MY ARTHUR C. CLARKE TRIBUTE
PAGE
HE IS A MODERN VISIONARY WHO HAS
INSPIRED AT LEAST TWO GENERATIONS, ARTHUR CLARKE IS THE PROPHET OF THE GLOBAL WEB. HE
FIRST PREDICTED GLOBAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS VIA GEO-STATIONARY SATELLITES BACK IN THE LATE
FORTIES.
HIS WORK WITH
STANLEY KUBRICK ON "2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY" GAVE US AN ENDURING VISION OF THE WAY
SPACE COULD HAVE BEEN, AND MAY YET BE IF WE ARE BOLD.
FOR ME THE APPEAL OF HIS
WRITING LIES IN HIS WILLINGNESS TO EXPLORE NEW POSSIBILITIES, AND HIS ABILITY TO MAKE THE
INCREDIBLE SEEM TANGIBLE. HIS "FAR FUTURE" FICTIONS - "THE CITY AND THE
STARS" AND MANY SHORT STORIES - ALWAYS GAVE ME A SENSE OF IMMENSITY OF TIME. HIS NEAR
FUTURE TALES - LIKE "A MEETING WITH MEDUSA" - HELPED ME SEE WHAT WE MIGHT
ACTUALLY ACHIEVE AND WHAT WE MIGHT FIND.
I ENJOY ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S
WORKS, ALL OF THEM, BECAUSE THEY BRIM WITH IDEAS. EVEN HIS LESS INSPIRED SEQUELS TO
"2001" AND "RENDEVOUS WITH RAMA" RETAIN A SENSE OF WONDER.
MY FAVORITE?
I CAN'T say, though I've read and re-read
some of his early novels so many times - "Prelude to Space", "Sands of
Mars" and "Islands in the Sky". "Childhood's End" stands out as a
unique 'End of the World' novel, and one quite opposite to Arthur's own views about human
destiny. His "Fountains of Paradise" has a great appeal also, not so much for
the human drama, but the side-story of alien contact and its dramatic effect on our
collective consciousness.
His more recent books have been catalogues
of wonders, especially "3001" which was mostly about Frank Poole's sense of
"Future Shock" when he is reawakened some thousand years after his demise. It's
hard to portray a thousand years of history and Arthur is doubtless way-off in his
guesses, even if the Orbital Ring is set in place before then. John Barnes, in "How
to Make a Future", notes that every long-wave industrial cycle [every 50 - 60 years]
produces about 10% "magic", technology involving new techniques that are beyond
extrapolative predictions based on previous technologies. In a thousand years [twenty
generations of technology] most familiar technologies and their extrapolations will be
about an 1/8 of what you might encounter in every field of life. In two thousand years
it's 1/64, and in ten thousand everything is different, even if uses are familiar.
What remains of archaic technologies
from 10,000 years ago? Glazed pottery and stone work is about all that a civilised person
from 8,000 BC would find familiar. While we still use clay and build walls of uncut stone
there's so much more that we use that a Neo-Lithic villager would find unfamiliar - our
use of metals, plastics, ultra-fine weave fabrics and so on. Then there's our plumbing,
invented around 2000 BC, and various out-doors tools that would be familiar to someone
from the Bronze Age though our wealth of metal would be surprising. Of course our use of
electricity, engines, electronics and electromagnetics would be marvels in any earlier age
- though such were imagined from the 17th Century onwards. An educated person from 1700
might find cars and aircraft incredible, but they wouldn't be as astounded as they would
be by our uses of electricity. Someone from 1880 would see all our clever electrical
gadgets as reasonable extensions of their electrical know-how. However computers might
seem quite fantastic, an extension of Charles Babbage's machines and ideas in a wholly
unexpected manner. And nuclear power would be outside their expectations entirely.
So what should we expect in the
centuries to come? And will it be a seemingly leisurely progression of slow replacement of
the familiar with the incredible, or will there be a Spike, as Damien Broderick puts it,
that will totally transform who we are and what we do? Arthur Clarke's vision is of slow
transformation, regardless of how revolutionary some of the developments might seem.
Other authors imagine worlds after the
Spike. Greg Egan's works are the best illustration I know of this view. In his novel
"Diaspora" humans will be faced with three choices in the near-future -
genetic-transformation, cyborgisation and transformation into pure information. This
results in a strange, though quasi-stable, society shared between humans, gleisners
[humans become robots], and software beings [some human in origin, some not.] Truly an
alien world, but a reasonable possibility given current speculations. Other authors with
similar visions are Greg Bear, in "Eon" and "Blood Music"; Vernor
Vinge, in "Across Realtime"; Gregory Benford, in his Galactic Core series, and
numerous other post-Singularity scenarios.
I find Arthur Clarke's preservation
of the familiar, even in the far future, kind of comforting. His "Songs of Distant
Earth" is a good example. Set in 3864/5 on a distant colony planet it involves the
arrival of a starship escaping the destruction of the Solar System, to a small world kind
of like New Zealand or some other Pacific island. The escapees are still recognisably
human though over 1500 years or so of change separate them and us.
"Songs" has a few niggling flaws that provided some amusement for me. I loved the original short story, and while I enjoyed the novel I loved
the details of Clarke's future building - except for a major flaw in one key setting
element. Arthur writes that manned interstellar flight is impossible because of the need
for the squaring of launch MASS in order to deccelerate [chp.7, page 26 in the 1986
Grafton Books edition.] As he well knows, it is the squaring of the MASS RATIO that is
required, which gives an entirely different slant to the issue of escape from the
impending doom of the Solar System. Perhaps a deliberate bit of license to add drama to
the tale, though a let-down for a pedant like me.
"Songs" was a Christmas present
for me and it and "Eon" exposed me to GEOMETRODYNAMICS for the first time. The
lure of Quantum Vacuum Energy and its possibilities caused me to take up Physics at
University, but I should have done Engineering... ah well.
HIS recent books - "3001" and
"Hammer of God" - mention Cold Fusion. Though condemned as "BAD
SCIENCE" by certain vested interests I agree with Arthur that it's a possible wave of
the Future, but just how it will change our tomorrows is hard to guess at. An interesting
tribute to Arthur's work is used in "Hammer of God". Since he wrote of the
fictional "Space Guard" in 1973 in "Rendevous With Rama" a real life
"Space Guard" has sprung up to warn of approaching asteroids and comets, which
led Arthur to poke fun at himself. However a real "Space Guard" is critical to
human civilization continuing on Earth. A smallish asteroid could do untold damage to our
rather fragile fossil-fuel based society, and larger comets are known invaders of Inner
Solar System space. As Arthur showed us over 30 years ago we could lose a lot if we ignored the
heavens above.
NB: Since I wrote this I re-read "Rendevous With Rama" and was surprised by some details I missed. Firstly he has a homosexual couple on the ship - though I am not sure how homosexual since they share a wife - a triad? Arthur Clarke quietly slipped Gay characters into his novels from the 1970s onwards, so I guess I wasn't too surprised. The other interesting bit is the Mercurians using mass-drivers to export their products to all the planets, which makes a lot of sense. Mercury is more 'habitable' than it was in the '70s because we know it has large, ice-lined polar craters. An average of ten times Earth's solar-energy density is an advantage too as is a relatively shallow metallic core.
WHAT IS EVOLUTION?
Who Is God?
Front Page
This page hosted by 
Get your own Free Home Page