Letters to the Editor
Rocky57
Published Letters: 219 Editor's Choice: 4
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God, Andrew...
[Read the article: The last rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...I didn't know Clarke had died...it was one of my dreams to travel to Sri Lanka to meet him
The club is tight [pre-star wars] and I'm glad you're a member. For myself, I began reading adult SF as an eight year old, with Heinlein's "Between Planets" and a copy of If magazine, with a cover illustration by the inimitable Ed Emshwiller of a short story by one of those slightly lesser but really no less important masters, James Gunn. This was before Star Wars and Star Trek and contiguous with Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. For me, it was staring at the back of the few [BB] Ballantine paperbacks [preferably with a Dick Powers illustration] I could corral [my parents had meagre resources and not much to invest in "luxuries"] and wondering what it would be like to read Judy-lynn's father's "Nerves," Philip-Jose Farmer's "the Lovers," Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451," with the arresting cover by the underrated Joe Mugnaini, and poring through "New Maps of Hell," the Kingsley Amis's criticism of the only field of literature that, at that time, meant anything to me.
Clarke was part of the Holy Trinity, of course, and "Childhood's End" was another book I was finding hard to get ahold of despite the pull that the Powers cover had on me. I went on to read his short stories and then, the sparely poetic, "A Fall of Moondust" but I didn't corral "Childhood's" until I was eighteen. Clarke also figures in one of my greatest disappointments: Groff Conklin, in his "5 Star Shelf" book review column in Galaxy, had so vividly reviewed Clarke's speculative work of non-fiction, "the Challenge of the Spaceship" that I scraped my allowance together to amass the 4.95 [in hardcover!!] to buy it. I sent it away to Scribner, via money order, and never got the book. I've never read it but I remember, to this day, one of the fascinating ideas Conklin mentioned from Clarke's book--that the soviet union's and US's governments would gradually merge in their respective makeups as to become almost indistinguishable from one another. I don't know why I fixated on it but I've always said that that was an example of what I loved about SF authors--the ability to ask, "What if" and seduce you with the question and an answer--and Clarke had it in spades.
I'm sorry he's gone and I'm even sorrier still that I never got to talk to him.
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Addendum...
[Read the article: The last rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...I don't think anyone familiar with Heinlein will fail to see the irony in my listing "Between Planets," as one of my gateways into "adult SF". "Planets," of course, is one of the famed Heinlein Juveniles. Anyone who's read stuff from that oeuvre such as "Tunnel in the Sky," and, especially my all-time favourite, "Have Spacesuit, will Travel" will appreciate my inclusion of one of them as an intro to the genre of SF for Grownups.
Lastly [positively], I read an obit for Mr. Clarke that mentions his fondness for diving as the closest thing on earth to the weightlessness of space and it immediately brought to mine another personal Clarke favourite, "The Deep Range," one more spare work of prose that somehow reads like poetry.
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Humourous, indeed
[Read the article: The last rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"...My third encounter (and fondest Clarke association) was the great short story The Nine Billion Names of God. That one tickled me (and still does) because not only is it sharp, insightful, and well-written, it's damn funny...."
Heh....one by one, the stars were winking out.
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@Altair
[Read the article: The last rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"...SF in the 50's and 60's was pretty male oriented, but although boys of a certain age often reject stories with female protagonists (it's a staus thing, I think) girls are not so hampered. Yes, Heinlein had some odd ideas about women--anybody remember Delilah and the Space Rigger?--and cardboard female characters were the norm for decades. But I don't recall caring, at least until I more or less grew up. Science fiction was mind blowing and all we proto-geeks of either gender sucked it up like Kool Aid. Arthur Clarke was a remarkable man, and he will be missed. Hey, at least we still have Harlan, SF's aged enfant terrible."
Yeah, but look at the protagonists/and or central characters of two of the Juveniles, "Have Spacesuit will Travel" and the last in the series, "Podkayne of Mars." (aaaand, I think, though I'm not sure--since it's been thirty five years--the adult work, "the Moon is a Harsh Mistress"). Then, you have the Starship Troop Transport pilots of "Starship Troopers (Verhoefen was faithful to that, as well as the fifties atmospherics of colour-splashed optimism, albeit through a glass sardonically)." Consider them and you really can't pin the ol' sexist down.
He got weirder--and arguably, in at least one sense, more objectionable-- re women as he got older ("Farnham's Freehold" and the one thing that just about tore it with me, for other reasons, "I will Fear no Evil").
"Stranger in a StrangeLand" is sui-generis and deserves its own series of posts; so, as not to take away from Andrew's hommage to Clarke, I'll stop right here.