The Star by Arthur C. Clarke (1956 Hugo Short Story Winner)

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 22:48:13 -0700

This is one of a series of posts I am doing as I read the short stories that have won the Hugo award since it was started in 1955.

Like many people, I was first introduced to the work of Arthur C. Clarke through Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. For a time when I was a boy, my local PBS station frequently showed 2001 and I felt very adult watching this serious film that my parents (especially my engineer father) had stories of seeing when they were young. I particularly remember the first New Years when my parents let me stay up until midnight 2001 was on (probably for the 2000 New Year😊) and we stayed up late watching it. That was where my troubles with Clarke started though as I struggled to stay awake through the whole film.

Clarke is definitely a good writer who can weave an interesting story and he makes up for a number of golden science fiction’s shortcomings. At the end of the day though he is not an author who will keep you awake until midnight. This in many ways comes from the fact that while Clarke did integrate religion and philosophy into his work it was often second to the scientific accuracy of his stories. The end result being that his stories are mostly about some sort of engineering or scientific breakthrough or achievement with various amounts of philosophy or religion thrown in for some spice. Over time, Clarke matured in his work to an engineer or scientist slice-of-life style that brings a warmth to this work, but does more to put one to sleep than keep you on the edge of your seat, which is good in its own way.

Taking The Star as an example, it starts out with an interesting premise that one of the last Jesuits is serving as the navigator on board a star ship sent on a mission to explore the remnants of a supernova. This has revealed a terrible truth that has led the priest to question his faith. This religious aspect is quickly lost to an in-depth explanation of how stars explode, supernovas and a detailed description of the supernova remnant they are approaching. The story ends with the quote-on-quote shocking revelation that the star system had an alien race before the supernova and that this supernova that wiped out this civilization was the Start of Bethlehem. The priest wonders how he, or anyone, could remain faithful after this terrible revelation.

The story, like many of Clarke’s works, feels like an excuse to relay technical or scientific information in a way that is interesting yet at the end of the day feels forced. Indeed, the priest’s horror at this discovery seems a bit overblown in our current age as people have speculated that the Star of Bethlehem was a supernova for a while now and in this distant future where people can travel between stars it seems likely this would have been known long before the story started. It also reads like an atheist’s idea of what a loss of faith would look like where reason triumphs over superstition.

With that said, Clarke was a very prolific writer of digestible and fun science fiction stories and novels. My favorite, and Clarke’s too, was his 1986 novel The Songs of Distant Earth. A starship is fleeing the destruction of Earth due to the sun’s stellar evolution and stops at one of humanity’s colonies for resupply. The colony long ago lost contact with Earth and has evolved into what we today might call a solarpunk utopia that retains knowledge of advanced technologies but has chosen to live a simpler existence for the benefit of humans and the planet. The pleasure of the story is that there is no grand conflict except the need to restock the starship. There is a subplot where some of the colonist fear the starship is there to conquer them, but as in most of Clarke’s stories this resistance is easily overcome. This gives us ample time to meet the characters and watch as their personal and cultural dynamics play out.

This slice-of-life approach to science and engineering is really where Clarke shines and becomes much more prominent after Clarke’s move to Sri Lanka in the latter part of his life. After this move, one can really see Clarke softening in his fiction from hardened engineer (Rama, The Fountain of Paradise) into a more relaxed grandpa figure enjoying life on a beach (The Songs of Distant Earth). While Clarke’s work may be easy to forget, it ultimately brings warmth and humanity to science and engineering and reminds us that the greatest achievement is building a simple life with the people you meet while working wonders.

Source: The Hugo Winners Edited by Isaac Asimov Related: The Secret of the Vault by Quinn’s Ideas

What do you really fear?

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:49:13 -0700

I must confess that my guilty pleasure show of the last decade has been Rick and Morty. The multi-verse world of Rick and Morty perfectly captures the post-modern moment we find ourselves in; We now each get to live in our own little universe constructed from a pastiche of found cultural objects. Yet in a world where we have experienced and deconstructed everything, we still find ourselves dissatisfied because at the end of the day the pastiche simply enables us to avoid the terrible responsibility of ourselves. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the concluding episode of Rick and Morty season 7, Fear no Mort, which is probably one of the scariest episodes of TV I have seen in a while.

The episode finds Rick and Mort visiting an alien carnival of terrors with their usual jaded, nonchalant attitude. Surrounded by grotesque, biological cyborgs, they note that after seeing everything they really have nothing left to fear. Hearing this, a well-dressed man approaches them to note that it is so true that there is little left to fear, and that in fact the scariest thing in the multi-verse is on Earth. The trio take off and find themselves at a Denny’s. Rick and Morty groan at the below the belt joke, but the mysterious man shrugs and goes to get some pancakes.

Inside the Denny’s, the server notes that if Rick and Morty want the fear hole it is in the bathroom. The pair visit the bathroom and discover a mysterious hole in a bathroom stall. An accompany TV with built-in VHS player informs them that the hole manifests people’s greatest fears and then consumes them. The pair roll their eyes and walk away, only for Morty to bolt and jump in the hole. In the hole, a monster grabs Mort and proclaims its intention to stuff Morty with magots just before Rick shows up to kill it and take Morty out of the hole.

The pair laugh in mortified relief that they escaping the hole and head home. Yet something is not right. Suddenly, Rick’s dead wife (Diane) suddenly appears in the family’s living room, confronting Rick and Morty with the realization that they are still in the hole. As Rick goes down memory lane with Diane, Morty explores his terror of not being accepted. Everything seems to go well as Morty puts himself into more and more embarrassing situations and the simulation begins to break down. At last, Rick makes peace with Diane and goes to help Morty confront his fear of rejection. The simulation breaks down into darkness and the pair find themselves climbing out of the hole.

Yet as they name more fears they keep popping out of the hole. They eventually proclaim that they no longer need to know if they are in the hole and leave the Denny’s to live their lives. Years past, Morty grows up, Rick continues to have adventures, and the pair eventually move into a house together in Morty’s middle age. Then one day Morty realizes he has become his father, and the pair suddenly are popping out of the hole again.

Morty wonders if they were simply born in the hole, to which Rick responds they are going to get out of this and he will never leave Morty behind because he is irreplaceable. Morty looks up with terror as he realizes that Rick would never say this in real life and proclaims, “This entire thing has been about me. You’re not even in the hole are you?” Rick’s mouth opens and is filled with the blackness of the hole, which says that Morty’s fear of relying on Rick has been delicious. Morty awakes at the bottom of the hole to see Rick looking down at him with an inquisitive expression.

Morty quivers in fear after climbing out of the hole, but as Rick notes he also seems to have been lightened a bit. The terror of the hole was that it peeled away the cultural pastiches Morty had constructed around himself (body horror, teenage rejection, middle age, etc.) until only the common denominator of these scenarios remained, Morty. In this rejection of the constructed pastiche, the episode offers an alternative to our postmodern condition in which our baseline of reality is found by confronting ourselves so that we free to act in the world rather than acting out against the world.

science-fiction on Logan's Essays

The Star by Arthur C. Clarke (1956 Hugo Short Story Winner)

What do you really fear?