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The Star – Arthur C. Clarke (1967) [pdf]

michaelsbradley
13 replies
1d13h

Merry Christmas

Christus natus est

O Χριστός γεννιέται

Христос раждается

המשיח נולד

ابن الله يولد اليوم

talonx
6 replies
1d12h

Merry Christmas

শুভ বৰদিন

শুভ বড়দিন

क्रिसमस की बधाई

క్రిస్మస్ శుభాకాంక్షలు

I'm guessing you wrote in the languages you know (I did).

antman
5 replies
1d10h

Which languages are these? Especially the two that look similar

chrismorgan
3 replies
1d6h

English, Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Telugu.

The first, I expect requires no explanation!

The second and third are in the Bengali script, which is used primarily by Bengali and Assamese—but the letter ৰ is no longer used in Bengali.

The fourth is in the Devanagari script, which is used by many languages, but Hindi is the biggest one by far. (Second comes Marathi at about ¼ the native speakers, then Bhojpuri.)

The fifth is in the Telugu script which is primarily used by the Telugu language.

(Sources: personal knowledge of Bengali and Telugu and recognition of Devanagari, as an Australian who’s spent a lot of time in India, mostly in Telangana and West Bengal; and affirmation by Google Translate auto-detection of each one in turn, though that’s not very reliable as you’ll easily see if you try just pasting the whole lot in, and observe how it decides it’s Telugu, but still happily translates the others as “Merry Christmas”… except the Assamese, which it translates as “happy birthday”. Google Translate makes huge gaffes with Indic languages even if you identify the language correctly, and it just gets worse when it’s trying to translate it from a different language.)

talonx
1 replies
1d4h

It's technically the "Bengali–Assamese script". There is a difference of 3 letters between the written forms of these two languages, including the one you pointed out.

Google translate added Assamese recently, that might explain the gaffes.

chrismorgan
0 replies
1d

If you want to be technical, you can call it Eastern Nagari. In practice, the name “Bengali–Assamese script” doesn’t seem to be used outside of Wikipedia and adjacent projects: it’s overwhelmingly called the Bengali script, with Assamese materials calling it the Assamese script. The fact that there are almost 20× as many speakers of Bengali as there are of Assamese probably contributes to this. (There’s also Manipuri, but it’s smaller still.) I find references to some ISO decision from June 2018 to recommend renaming the Bengali script to Bengali/Assamese script in Unicode (less than they were asking for, which was separate encoding due to some pronunciation differences), but I can’t see that this has happened. But I’m not familiar with the matter.

Google Translate has major gaffes in many of its less common languages. This is nothing particular about Assamese.

talonx
0 replies
1d4h

I just tried "শুভ বৰদিন" and Google translated it correctly as Assamese. Weird.

uptownfunk
0 replies
1d10h

Bangla and… dunno the other one (Assamese?)

Tistron
4 replies
1d9h

God jul

Gleðileg jól

Glædelig jul

Fröhliche Weihnachten

talonx
3 replies
1d4h

I'm no linguist but even I could tell that the first 3 (which Google tells me are Norwegian, Icelandic and Danish) belong to the same language family.

Sharlin
2 replies
1d4h

”Good yule” in English ;)

—--

”God jul” is either/both Norwegian and Swedish. The two languages are mostly mutually intelligible; written Danish is as well but Swedes and Norwegians usually find Danish pronunciation… not so easy to comprehend.

With Icelandic there’s already much more guesswork and expertise required, mostly because the language has changed little since the days of Old Norse, and has not undergone grammatical simplification or adoption of (mostly Germanic, Romance) loanwords nearly to the same degree as the others.

talonx
0 replies
1d3h

Fascinating, thanks.

Tistron
0 replies
20h3m

Yeah. My mom is Icelandic and I know enough Icelandic to get by. My father is Swedish and I grew up in Sweden. The last 5ish years I lived in Denmark and speak the language enough that they understand me, and I understand it pretty well.

I went to a church with my girlfriend's family the other day (by Stockholm, Sweden) and there was a 1000 year old rune stone, which was pretty much just Icelandic (https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upplands_runinskrifter_214).

867-5309
0 replies
1d10h

gaudete!

pkoird
10 replies
1d12h

Also check out The Nine Billion Names of God by the same writer.

https://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/WRIT510/readings/The%20...

cwillu
5 replies
1d11h

And by a different author, but a similar theme: https://unsongbook.com

bitwize
4 replies
1d11h

I came across Unsong here on Hackernews, very shortly after running across a form of online (mainly TikTok) idiocy called Grabovoy codes, which are strings of numbers that supposedly amplify the Law of Attraction, each string thought to be a command or "cheat code" instructing the universe to give the user what they want. They were created by a scam artist and convicted criminal called Grigory Grabovoy... who is also an anti-Semite.

I thought, none of this is a coincidence because nothing is a coincidence.

bear141
2 replies
1d10h

Coincidences exist. Coincidences are real. Saying that there are no coincidences stops inquiry. Challenging the statement forces us to make sense of its ambiguity and explore our potential involvement. You can choose the random perspective and with a wave of a mental hand, dismiss most coincidences as not worth further attention. Or, you can seek out their possible personal implications and make life into an adventure of discovery both about yourself and the world around you. As you explore, you may uncover the latent abilities hidden within you.

whatshisface
0 replies
1d10h

The last sentence in the parent comment was a reference to UNSONG.

tomrod
0 replies
1d

"Coincidence" is defined as simultaneously occurring, so coincidences definitely exist. Causal relationships may not be casually inferred, however.

jedrek
0 replies
21h53m

Coincidences exist because human brains are absolutely amazing at finding patterns, wether they actually exist or not.

MarkusWandel
1 replies
1d5h

I'm in metered internet land here at my mom's so I won't look for the link, but there's a pretty decent short film version of this (The 9 Billion Names of God) on Youtube.

sohkamyung
0 replies
1d4h

YouTube link to that short film [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtvS9UXTsPI ]

zakki
0 replies
1d9h

Intrigued by the title, Moslems read The 99 names of God.

elnatro
0 replies
1d7h

Have anybody tried to replicate that machine with actual code? Would it be possible?

marstall
9 replies
1d11h

literally the first words ... "All rights reserved; not to be reprinted without permission of the author" and "copyright Arthur C Clarke" - so why share it here?

pb060
2 replies
1d7h

I know you shouldn’t comment about votes, but why downvotes? You might be against copyright in certain cases but technically, if not legally, the point holds.

layer8
0 replies
1d3h

The comment seems to assume that most everyone would agree that such sharing of the link should not be taking place due to copyright reasons. That is an absurd assumption to make, to everyone who has been around the internet for a bit.

It would be different if the commenter would be trying to make an actual, intelligently argued case why the link shouldn’t be shared in this instance.

That being said, one could instead link to https://web.archive.org/web/20080718084442/http://lucis.net/..., where the story is “reprinted by permisssion”.

chernevik
0 replies
1d4h

Because downvotes are heavily used to say "I don't like this" rather than "this is not relevant".

I've complained to HN about this and proposed solutions. They don't care.

nine_k
1 replies
1d11h

Maybe this copy is put out with a permission?

amanaplanacanal
0 replies
1d2h

Exactly! From what I can tell, there is no way to tell the actually copyright or licensing status of anything you find on the internet, you can only guess.

whythre
0 replies
1d10h

Better call the police. Seriously though, Clark died in 2008; it isn’t like he is being victimized.

pjbeam
0 replies
1d11h

Seems like the University of Northern Iowa's concern, no?

bear141
0 replies
1d10h

Thank you for your vigilance, Hall Monitor.

Rebelgecko
0 replies
22h21m

My ouji board said Arthur was cool with it

akoboldfrying
8 replies
1d9h

Grinch take: I hated the ending. (I get the feeling that that's the part everyone else loves.) It's clever in the way that puns are clever, which provokes a flash of intellectual recognition ("I see what you did there") but kills any emotional response -- in me, at least.

I think a better way to end it would have been for Dr. Chandler or one of the other non-believers, moved by the scale of the event, to have a change of heart about religion. Perhaps not all the way. Perhaps he comes to the protagonist on the observation deck, his face now uncertain, and with difficulty asks what made the protagonist start to believe. The protag is faced with trying to console this man plainly in need of spiritual support -- perhaps while at the same time feeling his own religious conviction slip away.

throwaway8877
1 replies
1d5h

Sorry, but I don't think Clark was into creating warm feelings in people who are into nonsense.

"He who built the Universe can destroy it when He chooses. It is arrogance—it is perilously near blasphemy—for us to say what He may or may not."

akoboldfrying
0 replies
19h6m

creating warm feelings

If you think my proposed ending creates "warm feelings" in anyone, then I didn't communicate clearly. In my ending, two people have spiritual crises, which propel them in opposite directions, and both are left unresolved.

people who are into nonsense

I can't tell if you mean me, or religious people, or someone else.

tralarpa
0 replies
1d8h

I was expecting that at the end it would turn out that the records of the lost civilization are full of symbols of a certain religion, let's say the "Om" sign or whatever, and that the priest would then realize: "Oh shit, religion XYZ was right all the time" or something like that.

Actually, I like my ending better :)

I guess we had to wait till Douglas Adams for such absurdities.

signal11
0 replies
1d7h

In a lot of “twist ending” short stories (a lot of good SF stories fall into this bucket) the key is to leave things unsaid and let the reader wrestle with the ending and its implications, which is what this is doing.

It’s a “less is more” strategy that works for many people, but of course every reader is unique and it might not work for you :)

paulddraper
0 replies
1d

It was a good twist.

I also think yours would have been a good twist.

mannykannot
0 replies
1d3h

The thing that gives this story a gravitas beyond that of others in a similar vein - such as ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ - is that it brings to the fore an important theological/philosophical issue: the ‘problem of evil’. A great deal has been said and written about it over the millennia, often in abstract, abstruse and sometimes tendentious terms, but this story cuts to the heart of the matter. If it makes some readers uncomfortable, it is working.

gedy
0 replies
1d4h

You remind me a bit of the boy (Cory Fieldman) asking "And then what happens?" in the movie "Stand By Me"

Aeglaecia
0 replies
1d7h

each to their own , to me this exemplifies the twist ending , positioning audiences to expect the opposite , clarke did brilliantly to trigger both aha and emotional response , such creativity wow

elnatro
6 replies
1d3h

As some other comments have already said. This looks like an edgy story.

I don’t think there was a star in Bethelem at all, most of the Bible is metaphorical, and a story of the of a culture, society, and religion.

The Bible cannot be interpreted as a historical book, but a faith one.

michaelsbradley
2 replies
1d3h
elnatro
1 replies
1d2h

Not sure how this is related to saying that not all content in the Bible is 100% true content.

michaelsbradley
0 replies
1d2h

Oh, well it is, quite.

haunter
2 replies
1d2h

The Bible cannot be interpreted as a historical book

It certainly can to some extent because there are enough 3rd party sources about Jesus.

Today scholars in the field agree that a Jewish man called Jesus of Nazareth did exist in Palestine in the 1st century CE, on whose life and teachings Christianity was founded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus

gcanyon
0 replies
1d1h

I think what you’re saying above is somewhat misleading when the Wikipedia article you cite also says, “only two key events of Jesus's life are widely accepted as historical, namely his baptism, and his crucifixion (commonly dated to 30 or 33 CE)”

That’s like saying Forrest Gump is historical because Vietnam is a thing that happened, and JFK was president.

elnatro
0 replies
1d2h

I’m not saying Jesus cannot had existed. I’m saying that many events in the book are actually cathechetical content and not real events.

cloogshicer
5 replies
1d8h

If you enjoyed this, and you enjoy video games, you really should try Outer Wilds. It's in the same emotional spirit, and an absolutely fantastic game. Go in completely blind, don't read anything or watch any videos, since this is a game about gaining knowledge and can only be played once.

sl-1
0 replies
1d8h

I agree, it is probably the best narrative experience I have had with a video game. And easily ruined by spoilers.

mock-possum
0 replies
1d

There just aren’t any other games like it. At first you’re like, oh, okay, this is kind of fun but I don’t see what’s so- and then OH

you really just need to make it though the first thirty minutes, maybe an hour or so, before you crack the game open and realize what it is you’re playing - and then it only gets better from there.

block_dagger
0 replies
1d1h

I hear the banjo picking when all is silent and dark.

Marthinwurer
0 replies
18h48m

Outer Wilds is by far the best game I've ever played. It's wonderfully melancholy in so many ways, especially in how you can only really play it once. If you're the kind of person who reads HN, you're the kind of person who'd enjoy playing it. If you can't bring yourself to play videogames, or if you've already played through it and want to relive the game vicariously through others, then you might enjoy watching a let's play of it. I highly recommend LilIndigestion's playthrough. But, if you have the ability to play it, go in without any knowledge or spoilers, and experience the joy of discovery.

Gooblebrai
0 replies
1d6h

An absolute masterpiece

cipheredStones
4 replies
1d9h

Somehow I've known about supernovas for many years without realizing that the word and concept "nova" exists as well. It's from the Latin for "new": the appearance of what seems to be a new star, because the star going nova brightened enough to become visible from Earth. (It got picked up from Tycho Brahe describing what we'd now call a supernova, though.)

The mechanism for non-super novas is very interesting: a white dwarf in a binary star system steals hydrogen from the other star, then heats it until it starts to fuse, which blows it all off into space!

thrwyexecbrain
3 replies
1d8h

I was about to comment that the correct plural form of nova is novae, but it looks like dictionaries say that both novae and novas are correct. The irregular case does seem to predominate according to google ngram viewer.

Sharlin
1 replies
1d4h

As far as I know, it’s always valid, and perhaps even preferable, to use the regular -s plural with any Latin loanword, after all they’re English words now even if borrowed from another language. Using the original Latin plural forms in casual contexts feels a bit pretentious, especially when it’s not even the correct form, like "octopi".

steve1977
0 replies
22h20m

Or words like status, where the correct plural would be statūs, i.e. the same word but a long “u”.

mannykannot
0 replies
1d4h

It is often the case that as the regular case increases in frequency, it becomes accepted as an alternative. It seems that lexicologists these days are less likely than formerly to insist that the philological roots of a word are the only determinant of correct spelling.

chernevik
2 replies
1d3h

It isn't as clever as it thinks.

If an omnipotent God could arrange such an explosion, and we presume Him loving of all sentient creatures, He could easily arrange His explosion to avoid harming His creatures. Such a story wouldn't happen in the first place.

But what if He did? Anyone reading the Bible -- as certainly a Jesuit would have -- knows there is no theological requirement in Christianity that God value a life as humans value a life. "My ways are not your ways, says the Lord." St Paul is explicit that the notion that Pharaoh was created entirely for the demonstration of God's power by Moses does not contradict the justice of God. (Nor does he say Pharaoh was created for that purpose; he doesn't know, and treats the possibility as a hypothetical.)

Nor need the civilization's members be created simply for some demonstration. Perhaps they suffered the judgement of Sodom and Gomorrah. Perhaps the nova was the End Of The World for _that_ civilization, a component of its Second Coming, just as (Christians believe) our world will eventually experience. Genesis, Exodus, Paul, Revelations each provide precedents for such an apparent catastrophe. The priest can easily imagine any number of explanations consistent with his faith. (Indeed one might be the light of one world's closure illuminating the opening of another, reminiscent of the Greek's beacon signaling the fall of Troy in Aeschylus' "Agamemnon".)

Whether we look at the story from God's end or the priest's, it doesn't make any sense.

The reader doesn't need to _like_ any of those possibilities. The point is that the values by which we like or don't like anything are not necessarily the same as those of God. C.S. Lewis imagines a devil overseeing temptation during WW II saying "I am not in the least interested in knowing how many people in England have been killed by bombs. In what state of mind they died, I can learn from the office at this end. That they were going to die sometime, I knew already. Please keep your mind on your work." ("The Screwtape Letters".) For Lewis, death doesn't mean the same thing to God as it does to us.

Still more, the Christian thinks the perspective by which we judge doesn't know all that He does. Many very clever people have pointed out that a super-intelligence will think differently than we do. Boethius argued (in the sixth century) that God's different experience of Time can explain the apparent contradictions of omniscience and free will. That lightweight Godel argued out that what is logically contradictory for us, trapped in sequential thought, can be resolvable by an infinite knowledge that is beyond sequence. More recently (and casually) Vernor Vinge posits (in "A Fire Upon The Deep") that the study of super artificial intelligences will be classified as "theology".

And the reader doesn't even have to buy any of that. That's what tolerance is about, we're all free to form our opinions and arguments as we think best.

But it is just ignorant to, well, ignore those opinions and arguments that we don't agree with.

And it is remarkable how many supposedly intelligent, curious and tolerant people become so ignorant of what careful and intelligent people have thought when the topic is theology.

paulddraper
0 replies
1d

This isn't real story, you're overthinking it.

ganzuul
0 replies
1d

The parameter "life eternal" is rather strict. And what is a star but an engine of ascension?

heresie-dabord
1 replies
1d13h

Hugo Award winner in 1956. Brilliant story-craft.

This story was first published in 1955 and was collected in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Sky

The story was reprinted in the author's own collection of his favourite work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God_...

thrwyexecbrain
0 replies
1d8h

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is a great resource for publication details of fiction stories. Here is the entry for The Star: https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?40913

wisemang
0 replies
1d13h

Quick read. Excellent Christmas content. Thank you for submitting @Yhippa

tetris11
0 replies
1d2h

Would we have done as well, or would we have been too lost in our own misery to give thought to a future we could never see or share?

Sobering words indeed

sinuhe69
0 replies
21h23m

Reformatted in epub for reading on mobile device.

Enjoy and happy holidays!

https://filebin.net/8nvuikvpbf64o5ec

rootbear
0 replies
17h39m

I drag this story out most years about this time and reread it. It’s wonderfully crafted.

poncho_romero
0 replies
1d5h

Along these same lines, I would recommend _The Sparrow_ by Mary Doria Russell. An interesting story about religion meeting extraterrestrial life, and the implications thereof. Plus the dialogue, characters, and world building are wonderful!

michaelsbradley
0 replies
1d12h

The story is well spun, no doubt! I first encountered it in the 1990s — some reposted USENET content (iirc), in one form or another, while I was at university.

Then, and now, I thought an interesting retelling could involve the protagonists discovering a civilization (Type II+) that had learned to tap the energy of their star and (eventually) inadvertently triggered a supernova, though that fate took some time to unfold and so various laments were left behind on their planet's surface.

Upon realization of the above, the principal protagonist (Jesuit priest) recollects about his crews' wonderment that one civilization's end could, across light years, so precisely signal monumental changes in another. Unanswered questions are raised as to Redemption and Doom. The story ends with the principal protagonist having made a 30-year Ignatian retreat and marveling that, among all the myriad unanswered questions, Earth wheat and grapes were immediately cultivable in the alien soil, such that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was able to be offered uninterruptedly from the day they arrived to the present.

gbacon
0 replies
21h35m

Anticipating social media in 1954: “Perhaps they only showed us the best, and one can hardly blame them.”

ganzuul
0 replies
1d

If you enjoy the topic of Jesus in Space, the Urantia Book might be to your liking.

dtgriscom
0 replies
1d9h

A lovely story. Many Clarke novels strike me as technologically wonderful but emotionally dry; not this one.

dang
0 replies
1d12h

Related:

The Star – Arthur C. Clarke (1967) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29680799 - Dec 2021 (44 comments)

chambers
0 replies
1d3h

See the TV Adaptation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_(The_Twilight_Zone) for a different ending, and in my opinion, less edgy ending:

While Clarke's story ended with the priest in despair after the revelation that the alien civilization had perished in order to light "the Christmas star," the TV episode added an epitaph by the aliens, revealing their acceptance of their place in the universe. Brennert later commented that "Over the years I've taken a little bit of heat from certain fans in the science fiction community for changing the ending of this story. I actually maintain that the ending as it is in this episode is implicit in the story and is not really at odds with the kind of metaphysical work that Clarke did in Childhood's End."[1]
antoviaque
0 replies
13h10m
SergeAx
0 replies
14h27m

Text version for browsers and screen readers: https://web.archive.org/web/20080718084442/http://lucis.net/...