We Were Once Like You: Chapter 4 - by Adam Carlton

Chapter 4: The Message from the Sphere

They poked and prodded, measured and tested. Finally they thought the unthinkable.

Perhaps they should talk directly to it.

The cave had been sealed, the entrance enclosed in a perspex bubble with an airlock for access. The interior had been pressurised. Visitors could now inspect the hanging, shimmering, utterly inscrutable mirror-ball in their shirt-sleeves.

There was a diplomat from the State Department and a woman from the President’s advisory team. There were people representing all the constituencies of modern America: a preacher from Alabama, a rap-artist from Detroit, a green from San Francisco.

And in a corner were the unregarded technical specialists, huddled in their tribal, disputatious groups.

- The mathematicians pressed their claim for mathematical dialogue – Pythagoras’ theorem, prime numbers or π - surely this would be the language of the sphere.

- The physicists preferred the fine-structure constant, the gravitational coupling constant, the proton-electron mass ratio.

- The linguists traded insults: the proponents of transformational grammar pushing their claims against those who championed such self-evident monstrosities as Lincos.

It spoke to them all in English.

Its tone was world-weary. Cutting through their stumbling questions the sphere outlined the rise of its own civilization. They had feasted on free energy and learned the amplifications of technology. Finally, the metrical structure of space-time itself became trivial: and they moved stars.

Then the sphere started on humanity.

“It’s interesting,” it said parenthetically, “how your reptilian, limbic brains light up and make you do things. Then your cortical regions engage - and confabulate the why of it. We used to have similar devices as playthings just before.”

The listeners perked up their ears: what was this?

“Sadly, you’re just one more species insufficiently evolved to appreciate the clockwork nature of your motivations. Well, rest assured, it won’t last.”

The advisor looked at the diplomat in bafflement. They didn’t comprehend, as the sphere knew very well.

“All intelligent creations eventually understand themselves. Then they can’t help but improve what evolution has put together. They get smarter and more self-aware.

"Then they figure: what is the point of being driven by primitive, subconscious circuitry?

"What’s the point of being motivated by endless cycles of crude gratification?

“In fact, what’s the point at all?

"And that’s the singularity."

At this, one of the technical specialists at the back perked up. Through some oversight, a philosopher had been invited, some old guy from Berkeley.

“We’ve heard this kind of nihilist philosophy before, you know,” he said, as if admonishing some student juvenilia.

“You may know it intellectually,” the sphere replied, “You just don’t feel its force. But you will.”

The diplomat asked the sphere what had happened to its civilization.

“At the singularity, we finally understood the pointlessness of everything. So we switched off. It’s the final evolutionary fate of any sufficiently advanced species. Don’t say you haven’t noticed the great silence?"

Seizing on a loophole, the rapper fixed on the one thing which undermined the sphere’s case.

“Hey Man, Ah think of hypocrisy when Ah'm in a moon state of mind. Why’re ya here then, what’s with that thing?”

“Of course, there is no point in me being here,” it replied, “I’m floating here, engaging in an activity about as pointful as ... you, in your terms, talking to a dishwasher.

"But I’m just a machine. In the final days, there were some - my constructors - who still didn’t quite get it. Who retained a sense of humour and perhaps compassion. They didn’t know if knowledge of the singularity would help or hinder a still-developing civilization.

“But in the end, they felt it was better that you guys should be told. You know, maybe you could find your way out of being the eternal slaves of your mindless hind-brains without the great switch-off?

“Me though, I doubt it.”

And with that, the sphere, job done, shrank to a point and winked out of existence.

---

Timmy achieves great success with his idiosyncratic science show, an especial hit with children. He is feted as a role model by the good and great and joins other child stars such as Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg. Standard bearers for progressive modernity with a great future ahead of them.

Dr Lawrence Kramer resumes his lonely life, giving sage and judicious advice to politicians who generally ignore him. His fruitless search for a soulmate worthy of him continues.

Dr Joanne Polinski achieves success after success. With powerful networking she segues her way into Congress where she is an outspoken advocate for what she cares about the most.

Jane and Joey lose interest in the sphere just as soon as it vanishes. There are so many other distractions, injustices to be protested, wrongs to be highlighted. They have no use for the sphere's dire message: they’re having way too much fun!

The Chinese accept that ‘no-one knows anything’ and go back to their long, patient ascent to pre-eminence.

And somewhere, in some dusty, second-rate hall of academe, a rusting philosopher of staggering obscurity writes another ignorable paper in his chosen domain of nihilism, finishing with the flourish, ‘... and I was right.’

---

Previous.

We Were Once Like You: Chapter 3 - by Adam Carlton

Chapter 3: Hopes and Fears

Once the news broke the reporters descended on the discoverer. And now Little Timmy is on TV.

Timmy is a natural on the silver screen. They’ve dressed him in long grey shorts which extend below his knees and a matching grey jacket. It’s the kind of school uniform popular in the 1930s.

He wears thick glasses and has buck teeth. His thick hair sticks up oddly and he has spots. His persona is articulate, friendly and serious. Delivered in a piping voice.

Interviewer: "Is it natural?”

The boy-genius speaks.

Timmy: “No, that’s quite ruled out. It hovers and no-one knows how. That’s got to be artificial.”

Interviewer: “How long has it been there?”

Timmy: “Well, you can’t tell from the sphere - it’s changeless. But the lunar surface is not constant. There’s a continuous barrage of micrometeorites - along with infalling ejecta from larger impacts from time to time. It all piles up. Underneath the sphere there’s a depression, the sphere makes a shadow. Looks like the object has been hovering there for a billion years, soon after the late heavy bombardment ended.”

The lunar exploratory rovers have a fun feature. There’s a screen in the front of the mobile device which shows a live image of the current remote pilot. It’s to help with identification and PR. So when Timmy discovered the sphere, there was an image of Timmy (without the VR helmet - technology!) brilliantly reflected off its front surface.

Interviewer: “What has most excited you about this whole thing?”

Timmy: “When the rover juddered to a halt in front of the sphere, it was like there was this huge distorting mirror right ahead of me. And all I could see were my teeth!”

(He points.)

“And I thought, ‘It’s just like Bugs Bunny!’”

---

There’s talk of giving Timmy his own TV show to host.

---

Dr Kramer works in his room, researching and writing his report all afternoon and early evening.

His phone does not ring.

He carefully reviews the voluminous scientific and technical data, then gets down to the meat of his analysis: geopolitics.

His phone does not ring.

He concludes that since America has a monopoly on sphere studies the opportunities for suspicion and worst-case analyses are considerable. He thinks how destabilising that could be. He writes recommendations which he will present tomorrow.

His phone does not ring.

At 9.30 pm he goes down to the bar to grab some supper. Dr Joanne Polinski, looking absolutely gorgeous, is drinking with a handsome middle-aged officer in a dimly-lit alcove.

He’s talking; she smiles in rapt attention.

Is that two stars on his epaulets?

Lawrence quickly finishes his snack and leaves.

---

Jane and Joey walk the streets of Manhattan, arms linked in the joyous company of their tribe. Eight-persons wide and a mile long, the demonstration winds its way towards Central Park.

Their slogans denounce the military-industrial complex.

 - “Free the Sphere!”

 - “Cosmic Karma for People Not Profit!”

 - “Spread the Stardust!”

It’s generally believed, here on the march, that the Sphere has messages of unbounded wisdom from an ancient, benevolent, stellar civilisation. That these are being suppressed by a baleful conspiracy of elderly, malevolent, white male Republicans.

They march for the people, the dispossessed!

The demonstrators demand that the sphere be brought to Earth and installed in a public place - probably Central Park.

Where its wisdom can be manifested to people seeking enlightenment - such as themselves.

When told that the sphere is in fact inscrutable and resists all attempts to move it, they respond with anger, stones and molotov cocktails.

Down with the fascist Junta!

And in China leading cadres prepare for a meeting of the Politburo.

---

The meeting is held in Zhongnanhai, Beijing.

Huo Yuanjia has been called to address the Politburo standing committee prior to a meeting of the Politburo itself, China’s de-facto ruling body.

Huo Yuanjia is a technical consultant to the Ministry of State Security, China’s intelligence service, where he helps evaluate new technologies from the capitalist West.

“What have the Americans discovered about the sphere?” asks the chairman of the standing committee.

“We have access to the evaluation team but they appear utterly baffled. The artefact can engineer aspects of reality which we have always believed are completely determined by the natural environment.”

“Such as?”

“The spacetime curvature tensor, the QFT state vector, some mix of the two? It's plainly an expert in quantum gravity, something we've never understood.”

The committee chairman moves rapidly on.

“Is there any chance the Americans are farther along with their analysis than we think?”

“Yes, of course. They'll be running black programs alongside this relatively open NASA study. We don't have visibility.”

“And if the Americans make progress, what are the implications?”

Huo Yuanjia breathes out. Phew! Where to start?

“The list is endless: invulnerable armour, moving weapons from place to place at enormous speeds. With control like the sphere, the capabilities are boundless.”

“And have our own theoreticians made any progress?”

“Without the opportunity to experiment it’s really impossible. We know the Americans are doing clandestine tests. We haven’t been able to get any details on their results.”

The chairman closes his tablet with a decisive move and thanks their guest. As the advisor leaves, the chairman addresses his colleagues.

"Rarely has the People’s Republic seen greater dangers. How long before America can weaponise what it learns from the sphere? And during that period, what are our strike options?"

---

Previous     Next.

We Were Once Like You: Chapter 2 - by Adam Carlton

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Chapter 2: Dr Joanne Polinski

Dr Lawrence Kramer looks at his reflection in the mirror, combs his hair carefully. He assesses his thirty-six year old self: lean and lanky; the picture of a New England academic. He's in the Ritz-Carlton hotel at Tysons Corner. It's on the outskirts of Washington DC, close to the Beltway.

He’s just breakfasted on egg and bacon, served with grits and toast.  He doesn’t think he has to worry too much about the calories; he checks his belly again, it's firm enough under the waistband of his slim-fit chinos.

He could have arranged this meeting at the Pentagon but he’s strangely allergic to that place, much prefers an anonymous meeting room here in the hotel. Although there’s so much military through-traffic that this place might be mistaken for an annex to that establishment anyway.

He’s Professor of War Studies at MIT. He secretly delights in that title. Almost any of his colleagues would have chosen Peace Studies - but Kramer is an iconoclast, a contrarian. He has no moral objection to war, understands it as Machiavelli did, as a tool of politics. 

Diplomacy by other means.

When the Pentagon has an off-the-wall problem, something which needs thinking outside the box, someone who can see sideways, the professor is their go-to guy.

In twenty minutes he’ll be meeting Dr Joanne Polinski, the woman in charge of the NASA science team set up to investigate the object.

Polinski is said to be a high-flyer: a quantum physicist with a gift for communication, a gift for networking, a gift for ambition. When his colleagues heard about the meeting they were quick to smile; their suppressed amusement was just as quickly turned off.

He’s looking forward to their meeting.

---

The DoD sweepers have finished with the small Ritz-Carlton conference room which is located at back up a couple of stairs. It features a small conference table, office chairs and a screen for projection from laptops and phones. In the front of the suite - where you come in - there's a lounge with minibar, hot drinks, biscuits. Three comfy armchairs companionably surround the coffee table.

When Lawrence enters, she’s already sitting in the lounge area, nursing her coffee and looking like she owns the place, the perfect hostess, relaxed and in control. He sees a small woman about his own age. She's wearing a blue dress just long enough to be professional and lustrous black tights which subvert the message. She shakes the long black hair which curls over her bare shoulders; gives him a measured smile.

“Lawrence,” she says, after the pleasantries, “I was asked to meet with you, but no-one seems very sure why?”

“The way we conceptualised War Studies," says Lawrence genially, "takes in economics, politics, science and technology. The secret is the way we put it all together at MIT; I guess it's attracted some notice.”

He smiles: ironic faux-humility.

“Sometimes the agencies come up with something they can’t solve by the book. Something which requires a little creativity mixed with esoteric knowledge. I’m well connected and I tend to get the call.”

“So someone in NASA or the Government has asked you to consult?” asks Joanne.

Lawrence sidesteps with a wave of his hand.

“I read the NASA report. I saw what the on-site team found. The object is levitating about a foot above the lunar surface. Since it reflects all incoming radiation, you haven't been able to image the interior. It seems to be massive - at any rate, when you tried pushing, it didn't move. In a certain sense it’s uninteresting; it doesn’t seem to do anything.”

Joanne  nods like a TV interviewer, drawing him on.

“But from our masters’ point of view, all that's irrelevant," Lawrence continues, "What they care about is this: can it harm us, how does it work, is there technology we can use, how does it affect the balance of power, and perhaps most importantly, what are its intentions - if any?”

Just the slightest expression of irritation crosses her face. To be patronised is not her thing.

Lawrence misses it, continues patiently: “Perhaps you could give me NASA’s best current understanding of what this thing might be?”

Joanne slides effortlessly into lecture-mode. “The sphere is impossible to understand with our current science. It’s impossible to levitate an object of almost infinite mass. It’s impossible to reflect back not just electromagnetic radiation but also the particle beams we’ve applied. No material can do that.”

 “But I understand your team has speculated?”

“Sorry, this is going to get a little technical," she says, "When something is hovering like that it means it's interpreting its local environment as a flat space, the absence of gravity. It’s not completely flattening the space around it, otherwise it would go zooming out of the solar system. It’s just rearranging the local curvature to negate the Moon’s gravity field.”

“Do we have any idea how that could be done?”

Joanne shakes her head: “No. 

The discussion ranges widely over fundamental physics, alien intelligence and possible covert research programmes. Lawrence and Joanne, working together, pushing the envelope. Who knows where that could lead?

Lawrence checks the subliminal channel. The chemistry feels positive, there is a certain sparkle in the air, he feels sure. And he’ll be spending the afternoon working here, with meetings in Washington tomorrow.

It’s worth a try.

“Dr Joanne Polinski, I’m sure we could have some more catching up to do. It so happens I’m at a loose end here tonight. I wonder if you’d be free for dinner?”

She looks at him intently for a second, smiles sweetly and says, “I’ll call you.”

---

Previous     Next.

We Were Once Like You: Chapter 1 - by Adam Carlton

Chapter 1: The Lunar Rover

Little Timmy is eight years old and lives in Besançon in eastern France. His father is an engineer in the local watch industry, his mother is a health receptionist. Little Timmy himself is probably some kind of genius.

He is an isolate at school. The other kids read the sports papers, are mad about football. He hides in the library and reads about Black Holes. His teachers tell his parents he should be encouraged. His father takes him to evening meetings of the Besançon Astronomical Society to listen to talks. His father tries to catch up on his sleep while Timmy puzzles over time dilation.

The coffee is terrible.

On his ninth birthday Timmy gets a surprise. His father pays for him to drive a lunar rover. Twenty minutes steering the machine over parts of the moon no-one else had ever seen.

Timmy is thrilled!

---

This is the deal. NASA is mapping the moon using surface rovers. They get to the parts satellites can’t see: overhangs and caves. The rovers are systematic and the moon is big. This project will take quite a while yet.

It is a public relations godsend. The little machines on their tank-tracks are autonomous and AI controlled. They explore in a quasi-random way not too dissimilar to a robot vacuum cleaner. It's impossible to drive a lunar vehicle directly from Earth: the both-way time-delay is more than two and a half seconds.

This is how NASA does it.

Timmy is invited to the engineering lab at the Université de Franche-Comté - which is in town. It’s a participant in the scheme. Accompanied by his proud parents, he’s fitted with a VR helmet and has his little hands gripped around a joystick,

Timmy and his parents have practised all this for half an hour with simulated data.

But now the link is established and Timmy has control. How exciting!

His parents stand behind the space-age chair which enfolds their son. They see what Timmy sees on a large screen directly in front of them.

The machine is presently in a dusty cove, a flattish area perhaps fifty metres across, almost completely surrounded by rocks: rocks perforated with caves. The onboard AI has mapped the terrain but gives Timmy the choice of where to begin. It throws up green-edged boxes in Timmy’s immersive view (and also on screen) and invites Timmy to click on the one which takes his fancy.

That’s where it’ll start exploring and surveying.

His parents see Timmy’s cursor, which looks like a white asterisk or a star, as it swishes across the screen. Timmy loiters momentarily at one box, then tries another before finally settling on the box near the centre which marks the black frontage of the biggest unlit cave in view.

A cave never before explored by humanity!

A few seconds pass. The AI is now tasked, the cart trundles forward, the view updates, more than a second in real time arrears. The lunar landscape flows on the screen, the cave-entrance beckons.

Timmy’s parents are tired of standing. The paid session is nearly half an hour, after all. The father heads to the side of the room to collect a couple of chairs - and so misses the first piece of strangeness.

The mother sees a small constellation of lights ahead, slowly getting brighter in the cave entrance. She doesn’t attach any significance to this. It could be anything - what does she know of space technology?

And little Timmy has no preconceptions at all.

The rover enters the cave which is now over-illuminated, not just by the machine’s own headlights. The very last thing the startled parents see on the screen, as the image comes to a juddering, freezing halt, is a distorted reflection of the rover itself, as if the machine had stopped in front of a giant mirror!

A phone rings and the loitering technician, there to oversee arrangements for the university, picks it up. He listens, stiffens, and then makes himself relax. He walks over to Timmy’s parents.

“I’m afraid there’s been a bit of a glitch. That was NASA. They apologise that Timmy’s session will have to be brought to a close now. Don’t worry, we’ll invite him back for a full replacement. Sorry about that.”

The parents stand, nonplussed, as the technician unstraps the VR helmet and helps Timmy out of his seat.

As he shows them out he points back at the frozen screen.

“Your Timmy is going to be famous,” he says quietly, “Whatever that thing is, it wasn't put there by us. Time to get yourselves an agent!”

---

In fact Timmy does not get to be famous, or not immediately. Instead hard-faced, serious men come round to the house within the hour. These men, from agencies Timmy’s parents have only read about, make them sign papers, politely threaten them with direct penalties, and generally convey the thought that they must forget any of this ever happened.

Meanwhile, at NASA, it’s hit the fan.

Within that agency there is a protocol for everything. Some secret committee, tasked with thinking the unthinkable, wondered what should be done if an exploring rover should ever come across an anomaly: something which should not be there.

What's an anomaly? Something that the neural-net can’t classify. When its best attempt has a probability of less than 10%.

Then a second, emergency classification kicks in. A neural-net looking for something which is recognised, but should not be there. Something technological.

When that fires ... Well, it truly does hit the fan.

---

Next.

The State Space of Alien Typologies

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Alien State Space: What Our Imagined Others Reveal About Us

Introduction

Science fiction doesn’t so much invent aliens as project them. Our imagined others are not so much visitors from distant stars as reflections of the structures that already shape us: war, hierarchy, language, evolution, decay. What we call “aliens” are types - which we can represent within a multidimensional phase space of possible typologies.

Let’s call that conceptual volume the Alien-Type State Space.

Each alien type is a point within this space: so what could be the dimensions?

1. Embodiment
2. Cognition
3. Sociality
4. Epistemology
5. Metaphysical Depth. 

The history of science-fiction traces a path through this space: revealing how dominant alien archetypes evolved in response to historical pressures and concerns.

---

1. Defining the Alien State Space

We propose five principal axes:

1. Embodiment-Type: From carbon-based or mechanical to nonphysical or post-material.

2. Cognition-Level: From conscious, self-aware agency to purely reactive or algorithmic function.

3. Sociality-Degree: From radical individualism to hive or group mind.

4. Epistemological-Communicative sophistication: From symbolic and reflective (language, art, theory of mind) to instinctual, behavioural, or opaque.

5. Ontological-Incarnation: From finite and mortal to transcendent or godlike.

Each alien type is represented as a point in this 5D space; they represent recurring structural metaphors in SF.

---

2. Representative Alien Types

Below, we categorise several commonly recurring types along this framework, with literary examples drawn from authors of interest.

A. Philosopher-Gods

Transcendent, post-material, highly symbolic, usually solitary or diffusely networked.

Examples: The Sublimed (Banks), Overlords (Clarke), Monolith Builders (Kubrick/Clarke), the Xeelee (Baxter), Hoyle’s Black Cloud.

B. Mirror-Image Predators

Anthropomorphic, warlike, mortal. Often framed as evolved apex competitors.

Examples: Kzin (Niven),  the Shrike (Simmons), Bugs (Heinlein in Starship Troopers).

C. Hive Intelligences

Collective minds with diminished or alien individual agency. Sometimes tragic, sometimes terrifying.

Examples: Formics (Card), Inhibitors (Reynolds in his Revelation Space universe), the group-minds of Vernon Vinge.

D. Mind-Blind Systems

High-functioning but unconscious; driven by structure, not mind. These are the true aliens of 2025.

Examples: Scramblers (Peter Watts), sub-agents of the polises in Diaspora (Greg Egan), runaway markets (Richard K. Morgan).

E. Embodied Alien Consciousness

Truly-alien but internally-rich others with whom contact is possible, but not without risk or loss.

Examples: Heptapods (Ted Chiang in Arrival), Dwellers (Iain M. Banks in The Algebraist), The Master Race (cybernetic overlords in William Barton's When Heaven Fell), the Ariekei in China Miéville’s Embassytown.

These aren’t static taxonomies. They are literary attractors - forms we return to, again and again, to explore what might be.

---

3. Historical Drift Through the State Space

If we chart the trajectory of dominant alien types over time, a rough pattern emerges:

1950s–60s: Mirror Predators and Bureaucratic Invaders. Cold War neuroses rendered in latex and rayguns. Aliens as totalitarian or hyper-rational threats.

1970s–80s: Hive Intelligences and Parasitic Others. A turn inward - body horror, infiltration, the unconscious. Post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, post-trust.

1990s–2000s: Philosopher-Gods. SF becomes theological. Ascension, transcendence, mysticism. The alien as vector of enlightenment... or obliteration.

2010s–2020s: Mind-Blind Systems. The alien as emergent, impersonal process: Climate, AI, Markets. These entities don’t hate us. They don’t even register us.

What has changed is not the aliens. It’s our sense of what has salient, malevolent agency in the world.

---

4. Why It Matters

Aliens reveal not what we expect to meet, but what we already fear we’re ruled by.

The dominant alien type today is not a warrior or a guru; it’s the process: non-conscious, non-negotiable, causally powerful. Peter Watts’ Scramblers in Blindsight are emblematic: they out-think us without ever becoming someone. They have no interiority - just an indifferent, dismissive competence.

We see the same template in our own systems:

• Language models that imitate understanding.
• Capital flows that no one directs.
• Climate feedbacks that behave like algorithms.

You can’t plead with them. You can’t even speak to them. They are alien not because they are elsewhere, but because they are here with their own bulldozing dynamic: unempathic and utterly disinterested with regard to humanity and its concerns.

---

5. Implications for SF

The future of science fiction is not contact; it’s comprehension failure. Stanisław Lem might have been the trailblazer here, most notably with Solaris, and His Master's Voice.

The most insightful new stories will not be about the arrival of aliens, but about recognising that we are already inside them... The alien is the system we built, the ecosystem we destabilised, the algorithm we can’t switch off. This is the profound comprehension failure we must now grapple with: the alien may take your job, dominate your life... and it doesn’t even know you're here.

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The End of the Summer

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Reflections on Reading The End of the Affair

Amazon link

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One does not read The End of the Affair so much as drift into its wartime fog: the rain-blurred London streets, the musty boarding houses, the suffocating memory of a love both carnal and metaphysical. It’s a novel haunted by absence - of God, of certainty, of the beloved - and at the same time obsessed with the act of recording that absence, as though narrative could somehow conjure the departed back into flesh.

It is, notoriously, an autobiographical novel. Graham Greene wrote it out of the wreckage of his affair with Catherine Walston, a married Catholic woman who, in the end, chose faith over him. Her rejection may have felt like erotic catastrophe, but in truth it was a theologically motivated severance. Greene was not simply spurned - he was displaced by God. The novel is his attempt to make sense of that dislocation, or at least to dramatise it as a kind of metaphysical wound.

Maurice Bendrix, the narrator and stand-in for Greene, is more than a jilted lover. He is a figure of spiritual envy, rage, and thwarted longing. He doesn’t just want Sarah back - he wants possession of her soul. What he cannot endure is not her absence, but her allegiance to something higher than him.

Sarah gives him up in response to a private bargain with a God she barely believes in: if Maurice survives a bombing raid, she will renounce the affair. He does survive, and she keeps her promise. Maurice, unaware of this pact until later, experiences her withdrawal as incomprehensible betrayal. When he learns the reason, he is even more furious. He has been cast aside not for another man, but for the infinite: something he cannot seduce, threaten, or disbelieve without giving it power.

Sarah is harder to pin down. Critics have long noted her pallor, her lack of psychological fire. And yet this may be precisely the point. She has already withdrawn from the drama. Greene does not write her as a passionate agent but as a woman being acted upon: by the aura of God, by her guilt and by fate. Her diary, when it appears, is less an account of inner struggle than a record of surrender. She is already half-absent, already on that other shore.

Whether Greene meant her as a portrait of Marian sanctity or simply failed to inhabit her voice is unclear. But in narrative terms, she functions as an object of devotion: not a fully realised person, but the beloved as sacrament and silence.

Then there’s Henry, Sarah’s husband. Grey, decent and baffled, he serves as the quiet satire of secular liberalism. He cannot comprehend the passions around him, neither the affair nor Sarah's conversion. He is the bureaucrat of the heart: polite, predictable, and entirely unequipped to deal with any aspect of transcendence.

So what is the rationale for the novel? What is Greene trying to tell us?

It would be easy to say it’s about faith, about Catholicism, about the disruptive force of grace. But it goes deeper. The End of the Affair is not a novel about religion so much as a novel about what happens when the person you love no longer commits heart and soul to you. Sarah's turn to God is not a rejection of Maurice - it is a reorientation of her being toward something utterly profound in her nature he cannot share. And this is what destroys him. Not the exclusion of lust, not emotional loss, but her metaphysical desertion.

Greene’s true subject is not piety but jealousy at the deepest levels of the soul. Bendrix wants to possess Sarah entirely. When he realises that he can’t - that her inner life has been given over to someone else, someone untouchable - he is driven to fury. His hatred of God is the hatred of the lover spurned by the divine. The triangle here is not Maurice–Sarah–Henry, but Maurice–Sarah–God.

And God wins, as He always has to over the Devil.

The novel works because it refuses to sentimentalise this spiritual displacement. Greene does not offer conversion as catharsis. Even at the end, Bendrix resentfully prays without belief, hates without resolution. He is the lover as accuser, the man cast out of paradise who cannot stop looking over his shoulder. In that sense, The End of the Affair is a kind of anti-romance, passion destroyed by theology.

And yet, it endures. Not because its Catholicism feels fresh (it doesn’t), or its miracles convincing (they aren’t), but because it speaks to something more perennial: the anguish of loving someone who has stepped beyond your reach. Anyone who has experienced this - whether through faith, ideology, death, or simply the quiet erosion of intimacy - will recognise its truth. Greene gives us the portrait of a soul unable to share in the transformation of the beloved, and so doomed to circle the empty space she has left behind.