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Cactus posted:I was not at all thrown by the whole stopping war thing that a few people seem to be hung up on. One of his quotes, which also doubles up as a major theme in many of his works, is Yeah, I'm fully aware of the whole "sufficiently advanced technology" thing, thanks. The issue isn't that it doesn't seem plausible that the Overlords can stop war - it certainly does. The problem is that there's no explanation whatsoever of what change they actually affect that renders war impossible. War isn't a physical thing, it's an action that people take. I'm not asking for an explanation of how their technology would make those changes - space magic is fine for the purposes of the show here - but just what the changes are. Do they just make all guns shoot flowers now? Does a big forcefield appear between anyone looking to fight? Who knows, we're never told. And this is putting aside the idea that just getting rid of war does nothing to solve the problems that led to the wars in the first place.
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Dec 31, 2015 08:31
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Grem posted:Why did that little girl hang around earth for 80 years before blowing it up? Because the guy was still alive? In the books, its described as the formerly-human-children spending that time developing. A human child'll kick their legs to see how they work, the formerly-human-children are figuring out how to develop into whatever the Overmind wants.
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Dec 31, 2015 09:15
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MisterBibs posted:In the books, its described as the formerly-human-children spending that time developing. A human child'll kick their legs to see how they work, the formerly-human-children are figuring out how to develop into whatever the Overmind wants. Yea, in the books the point of the kids falling and stopping themselves is to show them playing with gravitational forces as a means of figuring out what they can do and becoming used to it. The Overloads make it clear that they had to move all the kids to a separate continent away from the adults and that they spent decades there doing all kinds of weird poo poo that not even the Overlords were really entirely sure of the purpose of because they were interacting with the Overmind and they could only see the physical result. After a while it mostly just meant that the kids were standing around in groups staring in to the distance as their minds flashed across the universe or merged with the Overmind for decades at a time because they were growing more and more distant from physical reality and their bodies. And then, when they were ready, they converted the entire Earth in to energy as a means to finally join the Overmind permanently, leaving physical reality behind altogether. He just happened to return at a coincidentally fortuitous time to witness it.
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Dec 31, 2015 13:29
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Funnily enough this is the one Clarke book I haven't read. Just finished up the series and I have to say I loved it. Has Syfy done any other good series or mini series recently?
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Jan 3, 2016 01:51
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tsob posted:That seems like it'd be a far more ambitious undertaking than a 3 episode limited series, both in terms of the budget necessary and the amount of episodes it would take to cover the story. I would imagine something like Rendezvous with Rama or Foundation would be far more likely - though as far as I know the rights to Foundation at least are still tied up at the moment. Jonathan Nolan is supposedly planning to work on adapting Foundation for HBO after Westworld airs this year. tsob posted:Rendezvous with Rama is probably the best sci-fi story ever written in my opinion, with the possible exception of The Stars My Destination. I've heard the sequel books are poo poo, but never bothered reading them. Rendezvous itself is amazing though, and my main fear if it was ever adapted is that it'd do what Childhood's End did and add a load of unnecessary melodrama that distracts and detracts from the established story because one of my favorite things about Rendezvous is that there is no real villain or even an antagonist of any kind - just the mysteries of Rama providing tension the whole time as the crew explore it since it's such an alien and unknown that literally anything could happen or be lying in wait. The fact that the crew are all competent professionals and just want to explore Rama itself and don't drag any massive lingering personal issues in is great too. You do get a sense of them as people and there's some implied drama between all the scientists on Earth trying to organize things, but the actual crew the book focuses on are just people doing a job and that'd almost certainly be the first thing to change in any adaptation sadly. A few years ago, BBC Radio did a radio adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama and was guilty of a lot of this - they added in a big subplot where the solar system government was basically in thrall to fundamentalist religions and censored the official reports after the fact, a lot of the Endeavor crew were super religious and spent a lot of time reconciling aliens with their belief in God, and the sequence where they defuse the Hermian bomb gets changed to the crewman sacrificing his life to save the ship.
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Jan 3, 2016 02:41
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Someone please explain the point of the Oujia board scene.
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Jan 5, 2016 02:31
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Rhyno posted:Someone please explain the point of the Oujia board scene. I believe it was that lady's unborn child (whod be the center mass of the Evolved Children in the miniseries) communicating with the Overmind (and the Overlords listening in). In the books, it was a bit more clever and less dramatic: a bunch of people were using it as a toy during a party, someone decided to ask "Whats the Overlord's Home World?" and they collectively answered it.
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Jan 5, 2016 02:56
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Also it wasn't Karellan at the party, just a rank and file overlord. I think going from the Ouija board at the end of a party to some crazy alien device teleported in is the change that makes the least sense to me.
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Jan 6, 2016 04:18
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MisterBibs posted:I believe it was that lady's unborn child (whod be the center mass of the Evolved Children in the miniseries) communicating with the Overmind (and the Overlords listening in). Also at the same party an Overlord was there solely to investigate the host's extensive paranormal literary collection so humans going all telepathic and poo poo was actually given some foreshadowing
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Jan 6, 2016 04:27
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I just watched the part where not only is Earth utterly annihilated, but Milo (the last human alive) finds his icecubed love Rachel smashed into pieces.  Goddrat that's bleak. Conduits of light are a common trope in sci-fi, but I was getting Mass Effect 3 flashbacks when Milo was about to talk to the Overmind. In fact, that whole exchange gave me the same sick feeling that Starbrat did. I wonder if the ME3 writers were intentionally going for a Childhood's End-esque ending? If so, it was disastrously implemented given the tone of the rest of the series, but that's neither here nor there. I need a palate cleanser. I'm going to go hug a human being now. 
Scandalous Wench fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 16:27
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Scandalous Wench posted:In fact, that whole exchange gave me the same sick feeling that Starbrat did. I wonder if the ME3 writers were intentionally going for a Childhood's End-esque ending? But not when the StarBrat is a reaper VI. It would have to be some super AI cobbled together from eons of defeated races. And it should mirror how the reapers ascended themselves. But its just easier to have humanity gently caress Yeah punch everything.
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Jan 8, 2016 18:39
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I've seen positive interpretations of Childhood's End as humanity ascending into something wondrous, but it never rang true for me. Childhood's End and ME3 strike similar emotional notes due to the utter hopelessness and disregard for free will. That said, Syfy deserves serious credit for adapting this particular story. It's dark and unrelentingly heavy, but they saw it through to the very end.
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Jan 8, 2016 20:11
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Scandalous Wench posted:I've seen positive interpretations of Childhood's End as humanity ascending into something wondrous, but it never rang true for me. Childhood's End and ME3 strike similar emotional notes due to the utter hopelessness and disregard for free will. Only because of your shameful attachment and nostalgia for your disgusting flesh prison if a body
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Jan 9, 2016 03:22
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Sir DonkeyPunch posted:Only because of your shameful attachment and nostalgia for your disgusting flesh prison if a body gently caress that. I prefer the story where humanity is too damned clever and devious to go quietly into that good night, and ends up colonizing the galaxy anyway in spite of the Overmind's wishes. The human kids take out the Earth in their Ascension but humanity has already left the nest. The Overmind can just change its goals at that point.
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Jan 9, 2016 04:02
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Sir DonkeyPunch posted:Only because of your shameful attachment and nostalgia for your disgusting flesh prison if a body But...but cookie dough ice cream and pop tarts!  GORDON posted:gently caress that. I prefer the story where humanity is too damned clever and devious to go quietly into that good night, and ends up colonizing the galaxy anyway in spite of the Overmind's wishes. The human kids take out the Earth in their Ascension but humanity has already left the nest. The Overmind can just change its goals at that point. 
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Jan 9, 2016 04:22
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Scandalous Wench posted:I've seen positive interpretations of Childhood's End as humanity ascending into something wondrous, but it never rang true for me. Childhood's End and ME3 strike similar emotional notes due to the utter hopelessness and disregard for free will. Yeah I'll give them credit where it's due. The story isn't my particular cup of tea, but it'd be worse if they had changed the end of an iconic story for modern feels or something.
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Jan 9, 2016 05:22
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GORDON posted:gently caress that. I prefer the story where humanity is too damned clever and devious to go quietly into that good night, and ends up colonizing the galaxy anyway in spite of the Overmind's wishes. The human kids take out the Earth in their Ascension but humanity has already left the nest. The Overmind can just change its goals at that point. In the book at least, and I'm pretty sure the miniseries at least mentions this once, there's no way this could happen, because humanity was undergoing the transition anyway. The Overmind and the Overlords had nothing to do with it, it was just the stage of human development we'd reached. In the book the Overlords make clear that they had arrived and created the utopia to ease the transition, but there were other species who achieved the evolution on their own, and others who destroyed themselves before they could make the leap (as humans in the book were on the verge of doing with the Cold War) before the Overlords could get there. The Overmind isn't something that's forcing humans to evolve into a collective consciousness or directing events in any way, it's merely the end result of all sentient species naturally making that development as part of some deeper cosmic process. But even if humans did somehow go into the galaxy to settle somewhere else, it wouldn't change the theme of the book (and I guess the miniseries to a lesser extent), humans as individuals are always going to compete and potentially destroy each other, whether through crime or nuclear war and whether on Earth or some space colony. Humans as individuals are the childhood that's ending; the kids in the book/TV are the "adults" that we've grown into.
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Jan 9, 2016 17:24
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Makes you wonder how the Overmind is capable of sustaining itself. Is it eternal, even after the inevitable heat death of the universe (Asimov's Multivac in The Last Question comes to mind here)? Will it join itself to some greater whole that is an amalgamation of all the universes' Overminds? Humanity's conclusion is treated as the conclusion of the book and the miniseries but what could come after is open to any number of possibilities, and it would have been interesting had Clarke chosen to address it in a future work.
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Jan 10, 2016 18:25
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RandomBlue posted:I hadn't read the book yet (reading it now) and it was clear they were joining the Overmind but not clear why the Earth exploded or why the girl was still there after 80 years (and not physically changed). It also seemed awfully convenient that she lasted that long and then everything finished up right after Milo came down to give the Earth a goodbye kiss. That was my thought as well. The overall story was cool but the details were almost all completely dumb. Why did the overlords need milo to talk to the mic at the end? Why did the demon fetus react to the cross and then melt it? The ouiji board was dumb. All of the ghost annabelle stuff added nothing at all to the story. It was ridiculous that nobody was concerned that all the children had a psychic connection to "jennifer" and nobody was following this "jennifer" around going WTF, while pilgrims flock to farmboy's house whenever the UFO passes by. They only had 1 vial of space serum? Good thing the religious lady showed up and shot Tywin and the aliens elected to not use the healing beam on the alien otherwise farm boy would have casually cured himself and all of that poo poo would have ended nicely. Why did the guy nuke the city and why did the couple just let it happen? The "why do they look like devils" thing was not at all explained in the show so that was totally dumb, and after reading this thread I'm not impressed by the canon explanation (psychic time cycle lol?). And at all times the overlords could have explained things super easily (not the main fact but just all the stuff along the way) without all the dumb mysterious poo poo. WHY would we find their form scary? Partial answers.
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Jan 26, 2016 19:20
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