Take me to your leader
In the unlikely event that you have come to this site before seeing Tim Blair, please let me urge you to visit this post - one of the weirdest stories, and certainly one of the funniest comment threads I've read for a long time. In short, it's about a UN resolution to establish diplomatic relations with extraterrestrials.
Apart from the comedy value, it made me nostalgic for a certain era in science-fiction writing, in which the aliens - if they were benevolent - always made a beeline for the UN headquarters to begin their dealings with the earthmen. Arthur C. Clarke's best novel, Childhood's End (1954), has just such a scenario - the Overlord Karellen becomes best buddies with UN Secretary General Stormgren, who becomes his sole conduit for interaction with the poor doomed human race - the President never rates a mention. In fact, there is a rather prescient passage in this novel, concerning the UN. When we first meet Stormgren, he is looking out of his lofty office window, at an anti-Overlord protest in the street far below:
"He sometimes wondered if it was a good thing for any man to work at such an altitude above his fellow humans. Detachment was all very well, but it could so easily turn to indifference".
Indeed.
And I'm sorry to say I guffawed when recently re-viewing Close Encounters of the Third Kind, at the scene in which a convoy of UN trucks suddenly rockets over a sand dune in the Gobi desert, blue banners flying heroically, like finalists in the Paris-Dakar rally.
In the unlikely event that you have come to this site before seeing Tim Blair, please let me urge you to visit this post - one of the weirdest stories, and certainly one of the funniest comment threads I've read for a long time. In short, it's about a UN resolution to establish diplomatic relations with extraterrestrials.
Apart from the comedy value, it made me nostalgic for a certain era in science-fiction writing, in which the aliens - if they were benevolent - always made a beeline for the UN headquarters to begin their dealings with the earthmen. Arthur C. Clarke's best novel, Childhood's End (1954), has just such a scenario - the Overlord Karellen becomes best buddies with UN Secretary General Stormgren, who becomes his sole conduit for interaction with the poor doomed human race - the President never rates a mention. In fact, there is a rather prescient passage in this novel, concerning the UN. When we first meet Stormgren, he is looking out of his lofty office window, at an anti-Overlord protest in the street far below:
"He sometimes wondered if it was a good thing for any man to work at such an altitude above his fellow humans. Detachment was all very well, but it could so easily turn to indifference".
Indeed.
And I'm sorry to say I guffawed when recently re-viewing Close Encounters of the Third Kind, at the scene in which a convoy of UN trucks suddenly rockets over a sand dune in the Gobi desert, blue banners flying heroically, like finalists in the Paris-Dakar rally.
posted by cuckoo at
8:36 AM
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