Essay Questions

What is the White Hart?

The White Hart is the name of a local pub appearing in a number of stories by Clarke which he eventually collected and published in a book titled Tales from the White Hart before appearing in this comprehensive career-spanning volume. The White Hart is more than just a pub, however, it is also a literary conceit. The pub is a gathering place for like-minded writers their gathering there serves as a framing device which then sets up the story-within-the story told by a character named Harry Purvis. The White Hart stories showcase the lighter side of Clarke’s approach to science fiction, very often incorporating elements more closely identified with fantasy, satire and parody.

‘If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth…’ has been various described by reviewers as a static story featuring flat characters with no action or plot development yet is ranked among Clarke’s finest. Why?

This story is a perfect example of Clarke’s strengths. The truth is that, at least as far as his short stories go, Clarke never seems particularly concerned with complex characters or plotting. Almost every story in this collection moves inexorably and relentlessly toward its closing lines. The ending of a typical Clarke story is generally much stronger than the opening; stronger in the sense of making a statement calling up the reader to interact and contemplate. The plot of this tale may not be complicated, but the story itself is deceptively so: it is dependent upon nothing less than the end of the world as the result of nuclear annihilation brought upon earth’s population by itself. The power of the story comes now from literary mechanics like plot or action, but from the sobering reality of its cautionary message that though this story remains science fiction for the moment, it could quite possibly become a reality one day.

What is the “ultimate irony” that the narrator of “The Star” feels will be too much for the already depressed crew aboard the interstellar spaceship to bear?

The narrator of this story is aboard the spaceship in his role as an astrophysicist. But he is also a Jesuit priest and it is in that role that he discovers their mission to explore and report explosion of a star which has resulted in the Phoenix Nebula. The report will include the additional information that when the star did explode, it annihilated an entire civilization living on a nearby planet. By the time of the mission, the star had long since gone supernova, of course, and in his calculations to determine exactly when this alien civilization was instantaneously wiped off the face of the universe, he arrives at a date which points to just one single obvious conclusion. The light generated by the exploding star which killed an unknown number of lives is also the very same light attributed to the Star of Bethlehem. Any number of the possible conclusions that can be derived from this synchronicity is bound to be ironic to the ultimate degree.