It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican.
The narrator of “The Star” is the chief astrophysicist among the crew of a space ship sent to study a supernova observed in a distant galaxy. He is also a Jesuit. This unexpected juxtaposition of religion and science in a futuristic science explains the even more jaw-dropping aspects of the story’s opening line, quoted above. The commingling of not just religious beliefs and not just Christian religious beliefs, but a very specific Christian sect of believers has made “The Star” one of Clarke’s most controversial with criticism to an extent divided over whether the story is intended to be anti-Christian or whether the obviously sympathy toward and intelligence exhibited by its Jesuit character undermines such a critique.
So they left a sentinel, one of millions they have scattered throughout the Universe, watching over all worlds with the promise of life. It was a beacon that down the ages has been patiently signaling the fact that no one had discovered it.
It is from this central premise of the short story “The Sentinel” published in 1951 that a cinematic revolution in science fiction would sweep across movie theaters of the world seventeen years. Contained within the very constricted narrative and sparse story details of “The Sentinel” is the kernel for its epoch-leaping adaptation into the film written by Clarke and directed by Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
He was looking upon the funeral pyre of a world— upon the radioactive aftermath of Armageddon. Across a quarter of a million miles of space, the glow of dying atoms was still visible, a perennial reminder of the ruinous past.
The “he” is a ten-year old boy who is member a group of humans living on a colonized moon. He is looking down at earth, wondering why he has been told that return to the planet is impossible. The reason is made clear, but couched in evocative imagery dense with metaphor. The description of earth not as a green or blue planet, but as the dying embers of a global conflagration is a poetic description of a world made uninhabitable as the result of nuclear annihilation.
At 0150 GMT on December 1, 1975, every telephone in the world started to ring.
The premise outlined and subsequently pursued through this story is one that has taken on a life well outside it fictional confines. According to internet legend, Tim Berners-Lee was partially inspired by this story of communication technology interconnectedness around the globe during the process of becoming the creator of the World Wide Web.
"And now we find that we can live for two hundred years. Imagine how they're going to react to that news! This is your problem now, Mister Journalist; you've asked for it, and you've got it. Tell me this, please - I'd really be interested to know - just how are you going to break it to them?"
A journalist sent to the moon to do a public relations pieces on the research being conducted stumbles across what he believes to be a secret which had not previously existed during his previous visit. When confronting the Director of Medical Research, it is determined that the best course of action is to tell the journalist the whole truth. And now that he has learned the great and horrifying secret, the Director confronts him on his the terms of his own career ethics, thus suggesting that no matter what wonderful advancements in technology and knowledge humans make, they will still be facing many of the very same problems.
