The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Was any man more blessed in the music and images for his send-off? On Channel4 News they announced Arthur C. Clarke’s departure with the iconic clip, the swelling strings of Thus Spoke Zarathustra above the image of Sun Earth and Moon from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Well, if there’s an afterlife chances are he knows everything worth knowing now. He died at the age of 90. It’s a funny thing. He is one of those who achieved iconic status in a time when the international media was on the cusp of maturing, one of those people, one thinks of Carl Sagan, and Patrick Moore to a lesser extent, who were able to popularise science in a way which made them stars with near global reputations, and yet they were also clearly grounded in science and engineering. To some degree these were the tribunes of the space age, and their names are inextricably linked with it. And there are oddities too, because through the Kubrick connection there was a link not merely into popular culture but into some of the more idiosyncratic aspects of that culture (although one suspects that was as much a surprise to Kubrick as Clarke). It was their shared vision in 2001 that was to be the template for what many of us supposed the future would look like. That it hasn’t turned out quite like that has been… a … disappointment, but I don’t blame them.

Clarke, it is perhaps not widely known, was very much a political and social liberal and humanist, perhaps best expressed in his fiction in the sub-plot in 2010 about US/USSR confrontation. Indeed there’s a fascinating story in his biography about how a heated argument between him and a group including Robert Heinlein and Edward Teller in the 1980s saw him leaving the meeting, his internationalism as nothing against their boosterism of the Strategic Defence Initiative (Star Wars). He thought, rightly, that SDI was destabilising, and even his profound attachment to manned space flight was insufficient to convince him otherwise.

As to the writing? Well, I still think his early novels hold up extremely well, from a Fall of Moondust onwards… that said they are a trifle pedestrian. His mid period novels from the 1970s such as Rendezvous with Rama to the Fountains of Paradise are perhaps his best positing a reasonably plausible future development in space, but towards the end the novels became increasingly episodic with shorter and shorter chapters. That said he also collaborated on various novels, and while the successors to Rama with Gentry Lee always seemed bloated his more recent series with the excellent Stephen Baxter are strong – if flawed – works. In some ways his short stories are more interesting, ideas based and concise and with a surprising amount of humour.

A good and decent human being who always retained the burr of his original Somerset accent. He’ll be missed.

And as Starkadder of these parts noted on P.ie it’s not been a good time recently for Science Fiction or Fantasy, for Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with a premature form of Alzheimers’ disease. Pratchett is a remarkable writer whose work is much more complex and thoughtful than his chosen genre might seem to indicate. There is something utterly admirable about his determination to continue much as before.