Crusade (short story)

"Crusade"
Short story by Arthur C. Clarke
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre(s)Science-fiction
Publication
Published inThe Farthest Reaches
Publication typeAnthology
PublisherTrident Press
Media typePrint, book
Publication date1968

"Crusade" is a short story by English writer Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1968 and later reprinted in The Wind from the Sun as well as The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke.

Synopsis

The story follows the extremely long life span of an artificial intelligence that exists on a frozen planet in the vast space between two galaxies. The intelligence sends out scouts into another galaxy to seek other life like themselves, only to discover biological intelligences, whose physique is very different from their own. Tens of thousands of years pass to collect data about them, before the intelligence decides to send a "crusade", which will reach planet Earth in the year 2050.

Release

"Crusade" was first published in 1968 as part of the anthology The Farthest Reaches, which was published by Trident Press.[1] The following year it was given a French translation and released in the fifteenth fiction special for the magazine Histoires stellaires.[2] It has subsequently been republished in several different collections that include The Wind from the Sun and The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke.[3][4] "Crusade" has been translated into approximately five languages, which include French, German, and Croatian.

Themes

Themes covered in the story include the concept of humanity. In his paper "2001 in Perspective: The Fiction of Arthur C. Clarke", John Hollow covered the story along with "Dial F for Frankenstein", noting that "The thing mocked in each of these stories, however, is not the machine but man's assumption that he is the be-all and end-all of the universe."[5] Zoran Živković covered "Crusade" in his 2018 paper, writing that "The transience and fragility of the world of the giant ammoniac mind–in aeonian proportions, of course–compel it to act to preserve itself. Thus it takes a step that Clarke considers to represent a necessary phase in the development of every cosmic being."[6]

Legacy

Soumya Banerjee cited "Crusade" as the inspiration for this 2016 paper "A Roadmap for a Computational Theory of the Value of Information in Origin of Life Questions".[7]

References

  1. ^ Elder, Joseph (1968). The farthest reaches. New York: Trident Press. OCLC 448277.
  2. ^ Clarke, Arthur C. (1969) "Croisade", Histoires stellaires, Fiction Spécial #15.
  3. ^ Clarke, Arthur C. (2000). The collected stories. London: Victor Gollancz. ISBN 0-575-07065-X. OCLC 49338196.
  4. ^ Clarke, Arthur C. (1972). The wind from the sun; stories of the space age (1st ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 0-15-196810-1. OCLC 293152.
  5. ^ Hollow, John (1976). "2001 in Perspective: The Fiction of Arthur C. Clarke". Southwest Review. 61 (2): 113–129. ISSN 0038-4712. JSTOR 43468825.
  6. ^ Živković, Zoran (2018), "The Theme of First Contact in the SF Works of Arthur C. Clarke", First Contact and Time Travel, Science and Fiction, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 3–36, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-90551-8_1, ISBN 978-3-319-90550-1, retrieved 2021-02-23
  7. ^ Banerjee, Soumya (2016). "A roadmap for a computational theory of the value of information in originof life questions". Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems. 14 (3): 314–321. doi:10.7906/indecs.14.3.4. ISSN 1334-4676.