There was a more conscious attempt at a Utopia in CHILDHOOD'S END - the second part. Incidentally you must also read Huxley's last novel, ISLAND(patterned to some extent on Ceylon.)
I don't believe any society can be static - certainly not for as long as I postulated in CITY! For my more recent views, see PROFILES OF THE FUTURE.
I really wrote CITY for fun, as a voyage of exploration. Any philosophy is incidental!
First Point. This may not be the first time that some book or work of art, ostensibly created for "fun," and with "philosophy" relegated to incidental, will be remembered by posterity primarily for its philosophical meaning. "Through the Looking Glass" comes to mind as another, as does "The Matrix"...
Second Point: I think ACC was going "downhill" and at a rapid speed with "Profiles", which is scarcely worth a mention, certaninly not a read. To paraphrase one reviewer: It is confused mixture of propaganda and techno-utopianism which makes depressing reading compared to the fiction. Clarke, though, has never been afraid of sounding overly naïve when overtaken by enthusiasm for the new and unexpected. But when a distinguished and elderly futurologist says that predictions of the future are only provisional, he is almost certainly right. If he says that the opinions expressed "are not my own," he is almost certainly wrong, and if he hints that his predictions are to be taken seriously, he is almost certainly not speculating wildly enough.
Third Point: Realizing that more than a few readers of vortex probably think that I have gone way overboard with lavish aggrandizement of the "ulimate meaning" behind the X-box 360, which after all, is "only a toy"?... err, despite it being a teraflop-capable computer which will cost ~$300 for something that could easily have sold for 10,000 times more than that just seven years ago... hey I realize its limitations, and that we are not comparing apples-to-apples (or is that Apples-to-Crays) but I am looking at it in the context of being a stepping stone, and a giant leap to an immediate future - where as a small item which will only get smaller and cheaper (i..e the "sons-of xbox) to the point where a teraflop computer can be dedicated to such things as SR-P-IR which is "speech recognition"- "parsing"- "intelligent response" and pass the Turing Test as if it were some kind of juvenile joke... "are we there yet?"... giving us the capability of replacing/repatriating millions of boring jobs which have "outsourced" with a machine which will cost less than the monthly salary in India.... not to mention the further direction of this trend... whether it be towards heaven or hell, utopia or xtopia.
At any rate my new (kinda new, but already spoken for) word of the week is XTOPIA which is to be defined as the real "new world order" in which machine intelligence rules.
Whether or not humans will still remain in ultimate control after xtopia sets in (which is inevitable) - so as to make 'xptopia' and 'utopia' synonymous, rather than scary antonyms... that decision is still within the range of our group "free will" as a both a society... and...yup... as a dominant species in the new world pecking order.
Jones
