we will call him Clarke

[calimac]

Someone ought to write more about the stylistic differences and similarities among the "Golden Age" 1940s science fiction writers. They tend to be considered all of a kind, but I don't think they are. The ones I like best have a cool (not hectoring) and witty approach. My personal Big Three of that generation are Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, and Arthur C. Clarke. And now the last of them is gone.

My favorite Clarke stories are ones like "The Nine Billion Names of God", with its unforgetable last line*, and "What Goes Up" from Tales from the White Hart (a story that came to mind when I saw Monty Python's "Climbing the North Face of the Uxbridge Road" sketch), and "Superiority", the testimony of a defeated military commander who grabs the reader's attention at the outset by stating, "We were defeated by one thing only -- by the inferior science of our enemies."

But Clarke was probably better known as that distinctive form of creature, the scientific mystic. Some religious people think that explaining the universe in terms of its physical attributes is somehow demeaning, but to Clarke the physical scale and variety were a source of unending wonder, awe, and delight.

I'm one of many people whose first encounter with Clarke was the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was very young and I saw it on the biiiiig screen. It made a lasting impression, and not just because it was also my first encounter with Kubrick, with the "Blue Danube Waltz", and with the music of Ligeti, which I didn't realize was supposed to be music until I got the soundtrack album - I'd thought it was just sound effects. 2001 still holds up today, which is not true of many SF films of that era. At the time I was not at all sure I understood it, but it was impressive and it felt like it hung together and meant something, even if I didn't know what.

Later on I read Clarke's novel, which operates pretty much as a gloss on the movie. "Oh," I said, "now I get it," a reaction also testified to by William Anders, the astronaut.

Clarke's most distinctive and ambiguous novel is probably Childhood's End. I've only read it once, but I never forgot it. The ambiguity lies in moral and aesthetic judgment of the ending: is the fate presented here for the human race a positive and desirable thing? On the surface it appears the answer is supposed to be yes, and the characters most in a position to judge certainly think so. But to my mind it's horrifying, and I'm not entirely certain that the author doesn't agree: but if so he's just being very coy about saying it outright.

As I said: cool, not hectoring.

*"The Nine Billion Names of God" also made an unforgetable filksong:
Nine Billion Names of God on the wall
Nine Billion Names of God!
If one of those names should happen to fall ...

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Excellent testamentary.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

Hey, Childhood's End would be a great Potlatch book of honor next year!

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

One of the first things I read of Clarke's was Against the Fall of Night, which I'd liked. But I was very confused when I later read The City and the Stars, because I was not at the time aware the second was a revision of the first. I just kept thinking "Surely I have read this before!"

He wasn't one of my favorites ('fraid - all but the late books - Heinlein was that), but I always liked his books.