History Lesson (short story)

"History Lesson" is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1949.

This two-part story speculates on the cooling of the Sun as a "doomsday scenario" for Earth and an evolutionary advent for Venus.

The first part of the story is told from the perspective of a tribe of nomadic humans in a future where Earth has entered a final ice age. The tribe is traveling toward the equator ahead of glaciers that are descending from the North Pole, but discovers, when they arrive in the last hospitable region of the planet, that glaciers from the South Pole have already almost reached them. The tribe carries with it a few relics from the mid-21st century which it considers sacred, although the functions of the various objects have been forgotten. Before the ultimate extinction of the human species, the relics are safely relocated to a mountain that stands between the two advancing bodies of ice.

The second part of the story is told from the perspective of a race of Venusian reptiles who have evolved into intelligent beings capable of space travel in the 5000 years since the cooling of the Sun. The Venusians travel to Earth and recover the relics of the last tribe of humans, now the only remnants of civilization not buried under ice. The title of the story comes from the attempts of the Venusian scientist, to reconstruct the life and times of erect bipeds that once walked on the Third Planet through the analysis of one of the last relics of mankind — a film reel that apparently contains a Disney or Warner Brothers animated cartoon short.

imilarities with other works of Clarke

*According to Clarke's introduction to his story collection "Reach for Tomorrow", this story shares its roots with "Rescue Party". "Rescue Party" is similar in that the Sun is changing in a way that dooms Earth. But rather than cooling, it explodes - destroying all planets. But both the response of humans to the event, & story endings, are very different.

*There is another similarity with "Rescue Party" and also with "Trouble with the Natives" and '. In all four stories, aliens draw naive conclusions from little information about humans — a movie reel in this story, a 2D portrait in "Rescue Party", some BBC broadcasts in "Trouble with the Natives", and information taken from the end of the "Century of Torture", the 20th, in '.

*In one aspect, this story is very similar to a story in Clarke's "": superfast evolution of smart animals on a world newly made habitable. In 2010, heating up of Europa brings native animals to the stage of human cavemen in just 20,000 years; in this story, cooling of Venus brings Venusians to the level of space farers in just 5000 years.

*At the end of "The Fountains of Paradise", the Sun cools turning Earth into an icy wasteland. This situation is very similar to first story of "History Lesson". But the response of humans to this doomsday scenario is very different in the two works.