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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Arthur C. Clarke

12:02 / 19.03.08

Arthur C. Clarke died this week. For normal people this doesn't mean much but I found it suprisingly sad. I read "A Fall of Moondust" when I was about 9 or 10 and it's the first real sci-fi book I remember reading. I noticed copies of Clarke's books on my grandfather's bookshelves and he was one of the authors we bonded over. Clarke was also the last of the "Big Three" sci-fi authors (Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein) and for me somehow his death feels like the end of an era, where technological developments were a source of optimism. Where the future was utopian, not dystopian. A future that held promises and wonder, not 40 years of toiling in an office to make the rich richer while the earth collapses around us. I don't know if that makes any sense to anyone else but that's my thoughts.

Of course while a lot of his forecasting was way off, his predictions on spaceflight were fairly good and of course he's credited with the idea of geosynchronous communications satellites.

On a less personal note is anyone else a fan, or has any thoughts on his work?

13:41 / 19.03.08

He was a pretty amazing guy.

Here, from a page of quotations:

A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible - indeed, inevitable - the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody. -
Arthur C. Clarke, First on the Moon, 1970

I put more things here.

semioticrobotic

14:37 / 19.03.08

After hearing the news, I spent the morning in the library solemnly reading these excerpts from the diary Clarke maintained while working with Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

15:25 / 19.03.08

It's a tribute to the power of Clarke's ideas that they were largely able to compensate for his appalling writing style, lazy storytelling, and lack of understanding of basic human nature and social interaction.

Quick; name a single memorable character from any of Clarke's works, apart from HAL-9000.

19:56 / 19.03.08

Fair point. But as you mention what ideas!

20:14 / 19.03.08

Oh, sure. There's a great line from Kingsley Amis to the effect that in science fiction is a kind of literature, the idea is the hero; I always think of Clarke when I think of that quote.

I can't help but look at Clarke as a case of wasted potential, though. I mean, think about the kind of books he might have written if he'd devoted more effort to figuring out people. Good science and good stories are not an either/or proposition. Quite to the contrary: think how much more impact, say, Rendezvous With Rama might have had if we had actually given a rat's ass whether the astronauts lived or died.

20:14 / 19.03.08

Heh - I'm wondering if the monoliths count as a character.

I can remember names of characters that the computer mentions, but I can't say much more about them. Dave is just a blank slate in part because that's his job in the story. The real protagonists are the computer and the aliens, both of whom are in some ways absent.

20:17 / 19.03.08

Screenwriter Todd Alcott actually makes a strong argument that the notional offscreen aliens are indeed the true protagonists of 2001—making that story a nearly-literal example of idea-as-hero.

00:02 / 20.03.08

I was just thinking on the drive home after writing that that that...

wait, sorry...

after writing my last post here that the idea-as-protagonist is really the hallmark of science fiction as a genre, specifically hard science fiction. Out of the Big Three - Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke - the only one with characters I can actually remember is Heinlein, and those were nearly always relatively cardboardy pulp icons (grizzled veteran, ambitious officer, crafty spy). Asimov and Clarke, especially, seemed to write about planetary changes and looong swaths of history.

Someone more energetic than I has probably already linked this tendency to medieval literature and its use of allegory (although I have the opposite thing with Dante's Inferno in that I remember a comically lippy pope, but can't exactly remember what sin he symbolized. Simony?).

Maybe that's even in yer screenwriter link, which I shall read forthwith.

All Acting Regiment

11:25 / 20.03.08

That's the thing, though, the characters in Dante stand out to me as characters, as do the characters in Chaucer. And the thing with a novel is, it's sort of supposed to have characters ...

13:21 / 20.03.08

Welllll... I think Chaucer, specifically, might have been doing something novel in the way he made characters. The more allegorical stuff would be the, um, more allegorical stuff. The Pearl and Pilgrim's Progress and that.

23:58 / 22.03.08

Certainly the ideas were the hook for the me. 2010, Childhood's end and Rendezvous with Rama were wonderful reads.

I am in total agreement about his very wooden prose and lack of characters, but immeasurably preferred this to his 80's and 90's collaborations with Gentry Lee:-

The follow ups to Rama (all collaborations) are clunking things. I started to read Rama 2 and by page 30 had given up. Clarke (or his publisher?) had clearly looked for a more hollywoodized (terrible word, but can't quite find another) style. I found it unreadable.

The shame being that the fantastic ideas were still there in abundance. I had this image of Clarke sitting in his Sri Lankan home; dictating his visionary thoughts and ideas onto tape; sending them off and then, six months later receiving a package with the freshly realized book.

I am probably doing a very great mind a gross disservice.

16:17 / 26.03.08

I find it telling that Asimov and Clarke are mentioned together in this thread. I've read both and found that their novels, while interesting and enjoyable to read, could not match their short stories.
I haven't read their shorts in a significant number of years, but there are still a large number that stick out in my mind as excellent.
(While Asimov has managed a few memorable characters in his novels, his short stories are still better).

This strikes me as further evidence to support the notion that their ideas far out weighed their ability to write.

19:04 / 26.03.08

Is that perhaps due to both their roots in the pulps - a medium that focused on the short story?

I agree that Asimov was a better writer. His short stories hold up really well imho. His mysteries are good as well.