Anyone Ever Read Clarke's Rescue Party

[The Boy Who Cried Worf]

Rescue Party is the first short story Arthur C. Clarke ever sold in 1946. In later years he said he never read it again for fear of seeing how little he had improved, but I think it is quite good for an early effort.

The story is about a group of aliens from different races on a mission for a galactic federation. They are visiting Earth before it's sun is to go nova hoping to find some survivors to rescue. Instead they find the planet deserted and assume everyone must have committed mass suicide or something. Later as they are leaving the solar system they discover a huge fleet of ships travelling at sub-light speeds under rocket power and realize humans had dared to escape their world and travel the vast distances of space. One of the aliens jokes that he wonders if they should be afraid of these people, if they are this bold, what if they don't like their little federation The story ends with the line that 20 years later the joke didn't seem as funny, implying that human indeed had had a huge impact on the Federation.

I always wondered if this story had an impact on Roddenberry creating Star Trek or even much later down the road Enterprise. The whole idea of humans coming into a galactic federation and having such a dramatic impact was one of the core themes of Star Trek.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Clarke and Trek have a lot in common; both have generally portrayed an optimistic, Humanistic future. I like "Rescue Party"-- well, I never met a Clarke story I didn't like-- even though it's obviously a complete fantasy. There's no way it's possible to evacuate an entire planet, of course, or to get everybody to cooperate; those aliens would have at least found a bunch of religious nuts waiting for the Rapture or a bunch of conspiracy theorists who think the government is trying to trick them off the planet. But his portrayal of a Humanity that has the drive and the unmitigated gall to head out blindly into the Universe in a futuristic flotilla of canoes to save itself is something that very much appealed to me as a young kid, and still does.

 

[Christopher]

I always wondered if this story had an impact on Roddenberry creating Star Trek or even much later down the road Enterprise. The whole idea of humans coming into a galactic federation and having such a dramatic impact was one of the core themes of Star Trek.

It's doubtful the influence was so direct. There are plenty of "federations" in science fiction, and plenty of stories depicting humans as something really special that has a manifest destiny in the galaxy. That latter element was just part of the overall flavor of SF literature in the '30s through the '50s, particularly in anything edited by John W. Campbell, as "Rescue Party" was. Campbell insisted on portraying humans as a superior race that was smarter, more dynamic, more adaptable, more moral, and more suited to rule than any other species, which may have been an allegory for his racial beliefs (humans = Europeans, aliens = other races and cultures). The reason Isaac Asimov set most of his Campbell-edited fiction in a universe without sentient aliens was because he found Campbell's views on the subject distasteful and wished to avoid coming into conflict with him about it.

 

[Kegg]

Rescue Party is the first short story Arthur C. Clarke ever sold in 1946. In later years he said he never read it again for fear of seeing how little he had improved, but I think it is quite good for an early effort.

It was also because so many people who met him cited it as their favourite short story by him, so he feared that meant he hadn't developed or improved that much in all that time.

Honestly, having a volume or two of Clarke's short stories... yeah it's definitely one of my favourites of his and one of the ones I can easily recall. It's a simple idea, but it's very engaging to read and interestingly constructed. I also really liked the idea of the Palador aliens.

 

[The Comedian]

Rescue Party is the first short story Arthur C. Clarke ever sold in 1946. In later years he said he never read it again for fear of seeing how little he had improved, but I think it is quite good for an early effort.

It was also because so many people who met him cited it as their favourite short story by him, so he feared that meant he hadn't developed or improved that much in all that time.

Honestly, having a volume or two of Clarke's short stories... yeah it's definitely one of my favourites of his and one of the ones I can easily recall. It's a simple idea, but it's very engaging to read and interestingly constructed. I also really liked the idea of the Palador aliens.

The Palador were the collective mind, right?

That story shows why it might be handy to have friendly Borg on your side.

 

[Mistral]

Loved it as a kid and I find it still influences me as an adult writer(well, amateur writer). The epic feeling is very well done and the ironic ending still makes me grin.

 

[Kegg]

The Palador were the collective mind, right?

Yup.

 

[psikeyhackr]

What do you mean I should not reply 9 years later?

We were given a total of 4 science fiction stories to read in high school. That was one of them. Being a sci-fi geek since 4th grade I had already read it.

The Original Series was on the air at the time.

 

[Christopher]

I always wondered if this story had an impact on Roddenberry creating Star Trek or even much later down the road Enterprise. The whole idea of humans coming into a galactic federation and having such a dramatic impact was one of the core themes of Star Trek.

I already responded to this back in 2009, but here's something I didn't think of back then: As originally developed by Roddenberry, Star Trek was about an Earth starship. The Federation was introduced in "Arena," and was also mentioned in the first-season episodes "A Taste of Armageddon," "The Devil in the Dark," "Errand of Mercy," and "Operation -- Annihilate" -- all but the last of which were written or co-written by Gene L. Coon. That suggests that the concept of the Federation comes more from Coon than from Roddenberry.

 

[Mudd]

Yeah, the theme probably wasn't original to Clarke and it was pretty wide-spread in pulp sf. John Campbell, who edited the most influential of those mags for decades, was a racist with a real hard-on for the whole "Humans are remarkable/Earthman's burden" thing.

 

[N-121973]

I recently listened to it as an audiobook and thought it was pretty ahead of its time. Though if my maths is correct, it was set in the 22nd century which isn't really consistent with the Sun going Nova. I could also see the bigoted hand of its editor Mr. Campbell in those last few sentences.