News has just come through that Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90.
From my personal perspective it’s ironic that Clarke’s Odyssey in time should end just before Easter 2008, as it was just before Easter 1988 that I purchased a copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it was on Good Friday twenty years ago that I read the awesome final pages of the book. This began a literary odyssey for me which continued through the rest of the Space Odyssey series and pretty much every other work of novel length which Clarke has written (although for some reason I seem to have missed The Ghost From The Grand Banks).
Like all the giants of his genre, Clarke was able to meld a sure grasp of hard science with humanistic speculation on human, civilisational, spiritual and cosmic possibilities, both alone and in his collaborations (most recently with Stephen Baxter). As it happens, last weekend I was vexed to find that Brisbane CBD bookshops didn’t have the final volume of Clarke’s and Baxter’s Time Odyssey trilogy in stock. This will almost certainly be rectified quickly in the light of today’s news.
As for the ultimate question: will Clarke dream, is he a mortal creature whose time has come, or will he be resurrected using wormhole technology along with the rest of us once the Wormwood has been deflected?
I’d imagine that the more literary LP contributors will turn their nose up at Clarke - his prose was often pedestrian and his characters sometimes had an emotional range from mild amusement to mild exasperation, in the face of the utterly fantastic.
But the ideas were so bloody great, who cares?
If I had to pick a favourite Clarke novel (as distinct from short story, which was arguably his greater gift), it might be Earthlight, about a war fought between Earth and the independent planets over the moon’s supposed mineral resources. There are a few scientific anachronisms, certainly, but the society he creates on a satellite we had not yet visited still rings true today.
Yes, Clarke’s characters usually had limited emotional range, but at least they did have emotions, which was not always the case for hard sf from that era
And sometimes his prose did rise to the occasion. His evocation of the billion-year old Diaspar, the last city, has always haunted me.
My favourite … probably would be something from the 1970s. Maybe The Deep Range, about an astronaut who has to leave the high frontier for psychological reasons, but finds fulfillment doing a not dissimilar job under the ocean. It’s well within Clarke’s usual emotional range, but that’s perfect for the story. For sensawunda, I’d probably go with The City and the Stars, just pipping Rendezvous with Rama at the post.
Its a long long time since I read any A. C. Clarke.So long O foreget what I’ve read and not read. But at the time I wasd quite into him and really enjoyed him. He had a good run.
Clarke was at his weakest when invoking a sensawunda at absent aliens, like Rama and associated “big dumb objects” stories, and at his strongest when the sensawunda was at ourselves. Not the “humanity has done stuff quicker than other aliens” three cheers school, but his recurring theme of the young man working to expand his horizons. The largest example being The City and the Stars, but earlier examples were found in The Road to the Sea and The Lion of…something.
The sense of faith and wonder in humanity in aggregate, despite the pettiness, stupidity and laziness that might be found locally is inspiring. It’s also something he shared with Asimov, but was entirely absent is the heroic engineer ubermensch lectures churned out by Heinlein.
And that’s why I think Clarke will continue to be read for a long time, long after his technological dreams have become either absurdly anachronistic, or so accepted as to be overlooked. He managed to cut through petty politics of the time to get to a fundamental theme of faith in humanity’s endeavour.
He was the best science fiction writer I ever read. To me the essence of science fiction is creating a universe that fits within the laws of science. Alot of “science fiction” simply set a story in space or the future without regard for what is within realms of the scientifically possible. Clarke’s writing will date very slowly because he didn’t use ideas that were scientifically impossible. 2001 could be have been written and released today. The main ship in that story used nuclear powered ion thrusters which was a completely hypothetical idea at the time. Today NASA is (well was) working on producing a probe to Jupiter running nuclear powerd ion thrusters. JIMO is practically an unmanned version of Discovery One.
His short stories were the best. Enough to introduce an idea without too much else to get in the way.
I think he will actually be remembered longest for a piece non-fiction work he did. The book “Interplanetary Flight” was a reasonably short description of what a rocket would need to do to get to the moon, or Mars or into space. A surprising number of important people from the early days of space exploration say that reading this book was the thing that made them realise that getting into space was not just fantasy and could actually be done.
Most of the time I have rather limited patience for the bad writing and lousy story/character skills of most SF writers; the punch is almost entirely in the trippiness of the idea or conception, so the crazier the better, it saves time. (This is what makes Borges king.) For my money, Clarke really made the cut with “Childhood’s End,” which taken as a book is pretty unreadable now, but taken as a suite of trippy ideas, well, that’s another matter.
I always liked the 2001 movie a lot more when I was a kid and had no idea what was going on in it. It kind of reminded one of life, in that fashion. Still, most of the best parts are the sad little human moments, probably more Kubrick than Clarke.
Think of the immense changes Clarke got to witness in his 90 year transit. Odds are excellent that at least one of the many children born today, the day of his passing, will live to be at least 90 years old themselves. One wonders if human life as it’s lived at that next remote 90-year crossing would be at all comprehensible to us, today. (cue “star child” music and trippy camera effects.)
I doubt human nature will change all that much.
As Earthlight spent some time speculating on, office politics is unlikely to end even if it’s played out at an astronomical observatory on the far side of the Moon, or even further away…
I always loved ‘The Fountains of Paradise’ - gave me a lifelong enthusiasm for building a space elevator. The almost chapters from ‘The Lost Worlds of 2001′ were pretty good as well. However I admit that I stopped reading Clarke and Asimov around age 17 as I began to hanker after that character development stuff in my literature.
Sadly for me, the marvelous optimism of 2001 has slowly been replaced by an uncomfortable niggling feeling that the short story, “Breaking Strain”, where one astronaut tries to murder another for smoking, may have more to say to us about our immediate future as hard-boiled frogs.
Hopefully Childhoods end or the rendezvous with Rama will distract me from my gathering gloom.
I actually thought he was older. But RIP to the guy who made my childhood a lot richer. The stories and one life-changing movie. Farewell Arthur thanks for the ‘chucks’.
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out…
Vale.
That’s ‘chunks’ not ‘chucks’.
I loved his short stories. A couple of months ago I got an anthology (I think it was entire), of his work, prefaced by him, in chronological order. It was wonderful. Had read some of the stories before, not all. What an amazing period of time to have lived.
No-one’s yet mentioned his conception of the geosynchronous satellite, which if he had patented would have made him the world’s only billionaire SF writer.
Favourite novels: The City and the Stars, The Fountains of Paradise and Childhood’s End. Yes, the prose was pedestrian on the whole, but the ideas so meticulously expressed gave me a sense of what we could achieve beyond this planet, and a hope that I might even see some of it.
Never mind the geosynchronous satillite, Artie also invented PDAs in ‘Imperial Earth’.
Hoisted a few for him earlier tonight, after seeing Ray Davies at the Palais.
And in “Dial F for Frankenstein”, he first found the missing link between Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere and the world wide web.
I think I’ve mentioned these posts of mine before, but Art was also pretty on the ball when it came to the future of warfare — given that he was writing in 1946: [link] and [link]
OT - Nabs, how was Ray?
But the ideas were so bloody great, who cares?
Have to say, SF fans often make weird and misleading claims about the genre, partly out of a misguided sense of clannishness. One of them is the dichotomy between ‘good writing’ and ‘ideas’, as if the two can be so easily seperated out. It usually comes in the form -
Sure, science fiction often lacks style, but science fiction is a literature of ideas.
As if to say that James Joyce, Eliot, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, etc, etc, were somehow devoid of ideas. It’s also a rather strange claim linguistically, stating that only one type of genre fiction (SF) communicates ideas, and that all other genres are, by default, concerned simply with language games, and not the communication of ideas.
It just strikes me as being a dud argument.
None of this is to belittle Clarke’s achievement: he was a skilled writer in what he attempted - creative, clever narratives about the relation of people and technology, about the future, and about contact with other alien civilisations.
No real reason for literary contributors to turn their nose up at this, either - SF exists in a long literary tradition of fantastic, prophetic, and semi-mystic narratives, and has in fact given rise to some superlative writers - H G Wells and Olaf Stapledon. Clarke was a proud exponent of this tradition, and well deserves the credit coming to him.
Certainly not what I meant to claim. I think the claim is more that SF as a genre is more forgiving of writers who lack any special facility with language games, as long as the ideas engage the reader. The crime fiction genre similarly is forgiving of writers who lack that facility with language games, as long as they plot their whodunnits sufficiently tortuously. The writers have to be competent, no more, as long as they supply the other essentials that the genre readership demands. Any genre writer who also has the gift of presenting satisfying literary stylings is a bonus.
I don’t see why this has to be a function specific to genre fiction. You can do the same with any good book, eg, pick up Pride and Prejudice one day to admire Lizzy Bennett’s witty dialogue; pick it up the next to examine the characters in depth; and the next day still, admire its portrait of country English life (etc, etc).
????? “High” literature is expected to be read on the levels you mention, and be enjoyed on all those different levels, either in isolation or in gestalt. Writing which doesn’t fully flesh out those multiple levels tends not to be regarded as “literature”. Genre fiction tends to be written on fewer levels than literary writing, which doesn’t mean that genre writers are never literary writers, simply that their readership on the whole doesn’t care that much whether they are or not, as long as they tick the boxes on the other conventions of the genre (the convention for SF being, of course, unconventional ideas).
Anyway, Clarke’s final interview, with online tech-radio station Spectrum.
It’s the split between high fiction and genre fiction that I’m skeptical of. I think that any definitions (SF, fantasy, Detective fiction, modernist poetry, surrealist novel) that reinforce this split are provisional at best. But we’re probably talking at cross purposes here anyway, as I tend to think of SF as a kind of expressive style, like sonnet form or the triptych poem, as much as something which is defined by its readers. Thus there are specific dialogue, character, narrative, structural, symbolic, and metaphoric tropes which occur insistently within science fiction and work together to make it into a kind of expressive form. Or, to put it yet another way, for me, it’s as much the *conventional* conventions (recurrent plots about time-travel, outer space exploration, etc) that define SF as the *unconventional* conventions (the occasional genuinely new idea you encounter in an SF story).
Anyway, that’s a bit of a ramble as I’m thinking aloud.
The distinctions are in the pretensions of the readership rather than the merits of the work.
The writers whom are placed in the genre fiction (or even popular fiction) are frequently more liberated in what they can express. It means that a Chandler or Hemmingway (or even Shakespere) can write for a popular audience (and be read by it) whilst sacrificing no depth of character or theme, whilst impenetrable poseur writings become the cant of a literary ghetto and a powerless elite.