Sunday, May 12, 2019

Letting Go of the Old School: On Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke

In preparing to launch into my own study of Xenogears, I've been reading around in this awesome Xenogears Study Guide and came across a section about works which were influential in the history of the game's development:

Takahashi was a pretty small kid, so he was better at study than sports. Chemistry and physics were his favorites, "but I was awful at math" he recalls in an interview on Sony's Website in 2002. For art he would sometimes get good grades, sometimes bad, depending on teacher. "I used to read a lot of manga and those science fiction novels with the blue spines from Hayakawa Publishing" he says, referring to the publishers of Japanese translations of Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov, which have clearly influenced Takahashi.

In fact, Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke was directly referenced in Xenogears in the naming of the character "Karellen" (localized as "Krelian" for U.S. audience) who, according to Soraya Saga on Yggdrasil's Periscope Club BBS back in 1999, was the name of Takahashi's favorite character in Childhood's End. The title of "Guardian Angel," given to the character Citan Uzuki, was another reference. Clarke's idea for Childhood's End began with his short story "Guardian Angel" (1946). 2001: A Space Odyssey is referenced with the "SOL-9000" computer that houses the Ministry, and also in Xenogears: Perfect Works with the discovery of Zohar - a monolithic artifact - on Earth in 2001. This event, with some rewrites, was later used as the opening cinematic in Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht...

(So I guess I'll need to brush up on my Nietzsche and Kubrick soon, too). Naturally, I made a visit to the library at once and got a copy of Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke. Somehow, I'd made it this far never having read anything of the SF master, and while I am in awe of Karellen/ Krelian, I don't know that I would have found the book as interesting if I weren't already fascinated by the game. This could just be me, but it poses an interesting problem for this whole project of mine, in which I'm attempting to bridge the worlds of reading books and playing video games in the hopes that learning itself will continue to flourish by the exchange.

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I can well understand the appeal of Karellen for the young man who, in partnership with his wife, would create Xenogears, writing the alien into the game as Krelian. Clarke's Karellen is brilliantly mysterious and intriguing as the spokesman for the Overlords, the benign, seemingly all-powerful race which makes contact with Earth in Clarke's novel. The most interesting thing about him, though, is his secretiveness, hinting at some purpose which, until it is revealed, keeps us turning the pages. Once it is out, though, even more than once we've finally seen Karellen's physical form, he really diminishes in impressiveness. Perhaps, as we learn more about the Overlords' true place in the cosmos, Karellen also gains in pathos, but I would have needed a little more, I think, some hint that he feels the insufficiency of, and wants to do something about, this purpose, to really have Karellen keep my sympathy.

As we're told, though, the Overlords are inscrutable to our sensibilities as we, with our uncanny potential, are to them.

So ultimately what left me unimpressed with the book was the absence of a party corresponding to Fei and his compatriots in Xenogears. There isn't much of an arc for any of the other characters besides Karellen; they all seem like ciphers more than fully realized personalities. There are flashes of something great here, but it never feels like a great novel: the whole paranormal thing is grandiose, if a little stilted; the recapitulation of Jonah is clever, but what message does it convey, really? The rewriting of the past through the future, in the underlying myth of the Garden of Eden, is too pat, delivered as a punchline rather than developed as it would deserve, thematically, through, say, a more engaging Jeff, admirably sketched but too late and too underdeveloped as a young protagonist, or Jean, his mother, who gets so little breathing room as a character beside her cad of a husband.

I guess my question, then, is what it tells us about the creators of Xenogears, that they were so into this book? Of course, they're hardly unique in that, and their borrowings from all sorts of places are well-documented, but still, it might provide a helpful lens into the problems with characterization which the game, too, suffers from at times.

To pivot to the overarching project here again, though: it really seems to me that Clarke is onto something, metaphorically if not literally, with his Chestertonian/Lindsayan interest in the paranormal playing such a critical part in his story. That is, we might be profoundly limiting ourselves in unthinking acceptance of our traditional notions of human potential, and how best it might be nurtured. I deeply disagree with the loss of individual personality and emotional relationship Clarke imagines as prerequisite for some incomprehensible telepathic advance, but from his foreword to the 2000 reprint he seems to disavow some of that, too, later on. Nevertheless, if a school is conceived solely as an incubator for social-emotional comfort, a place where the state provides not only meals and shelter but psychological care as well--and all signs are that this is where we're heading, rapidly--then the utopian experiment Clarke trots out in his island Athens (and Sparta) seems like a good corrective, or at least worth a try. The way I see this actually playing out, however, is more as an add-on rather than an alternative to the social school status quo. That within the parameters of the home-surrogate environment our benign caretakers seem to be establishing in law and practice, there is actually an opportunity to find all sorts of unsuspected breakthroughs, if kids on their phones or devices are allowed to play and learn largely at their own pace. They need not go to some elite artistic colony; they will be there already, if it exists, and if they want to. It will just be a matter of making sure that there is material out there worth their while, and likely to challenge them to reach the full and free deployment of their talents. Something like that, anyway, it is the aim of the new school/Night School to provide.

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