Arthur C. Clarke passes

March 19th 2008 at 12:45 am

Of the big three SF/F authors (Heinlien, Clarke, Asimov) Arthur C. Clarke made the biggest impression on me, and of all the three, it is his canon that I read forwards and backwards several times and hunted all down as a teenager. Childhood’s End was also the first SF/F novel I ever read, at the age of 6 or 7, I think.

His visions of grand engineering projects (ones that came true like the satellite in geosynchronous orbit, and others like Rama, or the space elevator) were wondrous. I’ve often given speeches where I referred to my mind being expanded, and never quite returning to the same shape.

More than just his vision, though, was his inclusiveness. Many of Clarke’s characters ranged from all over a global society. Caucasians, Pacific islanders, mixed race Americans, Indian computer scientists, and more, if felt like various parts of the world had a place in the futures that Clarke novelized.

As the NY Times reported of one of his novels:

In “Childhood’s End,” a race of aliens who happen to look like devils imposes peace on an Earth torn by cold war tensions. But the aliens’ real mission is to prepare humanity for the next stage of evolution. In an ending that is both heartbreakingly poignant and literally earth-shattering, Mr. Clarke suggests that mankind can escape its suicidal tendencies only by ceasing to be human.

“There was nothing left of Earth,” he wrote. “It had nourished them, through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs toward the Sun.”

Those words were to set me, in a large part, down a journey of intellectual exploration (looking for more work that left me considering implications that big, at least, for a 6 or 7 year old) that are largely responsible for a great deal of who I am today.

One of the neat points in my career was that I got to have my name in the Table of Contents along with Arthur C. Clarke in the anthology Golden Age SF.

I’m not inclined towards hero worship, so I’ve never tracked down much about Clarke nor tried to seek him out. But to have my name in the TOC of a book along with the man who basically got me into reading the genre, that was quite a milestone for me. And to hear that he passed today certainly makes it feel, as I sit here late into the night, like we stand at the end of some sort of epoch.

May the next one be full of as many ideas and grand novels.

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