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The Mysterious World of Arthur C. Clarke

In 1924, a young woman named Anna Mitchell-Hedges, on an expedition with her father for her seventeenth birthday, found a crystal skull beneath a collapsed Mayan altar. The skull was life-size, carved from clear quartz, and as detailed as an anatomical model. There was a detachable jaw nearby. With the assistance of the Maya people, they were engaged in uncovering the ruins of the ancient city of Lubaantun in what is now Belize.

The young woman’s father, F.A. Mitchell-Hedges, was an amateur archaeologist, adventurer, and popular author. He believed that Lubaantun had some connection to the legend of Atlantis. Later investigations by those skilled in gemwork techniques indicated that the skull had been made without modern tools, which would have left telltale markings on the smooth surface. They hinted that its anatomical precision was the result of hand-grinding with sand, a process they said would have taken several centuries. According to Anna, the local Maya people told her that the skull was 3,600 years old. They said that it had the powers to heal the sick, and, if used in the proper way, the power to kill.

None of that was true. The skull was likely made in Germany in the nineteenth century, from quartz mined in Brazil. F.A. Mitchell-Hedges bought it on auction at Sotheby’s in 1943, as a present for his daughter, who exhibited the skull on and off—for profit—until her death in 2007. More updated examinations found evidence that it had been made with high-speed mechanical grinding equipment over a period of days, not, as previously claimed, through the painstaking application of hand labor and sand over hundreds of years.

The fact that the skull was a forgery did not stop it from being the centerpiece of a television show and accompanying book, both called Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, released in 1980 in Great Britain and the United States. Although he was not heavily involved in the production of either the show or the book (which seemed to have traded on the name of the famous science fiction author and cowriter of 2001: A Space Odyssey) the themes of Mysterious World were close to Clarke’s heart and to his work overall. This show helped establish and maintain a kind of holy canon of mysterious phenomena that had begun to enter into culture after the end of World War II. Among the topics it covered were UFOs, sea serpents, Bigfoot, ball lightning, and a lot of “unexplained” ancient artifacts and engineering feats like the Nazca Lines, Stonehenge, the “Baghdad Battery,” the giant stone spheres of Costa Rica, and the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull, which appeared on the book’s cover and in the opening title sequence of the series.

Clarke was a champion of the sciences—especially space science. He is credited with being an early proponent, if not the inventor, of key scientific and fictional concepts like the geostationary satellite and the space elevator. His work, alongside that of Wernher von Braun and others in the constellation of popular nonfiction books about space exploration that came out in the late 1950s, was built off of a long history of advocacy. He was twice the president of the world’s oldest space science group, the British Interplanetary Society. In John Clute and Peter Nicholls’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, they call Clarke the writer who is “most closely identified with knowledgeable, technological ‘hard’ science fiction,” and yet, they point out, he’s also “strongly attracted to the metaphysical, even to the mystical.”¹

In the 1960s and ’70s, as actual space science moved from breakthrough to breakthrough, and then stagnated, science fiction changed too. Writers like Clarke who had always mixed the mystical, and even the spooky, into their “harder” speculations became more relevant than ever. The “world” in the title of Clarke’s series is our world, Earth, but now made strange. And the mode of that estrangement was one rehearsed in his fiction about outer space. Clarke’s famous “Third Law” links up these realms and resolves the contradiction noted by Clute and Nicholls: “Any sufficiently advanced technology,” he says, “is indistinguishable from magic.”²

Clarke’s best-known works of fiction are built around encounters with mysterious artifacts of unknown technological purpose that hint at other, transformative ways of life in the universe. These are often impossibly simple geometric primitives, like the rectangular slab in 2001, or the massive eponymous cylinder that contains its own mysterious world in Rendezvous with Rama. These are both built by ancient vanished alien civilizations, and they may be able to take Earthlings to the stars, but only if they are willing to transform themselves. Clute and Nicholls call these “Big Dumb Objects,” and devote a whole entry in their book to the discussion of their role in the work of Clarke and others.

One of the virtues of Clute and Nicholls’s Encyclopedia is that it catalogs not only authors, works, and themes, but also the affects, emotions, and sensations particular to various kinds of science fiction. The ones they associate with Clarke and his Big Dumb Objects are the entries for “Conceptual Breakthrough” and “Sense of Wonder”—the effects of encounters with phenomena outside any of the contexts that you’d usually use to make sense of them. That type of encounter leaves one with either a new way to understand the world, or a new way to feel.

Characteristically, Clarke wanted to take all of this magic and, if not turn it back into technology, at least impose some order on it. His major contribution to Mysterious World was to organize its subjects into three main types: Mysteries of the first kind were once unexplainable inside the context of human science, but are understood now that the context has changed and expanded. Mysteries of the second kind are still misunderstood, but might be describable without the need to abandon or drastically alter existing frameworks. Finally there are mysteries of the third kind, for which any explanation is entirely outside the set of all contexts that human science might currently be able to apply to them.³ These are, like many of Clarke’s science fictional objects, threats to the existence of entire worldviews. The Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull seemed like a mystery of the second kind—or even the third—but it turned out to be one of the first.

This set of operations—trajectories that go outward to space to encounter new models and then bring them inward, back to Earth, where they make our world new and mysterious—is not only emblematic of Clarke’s work. This constant movement between the interior and exterior of various contextual frameworks characterizes a whole approach to space science and science fiction that came to the fore during this period, both in the West and in the soon-to-be former Soviet Union.

Odysseys in Time and Space

Wernher von Braun’s planetary and spatial imagination was limited; he could do little but picture—and design—an eternal America in an eternal 1955. Any unknown conditions could be simply “conquered” by throwing more of the same at the problem: more spaceships in the fleet, more men to build them, and more money to make it all happen. The horrors of the world wars, the real ones he’d participated in and his own imaginary ones that he hoped might ensure lasting peace, took place off-screen, edited out of any official accounts or biographies. He’d rather talk about planet Mars than Planet Dora.

But von Braun’s friend Arthur C. Clarke preferred to stay close to the strangeness, if not the horror. Clarke’s imagination replaced the certainty of the von Braun paradigm with mystery, conceptual breakthroughs, and a sense of wonder. And unlike earlier popularizers of the idea that humans could and should go and live in space permanently, Clarke was a bit of a skeptic. He seems to have suspected that even if humans were able to leave Earth, they would almost certainly never leave the Solar System, and if they did, both what they might find, and what they might become, would have little to do with humanity as it existed in the mid twentieth century.

In his work, Clarke often presents the encounter and engagement with mysterious artifacts alongside perfectly ordinary, even domestic, scenarios. For instance, in “The Sentinel,” a short story originally published in 1951 that was later adapted into part of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a geologist discovers an artifact on the Moon while making breakfast. He spends so much time staring at a glint of unexpected light in the lunar mountains that he burns the sausage. He leaves his rover and climbs the cliffs to the place the light had reflected from, where he finds a “glittering, roughly pyramidal structure, twice as high as a man, that was set in the rock like a gigantic, many-faceted jewel.”⁴

This object, “not a building, but a machine,” had been there for billions of years. It was too old and too singular and strange to have been part of the natural history of the Earth or Moon. It was, he concludes, a sentinel set by ancient aliens, in the hopes that one day Earth would develop intelligent life capable of reaching their planet’s closest companion in the Solar System. And once humans had disturbed this sentinel—blown it apart with an atom bomb, in fact—the loss of its homing signal would be a sign to those visitors that another species had simultaneously managed the capability of spaceflight and great destruction. Clarke’s story has echoes of Bernal’s thinking as well as von Braun’s: the choice to go to space peacefully is intimately bound up with the ability to make catastrophic war.

This set of assumptions about capabilities, and the subsequent mystery that arises when some artifact is in seemingly the wrong context—the wrong place or time, when no active agent with the ability to make or place it should have existed, is central to Clarke’s sensibilities. In 2001, the artifact on the Moon is not a glittering giant pyramidal jewel, but a matte-black rectangular slab, and it sends a signal to Jupiter, where another, larger copy of itself waits, hidden in orbit. The key feature of these artifacts is their uncanny tectonics. The methods of their manufacture are totally obscure, for the objects don’t express anything about how they are put together or refined. Like the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull, there are no marks or seams on their perfectly, unnaturally smooth surfaces. “It was a chastening thought,” Clarke wrote in 2001, “that the entire technology of Earth could not shape even an inert block, of any material, with such a fantastic degree of precision.”⁵ The seamless tectonics and unitary materiality of these artifacts give them their name: Monoliths. The degree of exactitude and refinement of the object’s surface is linked to the presumed level of technical sophistication of the culture that created it.

In Mysterious World, this linkage shows up again and again. The crystal skull is mysterious because it could not have been made, Mitchell-Hedges and other archaeologists from the early twentieth century presumed, by the culture who occupied the same time and place where it was “found.” This question is resolved when the object is placed in a new context—a nineteenth-century workshop in Germany, instead of a ruined city from 1600 BCE in Belize (with presumed links to ancient Atlantis). This is what makes the skull a mystery of the first type, explained by a shift in, not an expansion of, existing contexts.

Another set of artifacts in the book and television series underwent a related shift. The stone spheres of Costa Rica, also featured in Mysterious World, are a set of objects, again monolithic, dated to as early as 500 CE. They exist in a range of sizes, but several are bigger than six feet in diameter, and weigh many tons, though they are very accurately carved. The mystery, when they were “discovered” and studied by European American archaeologists in the 1940s, was “who made them, how, why, and when?”⁶ The context that made these questions possible was defined by a set of assumptions that was racist and ahistorical: that indigenous, colonized people could not have possessed the capability for the production of objects of such size and refinement.

This was a political context that lay outside of the archaeo-logical context, and it went unexamined, even though it should have been as important as the search for telltale tool marks on the objects’ surfaces. The culture that made the spheres had been wiped out by Spanish conquistadores. And, in a turn not unlike the last resort of the scientists in “The Sentinel,” workers in the United Fruit Company, during a more recent wave of colonization in the 1930s, drilled into some of the seamless objects and blew them up with dynamite. At the time, rumors and legends were circulating that somehow the spheres were filled with gold.

When Clarke and his coauthors were putting together Mysterious World, these two mysteries of the first type were still considered to be of the second. The crystal skull and the stone spheres were categorized as “unexplained.” The shifts in context that redefined their origins only happened later. Other mysteries cataloged in the book remain open. The Baghdad Battery, a vessel from Iraq with copper and iron inserts that could have produced an electric current, might be up to 1,800 years old. One segment of the television show showed an experimenter generating a half volt of current when they filled an identically configured vessel with grape juice, a mildly acidic liquid. Common speculation suggests that it was used to electroplate metal ornaments with gold or silver.

The Antikythera Mechanism is another device featured in the show and book. Dating from a period about a thousand years earlier than the Baghdad Battery, it is a collection of interlinked gears that was found by divers in 1901 in a shipwreck under the Aegean Sea. As X-ray images and computer modeling have shown, it is a clockwork analog computer that can track and predict the movements of the Sun, Moon, and planets, including eclipses.

The tectonics of these objects tell a different story than the seamless spheres or skulls. They are clearly made of individual parts that could only have been put together, in the way they are, in order to serve some legible technological purpose, even if a very unlikely and unexpected one for their time and place. These cases—as Clarke’s Mysterious World frames them—are examples of singular technologies that seem to have come out of nowhere and disappeared without leaving any trace of their development or their lasting influence. Where did they come from, and perhaps more provocatively, where did they, and the knowledge it took to build them, go?

Clarke and others, like his fellow mystery-phile Erich von Däniken, sometimes seem to suspect that things like these point to an influence from outside the human world, possibly from some more “advanced” alien species. Von Däniken, in his 1968 book Chariots of the Gods?, developed a kind of grand unified theory that encompassed many of the canonical mysteries that Clarke explored in Mysterious World. His thesis was that artifacts from older cultures around the world pointed to a period in which Earth was regularly visited by ancient aliens. Some of them, like the pyramids in Giza, were built by these visitors, according to von Däniken’s theory. Others, like the Nazca Lines drawn on hillsides in South America—which are only comprehensible from the air—might have been built under their direction. Still others, like the Baghdad Battery and Antikythera Mechanism were, in von Däniken’s schema, built by humans using knowledge that the aliens had given them.

In Mysterious World, Clarke stops short of calling the Antikythera Mechanism an alien artifact, but he does say that it’s not far off from one:

If the insight of the Greeks had matched their ingenuity, the industrial revolution might have begun a thousand years before Columbus. By this time we would not merely be pottering around on the moon; we would have reached the nearer stars. And I have often wondered what other treasures of advanced technology may lie hidden in the sea. We can be absolutely certain that the Antikythera computer is the product of human skill; but if there is anywhere one might expect to find crashed spaceships or other alien artifacts, it would be in the oceans that cover three-quarters of our world.⁷

So if the potential of the Antikythera Mechanism had been followed through on, we humans might be someone else’s aliens by now. Are these objects out of time? Or out of space? Maybe they exist because of the intervention of an alien culture that was previously distant in space and further along in the linear path of time? Or maybe their existence is an affront to our assumptions about how time itself works. Either way, they are outside of the contexts that historians and archaeologists ordinarily bring to bear in order to make an artifact make sense. The salient question here is less “How did they do that?” and more “Why did they stop?” Why and how would people in the Fertile Crescent invent a battery and then fail to see what else (besides electroplating jewelry) could be done with it? What could explain the seeming fact that the ancient Greeks built one mechanical computer (to serve one purpose), never built another one, and subsequently forgot how? These things are a challenge to assumed linear frameworks about time, space, and technology.

Colonialism is a type of planetary imagination that constructs—and benefits from—these preexisting assumptions. In the colonial imagination, some cultures that are distant from Europe are defined as primitive, and European cultures are thereby defined as advanced. Alongside this spatial distinction, there’s a parallel temporal one. Colonial modes of thinking about archaeology, anthropology, and science fiction assume that older cultures must have more technological capabilities than younger ones. This is not a context within which one can place a 2,000-year-old mechanical computer.

When Alexander Bogdanov or Wernher von Braun imagine Mars as an older, dryer planet with an ancient, wise, decaying society, they are translating these Earthly colonial contexts about space and time to the Solar System. In early twentieth-century science fiction imaginations, Mars (further from the Sun) is old and advanced, decadent even, while Venus (closer to the Sun) is young, vital and primitive. Earth is somewhere in the middle of this developmental trajectory. There is more than racism and colonialism in play here, although these modes all support one another. Call it the ideology of teleology. In this context, there’s an unexamined assumption that the time in which culture and technology changes is linear, and that change follows an inevitable developmental sequence from simplicity to complexity. Given enough time and the right environment, this worldview says, and the octopus will always develop the eye; but further than that, the octopus, if it is smart enough to use tools, and lucky enough to avoid catastrophes, will create war, socialism, and space elevators.

Inside and Outside Contexts

During the 1990s, another science fiction writer, Iain M. Banks, described these kinds of situations in a way that’s related to Clarke’s earlier framing. When something appears or happens in a place or time in which it should not, in which there is no framework that can explain its existence, or even the possibility for its existence, we have, according to Banks, an “outside context problem.” This is the kind of encounter, like Clarke’s “mysteries of the third kind,” that reveals the limits of a personal or cultural worldview. And besides precipitating a “sense of wonder,” or a “conceptual breakthrough,” it often makes that worldview, and sometimes that person or culture, obsolete. “An Outside Context Problem,” Banks writes, “was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.” And, fittingly, the classic model for an outside context problem, per Banks, is colonization:

The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass … when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.⁸

When Europeans arrived in the Americas en masse, they had oceangoing ships, firearms, and horses, and they brought even more dangerous—though less visible—things along as well. The gap in technological capability alone may have been sufficient for European colonizers to conquer, subjugate, and enslave the indigenous people, but it was the multiple plagues that probably tipped the scales in the favor of the invaders. The diseases that came with them, for which native people had no preexisting immunity, killed millions. The technological imbalance was unprecedented in human conflict, but the existence and spread of alien microbes was an even more devastating outside context problem for the people of the “New World.”

Few things have presented so profound an outside context problem to the contemporary human world as the sudden appearance of an alien artifact or ship in our Solar System. Clarke dealt with this theme in a number of different ways. In the 1960s, space scientists were building a consensus that the complicated ecosystems and technological cultures about which earlier generations had speculated were not evident here in our Solar System. No ancient dying race of wise Martians, or swampy primeval Venusian jungles, existed. The allegorical interplanetary aspirations that von Braun and Bogdanov harbored—that humans might learn about our own future and past from our neighbors—were in vain.

If anything, other planets in the Solar System might be home to simple microbial life, or, as Chesley Bonestell and Carl Sagan thought likely, something like lichen might even exist in the cold Martian desert. The Soviet Venera probes that landed on Venus, and the American Viking landers on Mars (both alien ships in their own right) would confirm that neither place was hospitable to anything like life as we knew it. If alien intelligent life existed, we now knew, it must be very distant in time and space. But Clarke still imagined that life—as we didn’t, and maybe couldn’t know it—might have visited from far outside, long ago.

“The Sentinel,” Clarke’s first ancient-alien story, was included in a collection of his short stories of the same title, published in 1983. “Jupiter V” (1953), another of the stories in that volume that contributed to the development of 2001, is about the discovery that one of Jupiter’s inner moons, Amalthea, is actually a gigantic abandoned ancient alien spacecraft, from a culture that also left traces of their existence on Mars. The discoverers of this artifact are onboard the ship Arnold Toynbee, named after a British philosopher of history whose work dealt with, among other things, a question that had also occupied J.D. Bernal: that of the relationship between the mind and the body.

Beginning in the 1980s, an anonymous street artist working mostly in the mid-Atlantic region of North America began placing asphalt tiles in city streets with variations on a stenciled message: “TOYNBEE IDEA IN MOVIE 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER.” These tiles are their own kind of mysterious artifact, but the implied linkages between historical determinism, “Jupiter V,” 2001, embodiment in post-human futures, and critiques of Russian cosmism seem provocative, if not entirely clear.

Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama deals with similar tensions. This book is about the literal appearance of an alien spacecraft in the Solar System—a giant, miles-long, featureless rotating cylinder. The protagonists of this story attempt to place this artifact into various contexts in order to make sense of it, but ultimately Rama eludes all of these frameworks. The Earthbound Spaceguard system initially mistakes it for an asteroid that might be on a collision course with our planet. The Hermians, members of a human settlement on Mercury, are convinced that that Rama is here to subjugate and colonize the human worlds of the Solar System, and they send a nuclear missile to try and blow it up before it can enter orbit around the Sun. Another Earth-based religious group, the Fifth Church of Christ, believes that this is a craft come to rescue the faithful.⁹

Rama is indifferent to all of this, though. Rama keeps its mysteries to itself, while it seems to grow more active as it approaches the Sun for a “slingshot maneuver.” The human explorers leave before the cylinder pushes itself out of the Solar System, and maybe outside of the Milky Way galaxy, on its way to its next destination, using a drive that seems to violate the known laws of physics.

Another book by Clarke, Imperial Earth (1975), is about the resurrection of the dead, via cloning, on Titan, a moon of Saturn. Published in time for the United States’ bicentennial, this novel is about a family who lives on the moon. The favored “son,” a clone of the founder of this prominent industrialist clan, is returning to Earth in the year 2276, to mark the 500th anniversary of the founding of the US in colonial America. But he is also here to settle old scores with rivals and ex-lovers, and to clone himself in order to keep his family legacy continuous.¹⁰

The Earth in Imperial Earth is literally unrecognizable to this alien visitor, as it is to the reader as well. Just like in Mysterious World, Clarke takes the opportunity to transfer the sense of wonder, which is his key affect, from space back down to the home planet. The ex-girlfriend of the protagonist, we learn, is the vice president of an entertainment company that is famous for creating unique and unexpected custom experiences. The slogan of Enigma Associates is “We Astonish,” and to this end, she arranges for him to join a group that’s taking a trip to an unspecified destination. When their plane touches down in a clearing in the middle of a dense forest, and they hear strange sounds while camping out, their guide warns them not to go into the woods alone.

Is this Borneo? Indonesia? The Congo? No, this is a different post-colonial territory: Central Park, as they find out the next day. The Earth of Imperial Earth has a declining population, and cities like New York are emptying out and becoming wild again; one of the only skyscrapers left on the skyline is the Empire State Building, which gives away their location. The Enigma handlers take the group on a tour of a city in the process of reintegrating a new kind of wilderness. The zoo is resurrecting extinct animals, like giant wolves and pygmy elephants. The group rides these “miniphants” and ponies. They see Mount Rockefeller, a terraced ziggurat made from the rubble of the old city, now covered in lush hanging gardens. Then they head south along the West Side Highway, following the path of the present-day High Line park, to a grand finale of wonders, the newly raised Titanic, where they have lunch.

Clarke was obsessed with the sunken passenger liner, and it shows up in several of his books. The Titanic is, like the Antikythera Mechanism, a treasure of advanced technology that lies hidden in the sea. And yet, it’s difficult to imagine what this artifact meant to him. One biographer, Gary Westfahl, links it to the image of the broken machine. As Westfahl notes, even the most carefully engineered and planned pieces of technology are still, somehow, not magic. They don’t last forever; some don’t even make it to the end of their first trip without encountering an outside context problem like an iceberg. Clarke was also a diver, an expression of his lifelong fascination with the sea, and with ships. Although Clarke’s own father doesn’t seem to have been a sailor, a protagonist in one of Clarke’s novels, Glide Path (1963), is haunted by his father’s loss of his ship, which had sunk during the evacuation of Dunkirk.

Whatever the complex of feelings and symbolism bound up in a mysterious artifact like the Titanic, it is also emblematic of another of Clarke’s key modes. Whereas earlier proposals for the inhabitation of space and advancement of life on the Earth were about extensivity—the imperative to spread out as much as possible on the planet’s surface, and into outer space—Clarke seems more interested in intensivity—the urge to go inward into the strangeness that’s already present. The world, any world, becomes more mysterious the more deeply one looks at it. Clarke himself, and his protagonists, all dive deep into the waters and worlds. The hero of Imperial Earth finally encounters his ex-girlfriend, the vice president of Enigma Associates, aboard a lost ship dragged up from three kilometers beneath the ocean. And when they meet for the last time, it is in her Manhattan apartment, dozens of stories underground. The elite of Imperial Earth have also gone inward, away from the surface, and into the depths of their mysterious world.

Being Vnye

In the 1960s and ’70s, as Arthur C. Clarke was pivoting from writing about mysteries in space to exploring mysteries on Earth, another set of influential science fiction writers in the Soviet Union were making the same move. In both the West and the USSR, these inward turns were implicit and explicit critiques of earlier, more expansive models for human presence in space. Emblematic among those later Soviet writers were the Strugatsky brothers, Boris and Arkady, whose collaborative body of work was written between the late 1950s and late 1980s. One of their earliest stories, like Clarke’s “Jupiter V,” takes place around Jupiter’s moon Amalthea, and their work has other meaningful parallels as well.

The film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968 and directed by Stanley Kubrick from a script cowritten with Arthur C. Clarke, is often placed alongside Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris, based on a science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem. Both feature trips to space stations and mysterious cloudy planets. But a better comparison might be made to another Tarkovsky film, Stalker, from 1979, with a script by the Strugatskys, based on their 1972 novella Roadside Picnic.

Some of the Strugatsky brothers’ best-known work, besides Stalker / Roadside Picnic (which we’ll return to shortly), takes place in a shared future history timeline known loosely as the Noon Universe. In nine or so novels, and Noon: 22nd Century, the short story collection that gives this universe its name, they weave a utopian narrative of historical development that starts with the assumption of worldwide Marxist communism on Earth. In the early stories that compose Noon, the protagonists can travel faster than light and visit other solar systems, but they have not yet found any conclusive proof that intelligent life exists elsewhere.¹¹ They find artifacts that seem to have been left behind by species with more capabilities than their own human culture, but these have been abandoned millions, if not billions, of years in the past. In these first stories, when explorers do find hints that other intelligences might be hiding, or still in development, they observe a strict ethic of noninterference in their affairs, pulling back to observe.

This is a prefiguration, by only a few years, of Star Trek’s famous “Prime Directive,” which requires the more “advanced” civilizations of Starfleet to avoid meddling with the development of other alien cultures. This idea was, in fact, an echo of ongoing Cold War foreign policy debates and tensions. In 1924, Joseph Stalin had ordered that the posture for the Soviet Union’s relations to other nations be one of staid contentment with “socialism in one country,” after a series of failed Marxist revolutions in other countries in the early ’20s. Their failure had demonstrated, so the assumption went, the limits of an earlier dominant theory that the promotion of “permanent revolution” might quickly bring about the kind of global communism that the Strugatskys used as their utopian starting point. In the 1960s, during the US war in Vietnam, the rehabilitation of an ethic of noninterference with regard to other cultures was used as a critique of American foreign policy.¹²

This mode of detachment was prevalent not only in foreign policy and science fiction, but elsewhere in the USSR. Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak writes about Soviet culture in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s in his 2013 book Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Yurchak is interested in the way that daily life seemed to slowly freeze into certain patterns and modes during this era, in the memories of people who experienced it. And yet when it ended, along with the Soviet Union itself, in 1991, this catastrophic event seemed to surprise few people who lived through it. He identifies several ways in which people dealt with this contradictory existence, a state of being that was seemingly interminable, yet on the brink of certain collapse.

One concept that he returns to is the idea of “being vnye,” a particular term his respondents use when trying to capture the feelings involved. He defines it in this way: “To be vnye is usually translated as ‘outside.’ However, the meaning of this term, at least in many cases, is closer to a condition of being simultaneously inside and out of some context—such as, being within a context while remaining oblivious of it, imagining yourself elsewhere, or being inside your own mind.”¹³

To be vnye is almost a kind of ironic detachment—to be very into something, yet at the same time, almost literally, over it. Seen alongside the policies of noninterference in the parallel universes of Star Trek and Noon, being vnye is a kind of Prime Directive. If the ultimate disruptive event for a culture is to find an alien spaceship in its sky, or a border wall falling in Berlin, then being vnye is like a coping mechanism for dealing with, if not preventing, outside context problems—by remaining aloof from context in the first place.

In Roadside Picnic, the Strugatskys present an alien-contact scenario that could not be more different than the simple appearance of a spacecraft. In this story, there are multiple areas of territory around the world that seem to have, all at once, acquired some very strange and dangerous characteristics. These “Zones” are places where uncanny energies and artifacts are suddenly present, and the nations around them have adopted two ways of uneasily dealing with the power and potential risk they offer.

In the first, scientists study the Zones from the outside, and occasionally make officially sanctioned trips inside them, to bring things back for even closer examination. The results of this work include a slow integration of seeming anomalies like free energy and perpetual motion devices into daily life. This legitimate scientific and economic recuperation of alien artifacts, and the possible money to be made in their use, gives rise to the second mode of encounter: a parallel, criminalized underground network that is doing the same thing. Stalkers, self-taught Zone experts who pass down knowledge, lore, and hand-drawn maps to one another, also work in the Zones. Stalkers recover artifacts for clients who might sell them on the black market, or worse, use them as weapons. In the heart of one Zone, outside a small fictional Canadian town, a Stalker legend says that there is a place that can provide absolute power to anyone who reaches it: the fulfillment of that person’s innermost desire.¹⁴

The plot hinges on the search for this site, which, in the book, contains a classic Clarkeian Big Dumb Object, a seamless Golden Sphere (in the film, it is an interior space, simply “the Room”). But other, stranger phenomena surround the periphery. Here, the dead are resurrected, rising from their graves in cemeteries on the edge of the Zone, to return to their homes and their families, who sometimes welcome them back. These are not brain-eating zombies, but more like brain-damaged victims of dementia or injury. These resurrected dead can’t deal with anything new or novel, but they take comfort in the repetition of memories and domestic patterns from their old lives.

In the book, the scientists who study the Zone are concerned less with this mystery than they are with other, more context-shattering questions. The character Valentine is one of these scientists, and he admits, over a few drinks, that these undead are far from the weirdest phenomena: “What? Oh, no, that’s merely puzzling. How can I put it—at least, that’s imaginable.” This is only a mystery of the second kind. “We’re all cave men in one sense or another,” says Valentine, “We can’t imagine anything scarier than a ghost. But the violation of the law of causality is much more terrifying than a stampede of ghosts.”¹⁵

He is referring here to the phenomena of “the emigrants,” people who lived near the Zone when the moment of “the Visitation” occurred. These residents who survived this first contact seem to bring bad luck with them when they leave the town. If they move elsewhere, statisticians have started to notice that the likelihood of random deaths or natural disasters in the people and places they encounter goes inexplicably upward. Something in the Zone seems to prefer that the people who are living near it stay home, and it can bend the physical laws of chance to help ensure that. This is a mystery of the third kind.

The film Stalker, also written by the Strugatskys, starts with a monologue about mysteries. A character called only “the Writer” is telling a lady friend why he wants to visit the Zone, and it reads like a litany (and existential rebuttal) of the topics covered in Clarke’s Mysterious World: “My dear! The world is absolutely dull, and that is why there’s neither telepathy, nor ghosts, nor flying saucers … and there cannot be anything of the kind. Iron laws control the world and it’s intolerably boring. And these laws, alas, cannot be broken.” “And what about the Bermuda triangle?” she replies, “Are you also going to argue that …?”¹⁶

In the book Roadside Picnic, the strange effects and artifacts in the Zone are very much real; they kill, they maim, they ruin lives, and sometimes they even seem to change them for the better. But in the film Stalker, the nature of the mysteries is much more ambiguous. In the course of a day’s visit to the Zone, the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor encounter very little that’s unexplainable within existing scientific frameworks. A voice seems to call out from nowhere, they get lost, a phone rings in a vacant building with a familiar voice on the other end, a bird flies seemingly out of nowhere and then disappears. The sense of wonder in the film comes from the explorer’s intensive attention to the spaces through which they move, and Tarkovsky’s direction reveals the qualities of those spaces with long, deep shots that patiently wait for something to happen. When things do happen—when the wind stirs the grass, when a stray dog arrives, when a sudden rain shower makes the light dapple from a pool of water in the Room—the result is every bit as mysterious as any Monolith, Mechanism, or Battery.

Taken together, this combination, in Stalker and Roadside Picnic, of an intensive return to a world made strange, in contradistinction to an extensive attempt to bring normalized concerns to the entire cosmos—and, in this presentation, of a resurrection scenario gone wrong—constitutes a coherent and clear critique of the traditional cosmist agenda of Nikolai Fedorov and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Instead of the cosmist ethic of conquest, terraforming, and eternal life for everyone who ever lived, these later Russian works rely on a principle of accepting limits and difference, and deliberately remaining vnye, aloof and reluctant to interfere in the existence of other ways of life. Where Tsiolkovsky imagines the renormalization of places both in outer space and on Earth into situations that are optimized for infinite bare human existences, Clarke, the Strugatskys, and Tarkovsky multiply the mysteries, rewilding the Earth and making the cosmos mysterious again. Bogdanov’s scenario on Mars, in which the heroes—Martian and Earthling—need to talk down the Martian establishment’s desire to conquer Earth, is an argument in favor of a kind of vnye Prime Directive. It’s also an acknowledgment that the Manifest Destiny inherent in early cosmism could go both ways. Tsiolkovsky wrote, in Panpsychism, or Everything Feels, that in a human space-colonial future, “Imperfect worlds will be eliminated and replaced with our own population.”¹⁷ The Strugatskys and Clarke, along with Bogdanov, draw on the colonial anxieties implied here; what if someone else came to that same conclusion about us?

Being vnye is here more than just an ethic of noninterference; we can see that this ethic is rooted not just in a casual, ironic indifference, but in an intensive application of practiced care. We apply the Prime Directive to others, in these stories, in the hopes that others might apply that same Prime Directive to us. In one of the most influential science fiction stories ever written, H.G. Wells’ 1898 War of the Worlds, perhaps the most chilling line is one that describes the antithesis to this practice of care. In the opening paragraph of this book about invaders from Mars, one that was certainly familiar to Bogdanov and von Braun, Wells describes the Martians as “minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.”¹⁸ Wells’s Martians are strict cosmists. It is their lack of sympathy for organisms less “developed” than them that enables the Martian invaders to undertake their attempted genocide and colonization of Earth. But it is also this same lack of sympathy that leads them to overlook the even simpler germs and micro-organisms that end up killing them instead. If these Martians had practiced the care and concern that would have left them vnye, then they would not have encountered this threat to their own context and existence.

Strangely, it was an ethic of care that led Tsiolkovsky to his own conclusions about the necessity of a totalizing human future in space. Tsiolkovsky’s premise, clearly stated in his title Panpsychism, or Everything Feels, is that every atom in the universe has the ability to perceive, react, and even desire. He decides that the best and most satisfying thing for an atom to aspire to be a part of is a thinking intelligent being, and that since the most intelligent beings we know are human, then the goal of transforming all worlds to optimize them for human existence is noble, sympathetic, and emancipatory.

While Tsiolkovsky wants to change the cosmos to fit humans, the Strugatskys and Clarke, in their critique of classical cosmism, propose changing humans instead. In the Strugatskys’ Noon, this reciprocal change—almost a mutual domestication—between humanity and the cosmos, is evident in the section headings that break up the series of interrelated stories: “Almost the Same,” “Homecoming,” “The Planet with All the Conveniences,” and finally “What You Will Be Like.” In the story of that name, and in a few earlier allusions, there is speculation about a human future in which people would simply live in the cosmos like a person in their home. “Homo Omnipotens will inhabit the universe,” one character tells her partner, “the way you and I do this room.”¹⁹

The title of Roadside Picnic comes from a conjecture spun out by Valentine, during the same drinking session in which he discusses the zombies. His theory about the Zone is that it was an alien visitation, but not for invasion, conquest, greetings, or information exchange. He makes an analogy: imagine a roadside picnic, but from the perspective of the animals and insects that live in the field where the travelers stop. Their car might not be legible as a vehicle; so what kind of context would these “beasts that perish” have for making sense of that encounter? Rather, this “Visitation” is a set of effects and phenomena: deafening loudness, crushing weight, noxious gases. There would be activity, maybe songs from a radio, the consumption of food, strange sounds of conversation. What would they find after it was all over? “Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around … Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind … And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.”²⁰

These entities are as vast and cool as Wells’s Martians, but beyond malevolent or unsympathetic, these aliens are worse: they are careless. “So does that mean they never even noticed us?” Valentine’s drinking partner asks. They aren’t here to conquer, nor are they following any sort of Prime Directive that drives their ethics of engagement. They are not vnye in the sense that it is used by Yurchak, but simply don’t know that we exist, and don’t care what happens to us as a consequence of the things they’ve left behind. They are at home in the universe, and they treat it with a corresponding disregard. All of these artifacts, out of time and out of place, are just scraps and forgotten trash.

The story’s protagonist is a Stalker who goes by the name Red. In the book’s final scene, which is probably the most complex and damning critique of traditional cosmism in the Strugatskys’ work, Red leads one last push into the Zone to try and find the legendary Golden Sphere. Yet, we soon realize, even this piece of sufficiently advanced Clarkeian magical technology is just another discarded artifact. “Maybe it had fallen out of some monstrously huge pocket or had gotten lost, rolled away during some game between some giants. It had not been carefully placed here, it had been left behind, littering up the Zone like all the empties, bracelets, batteries, and other rubbish remaining after the Visitation.”²¹

Red has brought along the son of his old mentor/rival, and he speculates that the young man’s beauty, charm, and naive intelligence must have been the result of his father’s previous innermost wish granted by the Sphere. Red’s own daughter is cursed by another of the Zone’s effects; it turns out that the children of Stalkers tend to have genetic damage that causes them to regress in intelligence as they mature. Red knows, but does not tell the boy, that on every trip to this part of the Zone, the first person to pass through an area known by the Stalkers as “the Meatgrinder” will suffer a gruesome death, in order to make it safe for the subsequent explorers to reach the Sphere. Arthur, the young man, rushes past Red toward the Sphere, dancing and shouting his innermost cosmist desires: “Happiness for everybody! … Free! … As much as you want! … Everybody come here! … There’s enough for everybody! Nobody will leave unsatisfied! … Free! … Happiness! … Free!”

This reads like a parody of idealistic yearning that underlies the cosmist Common Task—infinite human life and abundance in infinite space. Red’s exploitation of this idealism reads like a hard cut in this passage, when the Meatgrinder inevitably does its work. But now that Red has his own chance to approach the Sphere, and he thinks about his struggles in life with work, suffering, and death, he can only reiterate the boy’s dying litany.

Cosmic and Other Oceans

Clarke and the Strugatskys, like Bernal and Bogdanov, were likely unaware of each other’s parallel work until much of it had already been produced. Indeed, none of these writers were widely translated into the other’s languages until the late 1970s and early ’80s. These interconnections between themes thus weave a fabric that is more like a set of resonances than a lineage. When stories by science fiction writers were published in the Soviet Union, the most common venue they shared was a magazine named Tekhnika Molodezhi (Technology for the youth), and it was here that Clarke and the Strugatskys first appeared in Russian. The magazine was analogous to Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, or Omni in the West, and was widely read by interested people of all ages. Tekhnika Molodezhi combined news about scientific and engineering development with fictional content that was more speculative, discussing the possible future worlds that might be the result of that progress. In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, a common theme was the development of hostile environments, not only in space, but also in the Arctic zones, deserts, and oceans of humanity’s home planet. In popular culture, in the West and the USSR, these tendencies toward extensivity and intensivity were related, and linked by technology.

In the United States and Great Britain, Mysterious World was not the only television show to explore some of these themes. Two other series, also with accompanying books, fill out a kind of trilogy that looks closely at Earth’s present, its deep past, and the far future, both intensively and extensively. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980) and The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau (1966—1976) both complement Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World (1980) in several ways. Sagan’s book begins with a kind of invocation: “The Cosmos is all that ever was or ever will be.” He capitalizes “Cosmos” throughout, and seems to use it in the same way that the Russian cosmists did.²²

Designer and theorist Nicholas de Monchaux points out the crucial difference between the word “cosmos” and the word “space.” Where space is empty and foregrounds nothingness, the cosmos is full to overflowing, and encompasses everything, even and especially Earth. It is significant, de Monchaux shows, that even though the word “astronaut” existed in Russian, and it means “sailor of stars,” the Soviets decided to name their space-farers “cosmonauts.”²³

It is foremost a sense of the oceanic that connects Sagan’s, Cousteau’s, and Clarke’s work. Sagan returns again and again to a theme he lays out in his book’s third paragraph, which is a variation of the narration from the television show quoted in chapter 2:

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. Some part of our being knows this is from where we came. We long to return.²⁴

Cousteau expressed similar feelings when he told Time magazine in 1960, “From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.” The opening lines of the first episode of the famed ocean explorer’s show, which aired in September 1966, complete this trajectory from extensivity back to intensivity: “Unworldly sights and sounds herald an adventure into inner space.”²⁵ In the ABC version of the show that aired two years later in the United States, those words were intoned by that well-known American mystery-phile Rod Serling, of Twilight Zone fame.

Undersea World relies on the characterization of Earth’s underwater realm as a mysterious world, or even a universe unto itself. The first episode is about the Conshelf Station experiments, which studied how humans could live and work in deepwater habitats, on the continental shelf. This work was originally funded by oil companies, who were interested in learning how long-term undersea living might enable deepwater resource exploitation. Cousteau later pulled out of the Conshelf project, preferring to use his public platform to advocate for the exploration and preservation of this underwater universe, rather than help those who would see it as another place from which to extract natural resources.

In this sense Cousteau was another kind of anti-cosmist. He loved the mysteries of the sea too much to help reshape it to human needs. A few episodes of Underwater World briefly touch on mysteries also beloved by Arthur C. Clarke. When they explore Lake Titicaca, on the border between Bolivia and Peru, the team turns its attention to underwater archaeology. This is the supposed site of the origins of the Inca Empire, Serling intones, and maybe even related to the mythical golden city of El Dorado. “There are few places on Earth where man has not probed, but this remote sanctuary has been untouched. And so the aura of mystery clings to it. Great fables have grown of untapped riches in its depths.”²⁶ In the end, though, it is the mysteries of nature that provide the sense of wonder here: Cousteau and his team are more enchanted by a species of frog that has lost the ability to breathe air, a former amphibian that has returned to a full-time aquatic existence.

Serling also narrated an American version of a 1973 documentary based on Erich von Däniken’s ancient-aliens book Chariots of the Gods? That film, In Search of Ancient Astronauts, opens with a discussion of the Baghdad Battery, with the hint that that this technology was “revealed to man, thousands of years ago.” At one point, saying the quiet part out loud, and inadvertently revealing the anxieties behind this whole line of reasoning, Serling’s narration wonders if prehistoric human cultures were all simply the remnants of an “ancient astronaut colony.” Unlike Clarke, who holds certainty at bay with his framework of three mystery types, von Däniken has the answers in advance, and they depend on colonial hierarchies of being in space and time; in his scheme, all that remains is to fit the evidence to the theory.²⁷

The credibility of this work, which has since been steadily and heavily undermined, is propped up in In Search of Ancient Astronauts by appearances from Wernher von Braun, only four years before his death from pancreatic cancer, and from Carl Sagan. Von Braun talks briefly about the cosmic scale of deep time, and the relatively short existence of human technology for sending and receiving radio messages to the stars. Sagan calls the idea that aliens had visited Earth’s past “exciting” but says of the possibility, “there’s not a smidgeon of evidence that is compelling.”²⁸ Sagan later wrote the foreward to a 1976 book debunking von Däniken’s work, called The Space-Gods Revealed, which could be read as a manifesto for his subsequent work in science communications:

That writing as careless as von Däniken’s, whose principal thesis is that our ancestors were dummies, should be so popular is a sober commentary on the credulousness and despair of our times. I also hope for the continuing popularity of books like Chariots of the Gods? in high school and college logic courses, as object lessons in sloppy thinking. I know of no recent books so riddled with logical and factual errors as the works of von Däniken.²⁹

Sagan, Clarke, Cousteau, and the Strugatskys reject the colonialist and extractivist rationales for exploring exterior and interior spaces. Instead of seeing differences as opportunities for conquest and the assertion of singular, hierarchically organized structures in time and space, they see the potential for a kind of existence that recognizes care for others of all kinds—even if that care means leaving others alone, or becoming a kind of other oneself. In these outer spaces, there might be the kinds of abundant mysteries that can sustain “Happiness for everybody! … Free!” But they were always also here on Earth all along, which is, after all, a part of the cosmos.