Re: A view of powerful cities in dated history, as seen through Science Fiction - A C Clarke

On 8/23/2020 2:54 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>,
> David Lesher  <[email protected]> wrote:
>> a425couple <[email protected]> writes:
>>
>>
>>> It is interesting to me how he totally skips over
>>> China, India, or any Middle Eastern power, yet to be.
>>> But then, this was just one sentence in a fictional
>>> story.
>>
>> When written, how economically big & public was China?
>> And India was just a possession of the British empire.
> 
> CE was published in '53, at which point the partition of India had been
> done, and both India & Pakistan were independent nations.  Of course it
> was written earler, but not that much earlier.
 >
 > Of course, along with China, all three were in something of a mess and
 > it couldn't have been clear if or when they would get themselves 
sorted out.
 >
The world was pretty sure that somehow China was going
to get itself "sorted out" and be a power.


"Guardian Angel" in was written in 1946,

Founding (of the United Nations)
The UN in 1945: founding members in light blue, protectorates and 
territories of the founding members in dark blue
The UN was formulated and negotiated among the delegations from the 
Allied Big Four (the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union 
and China) at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference from 21 September 1944 to 7 
October 1944 and they agreed on the aims, structure and functioning of 
the UN.[21][22][23] After months of planning, the UN Conference on 
International Organization opened in San Francisco, 25 April 1945, 
attended by 50 governments and a number of non-governmental 
organizations involved in drafting the UN Charter.[24][25][26] "The 
heads of the delegations of the sponsoring countries took turns as 
chairman of the plenary meetings: Anthony Eden, of Britain, Edward 
Stettinius, of the United States, T. V. Soong, of China, and Vyacheslav 
Molotov, of the Soviet Union. At the later meetings, Lord Halifax 
deputized for Mister Eden, Wellington Koo for T. V. Soong, and Mister 
Gromyko for Mister Molotov."[27] The UN officially came into existence 
24 October 1945, upon ratification of the Charter by the five permanent 
members of the Security Council—France, the Republic of China, the 
Soviet Union, the UK and the US—and by a majority of the other 46 
signatories.[28]

I tend to think, that in this one case, arthur Clarke did
not put a lot of serious thought into it,
or as I said earlier, "this was just one sentence in a fictional
story."