that. Suddenly, a fleet of space ships appears, one enormous silvery vessel settling quietly over each of the major cities of the world. The visitors quickly establish their absolute, total, and beneficent control over mankind. It becomes clear that they have come to save the human race from itself. And they turn the Earth into the paradise that it can be when reason instead of passion rules, and war is abolished forevermore.
As the story proceeds, however, you realize that the Overlords are not acting on their own. They have not just come; they have been sent, by a being or beings of which men have no knowledge or comprehension. This Overmind knows that something is about to happen in human history, and that it will be the most important thing that ever happened; hence mankind must be protected from itself until the fateful event occurs.
I don’t want to reveal what this fateful event is, and how it occurs. Among other things Childhood’s End is a novel of suspense, and I don’t intend to spoil it.
It is more than that: it is also a novel of ideas. In a sense everything Clarke has written (including 2001) bears on the same theme: the salvation of man from himself by means of some incomprehensible outside power. But in no other work, I think, does he make that wondrous future both intelligible and credible.
J.D. SALINGER
1919–
The Catcher in the Rye
Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City on January 1, 1919. He attended public schools in the city and a military academy in Pennsylvania, and also attended classes at New York University and Columbia. He began writing when he was fifteen and published his first shorts story in 1940. From 1942 to 1946 he was in the army, and his experiences inspired such stories as the wonderful “For Esme, with Love and Squalor.” His first novel, The Catcher in the Rye, was published in 1950. There are fads in books as well as clothes, and this book’s great fad—it was a cult novel throughout the Western world a generation ago—is over. Then, there would have been no question whether to include it in this list of recommendations. Now, there is a question, and the choice—for I do recommend it now as I would have then—requires some justification.
One of the problems with The Catcher in the Rye is its author. J.D. Salinger, who, after writing it and a handful of stories, some of them almost long enough to be novels, stopped writing altogether and retired from public view. In today’s world of “hype,” the lack of an author to promote becomes a serious hindrance to the continued fame and even the readability of a book. Salinger’s refusal to promote The Catcher in the Rye himself is of course symbolic and exemplary. The book itself is about that kind of refusal. Holden Caulfield, its puzzled young hero, is certain of one thing: “The phonies are coming in at the windows,” and he wants no part of them.
That is one of the phrases that persist in the memory of readers of The Catcher in the Rye. There are memorable images, too. Holden’s delight, and the authorities’ dismay, over the boy who farted in chapel. Holden’s obsession with the ducks on the pond in Central Park and his question: Where do they go in the winter, he asks his taxi driver, when the pond freezes over? Holden and his little sister, Phoebe Weatherfield Caulfield, walking down Fifth Avenue on parallel courses, not looking at each other but very much aware that the other is there, finally reaching out to one another. And the last, great image of the title, which Holden himself explains to Phoebe. (Do you know what the title means? Are you curious? Then you must read the book to find out!) The image of “the catcher in the rye” will haunt you and you will find yourself thinking about being that whenever you are at your best.
A generation ago young men and women everywhere read The Catcher in the Rye and sympathized with its hero’s rebellion against the forces that surrounded him (and them), and found in it the halting, inarticulate expression of their own rebellion. Rebellion has come a long way since the 1950s; today some young rebels kidnap business executives and torture them to death, or blow up railroad stations, killing scores of innocents. Rebellion, in short, has become institutionalized, has its own international communications network, even its own forms of promotion and hype. When it comes right down to it, terrorists want more than anything else to manipulate the media and control the hype, which is what corporations (their great enemy) also do, but with dollars instead of bombs. Holden Caulfield would say the phonies are still coming in at the windows, and he would be right.
The greatest fiction tries to get us to see, tries to help us tear the blindfold from our eyes and to recognize what is real and what is not, what is true and what is merely a promotion. The Catcher in the Rye is, in a sense, a slight book, but it is relentlessly concerned with doing the same things that the greatest books do. It tells us to beware of traps and illusions, to open our eyes to the real world, where phonies fade away to the shadows that they truly are. It warns us that frauds and phonies are everywhere, especially in high places, and especially when we are young, because then we are impressionable and can be all the more easily manipulated. It advises us to trust no one who does not love us, and to reach out with love in return. It tells us that all these actions are more important than getting good marks and having a successful career and making lots of money. It informs us that the world is, really, almost completely upside down from what the authorities tell us. It explains that we simply have to think for ourselves and take nothing on faith, even when it seems absolutely dependable and true. And it tells us, finally, that we will fail at this, and so will others, and that someone—probably each of us—will have to be a catcher in the rye, because otherwise the world will all fall down.