Arthur C. Clarke is my favorite writer and somewhat recently I've decided to read every piece of fiction he has ever published. Because I like how the short story format pushes the writer to condense his ideas to their most fundamental parts, I began by going through The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke. This book is also interesting because it covers pretty much his entire writing career, over 60 years, so you can really see his ideas evolved, got reused, improved upon, recycled, etc.
After that I went through The City and the Stars because I had read the novella a short time ago, and this novel is an expansion of it. This is one of his earlier novels, but in it, there are already many of the aspects that make me like this writer so much. His heartfelt enthusiasm for the expansion of the human mind, both through technical and scientific progress as well as the push to make man a truly intelligent entity in this universe. A fully ethical being with respect for life, an unending, almost childish curiosity about the cosmos, and the vigor to improve his knowledge of all things. The motto of this novel, "No true intelligence can be hostile," presents a very sunny, optimistic view of life in general, and it's not a completely ridiculous position if you understand what he means by intelligence. Like always, it depends on the definition, and in his own terms, I agree with him. His faith in humanity is contagious, and I very much enjoy how this novel and his other works make me feel. I mostly come from the other end of the spectrum, being a shy pessimist about things, so reading Clarke is like opening a door to beautiful, reassuring emotions that I usually don't tap into by myself. This is also one of the reasons I love Star Trek. The optimism and faith in humanity and its place in the cosmos.
The City and the Stars is basically a coming-of-age tale. You have a boy named Alvin, who is the personification of youthful rebellion against the decadence and stale traditions that hamper humanity from achieving its true potential. Here, as in many of his novels, this potential is expressed mostly as the courage and power to expand the horizon beyond the stars, space exploration and the necessary knowledge to do so. This is all told almost like a fable. This novel is not at all like the technical, hard science fiction he would write later on. The story is straightforward, and the characters are simple but effective. Each city represents a facet of human behavior or potential, and the characters are very much one-note, being the expression of single aspects of the emotional spectrum, like fear, courage, doubt, etc. It works very well for a fable like this, taking place a billion years from now.
Then I read Prelude to Space. It's very different and closer to his more mature work. It's about the first landing on the moon, conceived before any actual moon landing ever happened. Written almost 20 years before Apollo 11, this book reads like an extremely educated guess on how the first mission to the moon would likely unfold. He got some things right and others not so much, but it really doesn't matter. Again, the strength of this novel lies in his unabashed faith in humanity and its ability to overcome challenges and travel beyond our cradle Earth. He delineates a clear plan for human excellence in this novel, shaped by space flight and a love for knowledge and exploration.
All the characters are either engineers, scholars, or scientists. The story primarily focuses on a small group of scientists overcoming the various difficulties of spaceflight. It is very clear in this novel what his favorite type of character is. If you go to Goodreads or elsewhere and read the reviews of Clarke's work, you'll see that a lot of criticism and complaints center around Clarke's supposed inability to create compelling characters, that his characters are uninteresting, etc. I disagree with this assessment. It's not that he can't write characterization, it's more like that his heroes are expressions of the type of people he admires the most: cerebral, logical, but not without warmth. They're the best of what humanity can offer, not the worst or even the average. This optimism is at the core of most of his characters, beneath their technical, seemingly cold exterior. In fact, his characters are civilized men and women, civilized in the best sense, and this gives them a type of maturity that is pretty much final. By that, I mean there is really no character progression. They're never idiots, bellyachers, or foolish. It's usually a team of characters who are professionals and fit for the task at hand. It's akin to the team on the ISS. You don't have morons up there, it's a team of incredibly competent cosmonauts, the elite of technical people, and that's where Clarke's characters usually stand.
As such, and this is very important, there's no human drama stemming from personality flaws. The drama arises from technical problems and the consequences of failing to identify and fix such issues. The characters themselves function like a well-oiled machine, as a team of engineers and scientists should when facing huge problems that require complete cooperation. There's no space for love affairs, betrayals motivated by petty emotions, or other such things that people often like to read about. In brief, there's not much room for human folly in his novels, no space for monkeys who have yet to achieve civility. He's simply not interested in the type of character you would see in soap operas. There's a high standard among his cast, which, of course, contributes to the power of the story and the optimism expressed within it. Additionally, there's a harsh reality to the technical problems facing the characters; most of the time, had they spent time squabbling like children, they would simply die incinerated by comets, radiation, machine malfunctions, and the like. The message is clear: grow up and join the adults carrying on with human progress, or stay back home.
I enjoy how cerebral this novel is and, at the same time, how poetically he paints space exploration, linking it with a sort of human destiny and appealing to the characteristics he admires most in humanity: curiosity, intelligence, compassion, and courage. He has staunch faith in humanity and sees it as having almost unlimited potential.
Towards the end of the novel, there's a very heartfelt and beautiful monologue about the place of humanity in the cosmos and how our progress as a species can be measured by our capacity to cooperate toward a true understanding of the universe. The landing on the moon is understood in this context as one more step in our long history, from leaving the jungle to building space rockets.
Next was The Sands of Mars. It's about the first human colony on the fourth terrestrial planet. There are plenty of interesting assumptions about Mars in this book, which was published in 1951 and written even earlier. For example, it was generally assumed that there was vegetation on Mars and that there were no mountains. Despite the name of the book, we don't get to Mars until halfway through, with the first part dedicated to the complicated business of spaceflight, taking people and supplies into space and to the other planets.
The protagonist is a science fiction writer, Martin Gibson, and much of this character is clearly based on the author himself. There is an entire chapter dedicated to the role of science fiction in actual scientific pursuit, something I know was Clarke's concern. I think at times he yearned to have a more active role in the scientific community, doing research as a scientist himself instead of being 'on the sidelines,' as it were, an admirer and writer of fiction about the subject. In his first novel, Prelude to Space, the protagonist is a historian documenting the lunar landing rather than taking an active role in it. It would be some time before he let go of the role of outsider in his novels.
The book depicts a well-organized, fully functional Martian colony. Like in many of his books, it's all about a group of highly capable people carrying out research and developing tools to overcome a problem. The problem here is, of course, Mars itself. A planet with virtually no air and no atmosphere. I wish he would elaborate a little more on the production of oxygen and especially water, which is produced in a power plant rather than harvested. However, the main concern of the novel is with the more imaginary Martian flora and how to use it to develop a breathable atmosphere.
The 'gentleman's world' feel this novel has is almost amusing. The notion that society is already neatly organized and that the only problems left are of a technical nature, rather than social, is very strong here, and is partially why I enjoyed reading it. We never descend into squabbles in his novels, and, as I mentioned in my last post, humanity is held to very high standards, giving a sense of a utopia—an intelligent man's paradise. Yes, the colony has to go to great lengths for the bare minimum of air and water, but those problems are of a hard nature, with mathematical solutions.
The Sands of Mars gets quite pulpy towards the end, and I think it's almost inevitable for writers from the golden age of science fiction to include those elements when discussing Mars—a planet that has captivated writers for a very long time.
After that one was done, I re-read Childhood's End, one of the best novels I've ever read, pound for pound. It's a fairly short novel, but it packs quite a punch, especially with the two main ideas explored within the book: first contact with an alien race and humanity's ultimate destiny. The middle part slows down, setting things up and fleshing out the world and the impact of the Overlords on society, but it pays off in the end. The conclusion itself is the best part, presenting a very ominous, sinister sort of optimism that I honestly have never encountered in any other science fiction story. I really enjoyed reading the negative reviews for this book on Goodreads because you can tell that people were genuinely scared by this ending. I appreciated its tone and how it undermines the typical happy ending. This is one bizarre "happy ending."
Compared to Prelude to Space and The Sands of Mars, it's almost fantasy, at least towards the end. In that sense, this novel is closer to The City and the Stars than to Rendezvous with Rama and his other technically focused novels. It's all about subverting expectations and grappling with big unknowns. It reminds me of a sentence this author was fond of: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." While it never goes as far as sounding like magic, it does become quite abstract and loose regarding the technical aspects of what is happening. The fact that the ending deals with things outside human control and understanding ultimately makes the prose very effective and, at times, ghastly, which I found to be incredibly entertaining.
The Overlords were easily the best characters, in fact, pretty much the only characters in the novel. Since the story covers a very long period of time, human characters simply come and go with the passage of the centuries, while the main Overlords linger, taking care of humanity's problems and waiting for something of utter importance. I'm familiar with Clarke's writing, so I guessed almost right away what it was, but I think it's an effective mystery nonetheless. Clarke himself was very fond of this novel, mentioning somewhere that it was one of his best. I agree; in many ways, this is even better than Rendezvous with Rama.
Next was Rendezvous with Rama, another beautiful, technical novel, about a bunch of highly competent professionals exploring an enormous spaceship. I'm sure most people read this one, it's the novel by Clarke everybody is familiar with. Again, what I really like about a lot of his novels is the depiction of highly ethical, trained professionals dealing with highly technical problems. So much of scifi is human drama in space, but Clarke is more interested in exploring the technical problems the space age brings upon humanity, and boy there's a whole lot of strange things that can happen when you start playing around with huge masses, gravity and the laws of physics, away from the safety of planet Earth. And yet there's a delicate, inspiring humanism behind it all that I don't see in many hard scifi writers. Back a couple years ago I read the highly praised novel Dragon's Egg, and although I found the novel incredibly interesting, it lacks a certain warmth, I don't know. Ironically, I see a lot of readers complaining that Arthur C. Clarke is a boring writer because there's no warmth or room in the narration for the human condition, but I don't find that exactly true. Yes, there's no room for a more prosaic human drama, but humanity as a whole is at the very center of every story written by Clarke.
Finally, I'm currently going through 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's quite different from the movie. Where the movie leans into poetic imagery and silence to let the viewer decide what he's seeing, the book is quite explanative about every single thing that is presented. He goes into great detail on how traveling to the moon works, how the moon colony is organized, what they're doing there, how they travel around, etc. I'm quite enjoying it so far. It's been a long while since I watched the movie, so I don't remember much.
Anyway, apologies for the length of this thing, I've been writing this review for myself for a little while now and decided to paste it all here at once. Maybe there are other Clarke fans in here that will get a kick reading a paragraph or two of this. I'll talk about 2001 a bit more once I finish it.
