Thinking Big

If greatness in science fiction is to be measured by a writer’s impact on the culture at large, H.G. Wells was surely the greatest of the 20th century. Just as surely, the greatest during the half of the century Wells wasn’t around for, when the genre was at its height, has been Arthur C. Clarke, who has just published a compilation of his stories, nearly 1,000 densely packed pages in length. These 100-plus “Collected Stories” offer compelling evidence both for and against Clarke’s claims of preeminence within the field of SF, although his principal claim is present here only in the embryonic form of the six stories that were the basis for his “2001” screenplay. That film, and to a lesser degree the novel that mirrors it, is the jewel in the crown of Sir Arthur (as he has become), the guarantor of his immortality, as “Frankenstein” was Mary Shelley’s. Anyone who has managed to read “Frankenstein” knows it is not a very good novel. Had Mary Shelley not enjoyed the good luck of marrying a poet bound for glory and the further good luck of having her novel become a classic film, her creation would not have attained the status of a modern myth, a constellation in the postmodern heavens.

A similar confluence of luck has done the same for “2001.” Without Stanley Kubrick’s ability to limn and adorn Clarke’s naked vision of a chill, mechanistic and yet awesome future (a vision that underlies all SF like a sub-dermal tumor), the presence of that archetypal element in his work might well have remained a mere glimmer at the edges of the genre, like the aura of dread around the best fairy tales. But “2001” revealed the familiar landscapes of boys’ adventure sci-fi to be just as suitable for adventures of the soul. Read in that light, Clarke’s oeuvre of 50 years bears pondering as much as those of the great Goths--Poe, Hoffmann, Shelley.

And yet it is no easy ponder. Science fiction obsolesces faster than pop music. One or two stories of the pulp magazine era will sate most contemporary readers. Clarke’s stories have stood the test of time better than most of what appeared in Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder but, in his prolific heyday from 1948 through 1962, he worked for the going penny-a-word rates, so he wrote quickly, carelessly and too much. He is less guilty than others of padding, and he did not indulge in the space opera histrionics, but even so. . . .

It helped that Clarke hailed from that tonier neighborhood of Outer Space first colonized by Wells and Olaf Stapledon, where even the aliens have cultivated accents. Clarke prided himself on his vivid, documentary-like accounts of space travel, which could seem dry as physics lectures in disguise to those who didn’t share his faith in space as the new frontier. But he was respectable, which was more than you could say for sci-fi riffraff like A.E. van Vogt or L. Ron Hubbard.

Clarke’s first commercial success, in 1951, was “The Exploration of Space,” a nonfiction book advocating the moon and planets as the New West. It was science fiction without the taint of “fiction” but also without the frisson of myth that marks his best short stories, classic tales like “The Star” (1955), “The Wind from the Sun” (1964) and “A Meeting with Medusa” (1971). All are here in his “Collected Stories,” still as readable as when they appeared in Infinity, Boy’s Life and Playboy.

The merits of Clarke’s “documentaries of the future” are the merits of science fiction in general in its Golden Age, just after World War II, when it was essentially an American field and, to a large extent, an expression of national triumph and imperial ambition. Clarke had no more difficulty accommodating himself to the Pax Americana than most of his countrymen. Like many Englishmen of his generation (he was born in 1917), Clarke lost his youth to the war, spending the time from 1941 through 1946 as a radar instructor with the Royal Air Force. Thus from his earliest days he inhabited the domain epitomized by “2001,” in which warfare and science are scarcely separable and both are carried out on a global scale by warrior bureaucrats, samurai of the Head Office. It is almost not to be wondered that, long before the first rockets were launched into space, it was Clarke who predicted the age of satellite communications and the ways in which it would accelerate the creation of a global village. Clarke has always Thought Big.

Like his great predecessor Wells and his contemporary Arnold Toynbee, Clarke had a vision formed by the history of England in his own time--surviving the terrors of two world wars only to lose the Raj and most of the Commonwealth. This sense of tragic loss accepted with a stoic grace gives Clarke’s tales of Close Encounters a resonance absent from the later histories of American SF writers like Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, who have no doubt that the future belongs to an all-conquering Earth (i.e., America). Clarke’s sadder but wiser British perspective allowed him to end one of his stories (“Transcience” from Startling Stories in 1949) with a line--”For Man had come and gone”--that would have been sheer heresy among American sci-fi writers, for whom ruins offer no pleasure.

The Wellsean, or Toynbeean, side of Clarke’s vision was usually reserved for his novels, however, where it makes possible bravura endings like the apocalyptic finale of “Childhood’s End” (1953) (prefigured dimly in his 1950 story, “Guardian Angel”). In most of his short fiction, Clarke takes the unraptured donnish tone of a science lecturer given to earnest, if graphic, demonstrations of the feasibility of rocket ships.

Even in these rudiments of SF--describing a walk on the moon or the sensation of “breathing” the vacuum of space--Clarke can be highly effective, for he is as sensually present at these imagined events as at a tailor’s fitting. His prose is notable for the way it builds by careful increments to create great vistas, like photo-realist panoramas of the Alps. And he has no equal in evoking that Sense of Wonder that all SF fans insist is the genre’s raison d’e^tre; a sense (in almost all cases) of coming up against something absolutely and unimaginably Immense and Other. The Vastness of Space. The Size of the Stars. The feeling of being a little molecule at the bottom of a galactic Grand Canyon. It is a task, Sublimity, that non-genre writers rarely think to undertake. Milton was a past master of it, and among contemporaries Patrick O’Brian has some seascapes that are awesomely Sublime. But the sense of one Immensity after another that so distinguishes the film of “2001” is a regular feature of Clarke’s work, from his 1951 story “The Sentinel” (which contains the notional seedling from which “2001” would grow) to his 1973 novel “Rendezvous with Rama,” which is in its entirety a tour map of Pelion-on-Ossa.

As to the Other side of Clarke’s penchant for Immensity and Otherness, his aliens have been notable for the reticence they share with their creator, being more memorable for their remoteness and immateriality than for tentacled ghastliness. Like absconded gods, they tend to hover out of sight in the darker corners of heaven, or (often) they may take the form of sea-gods, for Clarke was a passionate scuba diver and could write about whales and sharks from intimate acquaintance, as he does in “The Deep Range,” the 1954 story that was the basis for his novel with the same title. A final aspect of Clarke’s tropism to strangeness is the fact that he has since the 1960s been a resident of Sri Lanka, a milieu he evoked vividly in “The Fountains of Paradise,” his 1979 novel about a space elevator connecting that island with an orbiting space station. Short of becoming an astronaut himself, Clarke has lived a more venturesome and alienated (in the good way) life than any of his peers in the genre, and his reward has been physical and writerly longevity. At 83, he is still chortling in the daily press about his status as a living legend and his virtual ownership of the year “2001.”

The disadvantage of SF’s high aesthetic valuation of the sense of wonder has been the scant attention it pays to human nature, and Clarke exemplifies this aspect of the genre as well. His most memorable stories are about single men confronting or discovering some fact or force of Nature. “Eureka!” the hero exclaims: end of story. The narratives common to other tellers of tales--tales of love and its loss or betrayal; of parents, their tyrannies and sacrifices; of enmity, revenge, growing up and growing old--none of these bulks large in Clarke’s private universe, where human relationships tend to be mildly convivial, as at a well-run office or on the Starship Enterprise. SF writers have often been scolded for this seeming lack of affect and human connection, both by those outside the ghetto walls and by their own schoolmarms, and they have responded, with varying degrees of success, by trying to breathe more life into their characters.

Clarke, to his credit, has never swerved from his course. His characters may be stick figures, mere Ideas with first names and the scantiest of CVs, but one such mere Idea is the HAL of “2001,” and surely HAL in his own anomic way is one of the great characters of 20th-century fiction: A disembodied voice as willing as any Stalin to wipe out all humanity in order to complete the quest he has been set upon, pleasant, plausible and mad as Lucia di Lammermoor, who also dies singing. Perhaps Clarke is being artful in his seeming stolidity; perhaps that is the only way to tell such a tale as “The Star” (in which it is discovered that the Star of Bethlehem was a supernova that destroyed an entire civilization rich as Earth’s in order to announce the Savior’s birth). It would not be the first time that the British used a stiff upper lip to sentimental effect.

The Defense rests--and will even confess after traversing several hundred pages of alien landscapes keenly surveyed that a rest is needful. Most readers would come away from a well-chosen smaller selection of his stories with a friendlier regard for the author than from this volume, were those readers so unwise as to attempt the whole monolith at a single go. For those not old or gifted with foresight enough to have salted away Clarke’s prior more bite-sized collections, this “Collected Stories” will do the job, though it will satisfy the needs of archivists better than those of actual readers. I should note there were quite a few egregious typos in my advance copy, including misspelled titles and spoiled denouements. Tor’s proofreaders should catch them, but if they don’t, the book’s bibliographic value will increase, just as errata increase the value of stamps. In fact, the book, with its release in the year that Clarke has made his own, is a kind of commemorative stamp. What else could be done for a man who already has a tract on the moon named in his honor?