RIP Arthur C Clarke

[drogulus]

      We need better propulsion systems that can bring the cost down dramatically. Without that we'll be stuck doing earth orbit stuff. Colonizing space and other planets is actually less of a problem than lifting huge payloads to escape velocity. Once you can do that efficiently the other problems are brought within reach of serious consideration.

      In the very long run I wouldn't bet against new technologies, but by long run I mean a century or more.

[Sean]

Very sad news: his mind was located in a past that the modern world and its rubbish computer generated imaginations had nothing to do with. I read somewhere that A Fall of moondust, about a stranded lunar ship, is to be made into a film; another very nice read from my schooldays was Imperial Earth, and I thought 2010 was also a strong effort, if not to be compared with the intensity and vision of 2001.

[DavidW]

Very sad news: his mind was located in a past that the modern world and its rubbish computer generated imaginations had nothing to do with. I read somewhere that A Fall of moondust, about a stranded lunar ship, is to be made into a film; another very nice read from my schooldays was Imperial Earth, and I thought 2010 was also a strong effort, if not to be compared with the intensity and vision of 2001.

If A Fall of Moondust is the one that I'm thinking of, reading it was the first time I encountered the idea that there was no sound in space.  And then it was either that one or a Poul Anderson one (probably Anderson but which novel I don't recall) taught me that it could be very hot even in space if you're facing the sun.  There was a sense of wonder when I was a kid reading those types of sf novels, the kind you would never get from the Star Wars type of scifi.

[Sean]

There was a sense of wonder when I was a kid reading those types of sf novels, the kind you would never get from the Star Wars type of scifi.

Absolutely, this is what I rant on about: the inner interest in the world and its finer qualities has been evaporated over a period of just two decades or less.

[Solitary Wanderer]

BIG fan of Arthur C. Clarkes Sci-Fi books here.

Especially enjoyed the Rama Trilogy sequel about 10 years ago.


RIP

[Joe Barron]

My last word on Mr. C, published as a column this week at springfieldsun.com:

Who wants to live on the moon? Earth will always be home

The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died last week at age 90. Though born and raised an Englishman, he had lived since 1956 in Sri Lanka, the island nation off the southeastern coast of India.
Clarke's age and isolation reduced his public exposure at the end of his life. His status as a prophet had diminished, too. Reality caught up with his stories: Men really walked on the moon, little rovers trundled across the surface of Mars and Voyager beamed home close-ups of Neptune's Great Blue Spot. We no longer needed Clarke's imaginative speculations about what space is like.
So, it might surprise younger readers to learn what a great influence this author exerted on my generation when we were children — an influence I've come to regard as wrongheaded and even harmful.
I was born at the dawn of the Space Age. The Russians launched Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, and I drew my first breath just four weeks later. I grew up with the space program, and the first moon landing in July 1969 was the most exciting public event of my childhood.
"That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind," Neil Armstrong, the commander of Apollo 11, said when he hopped off the lunar excursion module, and with Clarke's prophecies in mind, we believed him.
The movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," which Clarke wrote with the director Stanley Kubrick, came to the Orleans theater 1968, a year before Armstrong uttered his immortal, uninspired words. I must have seen it half a dozen times, awed by the music and the Christmas lights, and when Armstrong's ghostly figure appeared on my family's black-and-white TV, the moon colonies and Pan Am shuttles depicted in the film seemed inevitable, and close.
Space was the future, we believed, and it was Arthur C. Clarke who convinced us of it.
It didn't work out that way, of course. A dozen men walked on the moon in four years, driving about in go-carts, gathering soil samples and hitting golf balls. Then the moon shots stopped, and life went on as before.
A multibillion-dollar effort taught astronauts the moon was not as exciting a place as Clarke led them to believe, and he inspired them as much as he inspired us children. The crew of Apollo 15 — David R. Scott, Alfred M. Worden and James Irwin, in case no one remembers — named a crater on the moon after Clarke's story "Earthlight." On their return home, they sent him a 3-D map of the crater, along with a note thanking him for his visions of space. 
Thoughtful minds at the time realized the moon was a dead end without having to ride there on the taxpayer's dollar. Kurt Vonnegut called the Apollo landings a stunt, and in a late poem, W. H. Auden wrote that while the moon was perhaps worth going to see, it was not worth seeing.
True, many of Clarke's predictions were accurate, particularly those dealing with the development of technology. In a paper published in 1945, a decade before the advent of orbital rockets, he saw the potential for satellites to transmit communications around the globe.
Too often, though, his fiction rests on the insidious premise that the planet Earth is only a starting point, that is, in the universal scheme of things, insignificant and ultimately dispensable.
In the novel "Childhood's End," the last generation of human beings ascends into space to merge with the galactic oversoul. Their parents, left behind to age and die off, blow up the planet, believing it has served its purpose. It never occurs to them, or to the author, that millions of other species might be glad to have the place to themselves at last.
The subtext receives explicit formulation in a short story in which a moon-base administrator hangs this motto in his office: "Earth is the cradle of the mind — but you cannot stay in the cradle forever."
The author approved the sentiment, but he was wrong. The Earth is not our cradle. It is our home, and the only one we are likely to have for thousands of years more. It gives us air, water, warmth, food and beauty as nothing else in our solar neighborhood will ever do. If we degrade it beyond reclamation, we cannot just move on.
None of this is to say I oppose everything Clarke stood for. I insist my next car have will satellite radio, and I shall bless his name for it, but I don't want to live in his version of the future — on some cold, airless planet devoid of plants and animals, dependant on a pressurized dome for my survival.
I don't think Clarke really wanted that future, either. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he settled in Sri Lanka because he loved scuba diving through the coral reefs that surround the island.
He could never have gone for a swim on Saturn.

[Sean]

Hi Joe, most artists have good and not so good ideas. I thought the 2001 book was particularly visionary, and the sweep and lucidity of some of his other writing is good.