Play Book Tag discussion

Written in mid-20th century, this book takes place in the mid-21st century.

An alien race has arrived at Earth and pretty much taken over as "guardians". They seem benevolent, they promote peace and prosperity, but they don't reveal their motivations. And for a long time, they don't even reveal themselves. Just a mysterious presence in ships hovering above Earth's cities.

The book unfolds in a series of interconnected stories and felt a bit disjointed. Over the course of the book, much is revealed about the aliens and eventually why they're really here on Earth, but in the end I didn't really buy it.

I did appreciate some of Clarke's predictions of future life. This passage in particular made me laugh. He had the right idea, but under-estimated our insatiable appetite for media by a huge margin:

Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges—absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!

The version I read had a foreword from the author letting readers know that the open scene from the movie "Independence Day" looked exactly like he imagined the arrival of the aliens in this book.