"Crusade" is a

short story A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest ...

by English writer Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1968 and later reprinted in''

The Wind from the Sun ''The Wind from the Sun'' () is a 1972 collection of science fiction short stories by British writer Arthur C. Clarke. Some of the stories originally appeared in a number of different publications. A part of the book was included in CD on bo ...

''as well as'' The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke''.

Synopsis

The story follows the extremely long life span of an

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

that exists on a frozen planet in the vast space between two galaxies. The intelligence sends out scouts into another galaxy to seek other life like themselves, only to discover biological intelligences, whose physique is very different from their own. Tens of thousands of years pass to collect data about them, before the intelligence decides to send a "crusade", which will reach planet Earth in the year 2050.

Release

"Crusade" was first published in 1968 as part of the anthology ''The Farthest Reaches'', which was published by

Trident Press Simon & Schuster () is an American publishing company and a subsidiary of Paramount Global. It was founded in New York City on January 2, 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. As of 2016, Simon & Schuster was the third largest publ ...

. The following year it was given a French translation and released in the fifteenth fiction special for the magazine ''Histoires stellaires''. It has subsequently been republished in several different collections that include''

''and'' The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke''. "Crusade" has been translated into approximately five languages, which include French, German, and Croatian.

Themes

Themes covered in the story include the concept of humanity. In his paper "2001 in Perspective: The Fiction of Arthur C. Clarke", John Hollow covered the story along with "Dial F for Frankenstein", noting that "The thing mocked in each of these stories, however, is not the machine but man's assumption that he is the be-all and end-all of the universe." Zoran Živković covered "Crusade" in his 2018 paper, writing that "The transience and fragility of the world of the giant ammoniac mind–in aeonian proportions, of course–compel it to act to preserve itself. Thus it takes a step that Clarke considers to represent a necessary phase in the development of every cosmic being."

Legacy

Soumya Banerjee cited "Crusade" as the inspiration for this 2016 paper "A Roadmap for a Computational Theory of the Value of Information in Origin of Life Questions".

References

External links

* {{Arthur C. Clarke 1968 short stories Science fiction short stories Rogue planets in fiction