This is clear in one of Clarke’s earliest stories, “Rescue Party” ( Astounding Science Fiction, 1946), in which a crew of tentacled aliens is dispatched by the galaxy administrators to go rescue a fledgling, bipedal civilization from a backwater planet about to be vaporized by the local sun going nova. What that means for Clarke’s End of the World stories is that the theme of extinction or a dying Earth is an opportunity to encourage us to leave our petty terrestrial concerns behind and embrace our galactic manifest destiny. Pursuing that mystery is humanity’s noblest aim – it is an essentially religious imperative that becomes a means of transcendence. But unlike other galactic narratives like Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which treat the galaxy or universe as a gigantic platform on which to re-stage Edward Gibbon, Clarke keeps his universe unfailingly mysterious. Instead, they’re about to have their consciousness expanded as they become tied into a grand galactic narrative. In his stories, humans who face extinction, or who live as the last holdouts on a barren Earth, are not doomed. Clarke didn’t write write typical post-apocalyptic stories, but he sure liked to write about dying worlds, long-abandoned constructions, last cities, the end of humanity, and vast, empty spaces.
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