'If I Forget Thee, O Earth . . .'

“If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth” focuses primarily on the themes of Coming of Age as an Individual and a Species, Legacy and the Relationship Between Fathers and Sons, and The Dangers of Technology. The physical journey in the moon vehicle parallels Marvin’s journey of discovery as he realizes what has happened to Earth and what humanity must do to survive in the aftermath, as well as the role he himself must play.

Clarke uses the somewhat naive perspective of the boy to convey his message about the dangers of atomic weapons and of human hubris. The use of third-person limited point of view encourages close identification between Marvin and the reader, who experiences the story through Marvin’s perspective. At the beginning of the story, Marvin’s reactions are those of a 10-year-old child: excitement at seeing firsthand what he has previously only known from photographs and educational materials. The lyrical language with which Clarke describes Earthrise further invites the reader into Marvin’s sense of wonder. The juxtaposition of childlike curiosity and delight with the reality of Earth’s devastation  aims to heighten the emotional impact of the climactic revelation.

While the reader and Marvin experience the full weight of that revelation in tandem, the story clarifies that Marvin already knew about Earth’s fate in the abstract: “Father began to speak, telling Marvin the story which until this moment had meant no more to him than the fairy-tales he had heard in childhood” (405). What changes is not so much Marvin’s knowledge as it is his relationship to that knowledge. Marvin has grown up in a largely artificial environment, his love of the “swiftly growing vegetation” of the Farmlands the only hint of what he is missing (403). Seeing Earth brings home the full magnitude of what humanity has lost: not just a large percentage of its own species, but also all of the natural wonders of Earth. This awareness is key to Marvin’s coming of age and, the story suggests, that of humanity as a species. Having witnessed the destruction of their home planet, the lunar colonists now recognize its value. Technology cannot compensate for the loss of “sunset skies,” “pebbled beaches,” and “falling rain,” which is why the colonists are so determined to return. As Marvin’s father explains, “[Un]less there was a goal, a future towards which it could work, the Colony would lose the will to live” (406).

This introduces the second major element of Marvin’s coming of age, as well as the related theme of intergenerational legacies. The Earthrise serves as a symbol not only of Marvin’s dawning awareness of what the loss of Earth truly means but also of his own place in human history. More specifically, Marvin recognizes for the first time his duty to preserve the memory of Earth and the hope of resettling it—a responsibility that will fall to him and to his children, just as it did to his father. Like the “cold” light that reflects off Earth, neither the knowledge nor the responsibility provides much consolation. The story lingers on all that Marvin will not experience for himself while underscoring the remoteness of any possibility of return: “He would never walk beside the rivers of that lost and legendary world, or listen to the thunder raging above its softly rounded hills. Yet one day—how far ahead?—his children’s children would return to claim their heritage” (406). The rhetorical question suggests that it is impossible for Marvin to even guess when his efforts might come to fruition; he must simply have faith that they ultimately will.

The story’s many religious allusions support the notion that the colonists’ situation demands a kind of faith. The organizing metaphor is that of exile—specifically, the Babylonian exile of the Israelites, which is the subject of the psalm from which Clarke derives the story’s title. Although the immediate cause of this exile, like that of the colonists, was war, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles depict it as divine retribution for the Kingdom of Judah’s misdeeds. The implication is that just as those who have sinned can do little but hope God will forgive them, the colonists must hope that one day the Earth will recover enough to allow them to return.

That hope, the story further clarifies, should not rest in technology, of which Marvin’s father remarks, “[N]either machines nor skill nor science could save [humanity]” (406). While technology enables the human species to survive amid the Moon’s hostile environment, it cannot provide humans with a reason to want to survive. Moreover, as the nature of Earth’s destruction makes clear, technology can kill as easily as it can save, and the problems that it creates are not necessarily ones that human ingenuity can solve. Ultimately, it is not technological progress that will render Earth habitable again but rather the planet’s own natural processes: “The winds and the rains would scour the poisons from the burning lands and carry them to the sea, and in the depths of the sea they would waste their venom until they could harm no living things” (406). Though it tempers the story’s otherwise bleak tone, this reverence for nature also emphasizes the folly and carelessness of humanity’s actions.   

Clarke is careful not to specify when the story takes place, except that it is multiple generations after humanity has developed the technology necessary to build a colony on the Moon. This gives the story a timeless aspect that allows it to be as relevant to 21st-century readers as it was in 1951.