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Kaethe's Reviews > Rebuttal
Rebuttal
by
by
19 December 2022
Before rereading the story, a note about what comes to mind about it now. And the answer is "nothing except the awful discovery."
***
21 December 2022
I mean, the Jesuit astrophysicist was kind of a dick, since he only cared about this civilization because they made graceful stuff. God slaughters innocents all the time in the Old Testament, including his son, in the New, but that's cool because....? He doesn't mention other civilizations
that people interact with, but notes that remains of other extinct races have been discovered, and those don't bother him. Pretty clear who is the asshole in this story.
In looking for a copy to read I came across "Rebbutal" by Betsy Curtis, which is available from Project Gutenburg. It ran in the same magazine, sometime in the year after Clarke's. It has a unique point to make, but fair warning, it is even less a story, although presented as a diologue.
To my mind, both of these stories suffer the same deficiency: they both are based on the same premise: that the god of a culture of a certain place and time, one who implies the existence of others in his insistence on primacy, and one who seemingly did not reveal himself to any other culture at the same or earlier time, that god and no other is indeed the Supreme Ruler of the universe, and that humans cannot go on without him despite ample evidence that a great many humans have managed to go on no better or worse without that god.
Review cross-posted with The Star.
Personal copies
Before rereading the story, a note about what comes to mind about it now. And the answer is "nothing except the awful discovery."
***
21 December 2022
I mean, the Jesuit astrophysicist was kind of a dick, since he only cared about this civilization because they made graceful stuff. God slaughters innocents all the time in the Old Testament, including his son, in the New, but that's cool because....? He doesn't mention other civilizations
that people interact with, but notes that remains of other extinct races have been discovered, and those don't bother him. Pretty clear who is the asshole in this story.
In looking for a copy to read I came across "Rebbutal" by Betsy Curtis, which is available from Project Gutenburg. It ran in the same magazine, sometime in the year after Clarke's. It has a unique point to make, but fair warning, it is even less a story, although presented as a diologue.
To my mind, both of these stories suffer the same deficiency: they both are based on the same premise: that the god of a culture of a certain place and time, one who implies the existence of others in his insistence on primacy, and one who seemingly did not reveal himself to any other culture at the same or earlier time, that god and no other is indeed the Supreme Ruler of the universe, and that humans cannot go on without him despite ample evidence that a great many humans have managed to go on no better or worse without that god.
Review cross-posted with The Star.
Personal copies
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
December 20, 2022
–
Finished Reading
December 26, 2022
– Shelved
December 26, 2022
– Shelved as:
scifi
