No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.

A book from this list.

Easy read. Dated but still interesting.

Racist language in a few places 🚫 so heads up on that.

Misogynistic threads throughout 👎 but what else is new about scifi published in the 1950’s. Or anything published in the 1950’s.

There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded.

I enjoyed it but I didn’t love it. The big shock wasn’t as shocking as it probably used to be (you know, back in the 1950’s).

But they knew in their hearts that once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization…

I like how the story moves through time. It’s done well. New character introductions, enough details, not overdoing the description or backstory, always relevant but not always obvious what the relevance is (at first).

Interesting to me when the outdated predictions of a sci-fi novel aren’t wrong, necessarily, but also not quite right:

The world’s now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason’s obvious. There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments. Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges—absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!

Oh girl, if only Clarke could see us now. The year he died, average TV viewing was indeed at an all-time high: almost 5 hours per day. Good news tho! TV viewing time has gone down since then. Total screen time, of course, is another story. But what are you gonna do? I gotta, you know, do that whole working thing. And I also, apparently, gotta write these newsletters. Thus is the life of the passive sponge. Gotta keep evolving.

Science is the only religion of mankind.

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.

…no on of intelligence resents the inevitable.