Remembering Arthur C Clarke
Arthur C Clarke died yesterday in Sri Lanka. Many people have written of the stories and novels that they remember fondly. The most common seem to be “The Nine Billion Names of God,” A Fall of Moondust, Childhood’s End, and “The Sentinel” and its offshoot 2001: A Space Odyssey. Others have mentioned his technical achievements such as working on the first radars in World War 2 or proposing geostationary communications satellites. Clarke himself suggested half-jokingly that his epitaph should read, “He never grew up, but he never stopped growing.”
It took 90 years of biological weathering, but Clarke has at last stopped growing. To the end he was writing; he had just finished a new manuscript with Frederick Pohl entitled The Last Theorem. Since Pohl is one of my favourite SF writers and has a cold satirical edge that I’ve never found in Clarke, this is a book to look forward to.
So how to remember the man? Any of the books or stories mentioned above are worth reading; even their flaws are interesting. “The Nine Billion Names of God,” for instance, has one of the great ending lines in literary history even if the story’s conceit is, well, faintly ridiculous. But if there is one staggering achievement that Clarke leaves behind, it is a 2,500 word heart-kicker called “The Star.”
The story has been called anti-religious. It was once culled from a Sri Lankan school textbook for fear of offending Catholics. But this is an utter misreading of the story. Clarke was not interesting in sticking the knife into Roman Catholicism. The reason why the narrator happens to be a Catholic priest is due to the convergence of Clarke’s cosmological philosophy and one coincidental point of the Christian mythos. The premise is extraordinarily unlikely to turn out to have any basis in fact and Clarke did not expect any reader to believe it ever would.
It seems rather belaboured to explain the meaning behind such a very short story. You should read it. Go ahead. It’s right here. But if the story doesn’t shake you — or worse, if you come away feeling smug about not being Catholic — then you’ve missed the point; Clarke’s principle applies more generally than you would like to think.
“The Star” is Clarke’s ossuary.
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Those are the two Clarke stories I recommend when asked for his best. It’s a pity the 1980s Twilight Zone version of ‘The Star’, (IIRC, done as part of their Christmas special), felt the need to butcher it by giving it a happy ending.
Clarke was my introduction to serious SF, a role I’m sure he also served for many many other people. I can still remember the thrill of reading those oddly-bound purple Corgi collections of his short stories, which I encountered in the early to mid 1970s; but the novels of his which resonate most deeply with me are a couple which, I’d suspect, would now be classified as YA or even children’s books. ‘Islands in the Sky’ and ‘The Sands of Mars’ probably won’t be immortalised as his most crucial work but, for me, they provided the introduction to SF’s true ’sense of wonder’.
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