garote: (Default)

The Hammer Of God, 1992

This is a short story that Clarke turned into a full-length novel a year later. Astronomers spot a rock heading for Earth, and scientists launch a spaceship to intercept it and nudge it off its collision course. No relation to the short story of the same name by G. K. Chesterton, or the similarly-named-and-themed novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle from 1978.

I don't know why it took him so long to explore the scenario; he was writing about landing ships on comets over 30 years before he wrote this. On the other hand perhaps it only seems obvious in retrospect. In the 1980's, the idea of an impact killing off the dinosaurs had barely even gained traction in the scientific community, let alone for the general public. Plus, everyone was obsessed with the idea of nuclear destruction at the hands of the Soviets. Who had time to think about rocks from space?

Then, geologists found a layer of iridium sewn into the Earth's crust, and in the early 1990's they found forensic evidence of an impact crater big enough to do the job. And bingo, Clarke writes this story a year later, which uses a description of that impact as a framing device. I guess it was a blind spot for even the great "Grandmaster of Sci-Fi". He should have read Niven and Pournelle's book!

As a kid, I remember reading Orn, by Piers Anthony, and finding an "author's note" in the back of the book, confidently laying out a case for the dinosaurs dying due to temperature change, from continental drift*. I guess that was the state of the art in 1971, when Orn was written. Today that theory would be laughed at just as heartily as the impact theory was in the 80's. We've come a long way. I wonder what ideas there are today, on the fringe of science, that sound very reasonable with our present knowledge -- but will seem unworkable in ten or twenty years, after we make new discoveries that totally reframe the debate?

Here's a few I'm willing to put forward:

  1. By closely examining the DNA of a person, and the taxonomy of their gut bacteria, a computer program can predict their ideal diet, on a meal-by-meal basis. Seems sensible now; will seem childish in 10 years.
  2. The space elevator is a workable concept for Earth. Tantalizing now, will seem like a boondoggle in 20 years or less.
  3. Wormholes can be used as a means of travel or communication. Plausible now; will seem like a fairy story in 20-30 years.
  4. High-quality meat can be grown in vats, more cheaply and with less waste than well-managed pastoral farming. Seems like an any-day-now invention, but I reckon the closest we'll get will be a product of fermentation like tempeh. Not a bad outcome really, since tempeh is delicious.

It's always risky to pronounce things as wrong before they've been completely explored. I'll check back in a decade and see how I did. Terribly, I hope!

(*Now we call it "plate tectonics" of course.)

Reunion, 1971

A short one with a twist in the last four words. It's ham-handed and I might as well spoil it. An alien race makes contact, and claims that they are humans, and colonized Earth with humans ten million years ago. (Never mind our 99% of shared genes with apes, or our 50% of shared genes with all other cellular life on the planet. Did they know any of that back in 1971?) Most of the aliens abandoned the planet when the environment turned sour, leaving behind a handful of humans who had "descended to barbarism" because of a "genetic plague" that had broken out in the population and caused them shame and suspicion. The big twist: The "disease" is white skin, and the aliens are ready to "cure" it as soon as they return, so we can "join the society of the universe without shame".

This story is 45 years old, and it suffers for it. For every modern reader who would think "hah, that's a solid Take That against the white supremacists in my family!" -- there are two or even three readers who would say "Wow, you suck Clarke. The righteous response to racism is not bigger racism." And this is galactic-scale racism!!

On Golden Seas, 1986

A light-hearted mishmash about how the world governments would react to the idea of trying to pay their bills by extracting gold from seawater. Clarke gets a point for proposing that a future US President would be female. He loses that point for proposing that other world leaders would still happily make sexist jokes about her in the international media.

He keeps the tone playful here, and perhaps he is also making some clever commentary about global politics of the 80's but that commentary is lost on me now. Given how long the downtime has grown between his short stories in the 80's and 90's, I think he's actually become sick of the short-story format at this point and is using it to rid himself of half-baked ideas that he doesn't feel are worth a full-sized novel...

Improving The Neighborhood, 1999

In the introduction to this story Clarke proudly says it was the first piece of fiction to be published in Nature (which is usually restricted to very non-fictional scientific papers). He reckons it might have upset scientists who didn't know they were reading fiction.

I don't think so. The story is a dispassionate recounting of the history of a civilization of "large" "loud" beings that were so thirsty for energy to drive their machines that they accidentally blew up their entire planet, as well as its moon. Partway through it becomes clear that the narrator is actually on an alien world and the "large" "loud" beings in the story are us humans. Aside from a snide jab at how much we all love gas-guzzling vehicles, there isn't much emotion, structure, or even any real point to this story at all. Considering it was the last short story he ever published, I was hoping for something professional and clever -- something with zing to it.

Bummer!

The Wire Continuum, 1997

And here at last we come to the final story.

This is an episodic look at a technology similar to what Clarke wrote about in "Travel By Wire", except now we're hopping between two characters as they witness its long-haul development and integration into society. It offers an alternate history, branching off in the 1940's when we make the key discoveries, and transforming the future from there.

The basic technology - and the 'fiction' part of the 'science fiction' - is that humans and other objects can be "transported" by breaking them down into a digital signature and embedding that signature into materials at some distant place. Clarke and Baxter hand-wave the quantum mechanics and physics problems by the time-honored method of calling our attention to them, putting them all inside a black box, and then labeling the box by name-dropping a bunch of scientists and mathematicians that supposedly worked very hard on the contents and met with mysterious success. To take what should be a classic example, a "warp drive" engine is just like a regular engine, except somewhere in the traditional wiring diagram there is a large box called the "Einstein-Rosen-LaMarche-Baxter Box" that does all the currently impossible stuff. How does it work? It does that thing that Einstein, Rosen, LaMarche, and Baxter all talked about, very fast. Sounds classy and smart, right? You would be able to understand it, if only you were well-read enough to know what Einstein, Rosen, LaMarche, and Baxter all had in common. The author surely knows, which is why he name-dropped these specific people. (Not likely since I just made "LaMarche" up.)

Anyhoo, this story has Baxter's fingerprints all over it, since it's about the space-race and has turgid family drama very tightly knit into the narrative, as though there were something metaphorical going on that you can't quite grasp. When he integrates drama into his science it usually works out fine, and adds a very important element of human perspective to a story, but in this short form it proves a little squirrely for him. And it's clear that this is almost entirely Stephen Baxter's work. The stock Clarke characters are missing, the overt contempt for women is gone, and there isn't so much emotional distance between the narration and the protagonists. Clarke always did struggle with complex emotion in his stories, as perhaps he did in real life.

This story ends on a 2001-style note of an old man in bed, near death, encountering the future of humanity and the unknown all at once, and then doing something ambiguous that is ripe for interpretation. A pretty good story all told, and it pulls on other threads that Clarke and Baxter explored in "The Light Of Other Days," an absolute favorite of mine for its too-ambitious scope and surplus of ideas. I recommend this story, so I ain't spoiling it.

Also, I'm glad I got to this one last, because it's a good high note at the finish this project. And now that I've been through them all, I can ask some big picture questions.

Wrap-Up:

What was Clarke's best decade for short stories? I'd have to say it was the 60's, narrowly edging out the 50's. But the vast majority of his short story work was during those years, so that makes sense. How about a better question: What were his best two consecutive years?

I'm gonna say 1952, and 1953. In those years we get "The Parasite," which was the precursor to "The Light Of Other Days," "All The Time In The World," which was very smartly constructed and a fun read, and "Jupiter Five," which is enthralling and reads like a precursor to Rendezvous With Rama -- at least up to the point where Clarke rips us away from the interior of a spooky alien ship and makes the story about gravity shenanigans instead. And we also get "The Other Tiger," "Encounter In The Dawn," "The Possessed," and the whack-a-doo classic "The Nine Billion Names Of God" to round things out. Each hits on a very different theme.

Here's another question: Are there any I would consider good enough to read more than once? Yes, four of them:

  • Rescue Party (1946). It's so ancient it's turned Steampunk, and that makes it fun.
  • The Lion of Comarre (1949). Puzzling out the function of an ancient city is a premise that will grab me every time, and I've forgotten the details of this one.
  • All The Time In The World (1952). It's got a buildup like one of those dank Twilight Zone episodes. Fun to re-read knowing things in advance.
  • Before Eden (1961). The Venus that might-have-been, some chatty scientists doing their thing, and a nice twist as garnish. Worth another go-round.

Which story affected me - made me think - the most?

That's a hard one. I've been able to draw some interesting thoughts out of most of his tales. But if we're talking about influencing my worldview, or changing me, in a way that I can identity as important ... well, I don't know. I want to be able to point at one or two of these stories and go, "I am a changed person after reading that," like I can with "Rendezvous With Rama," or "The Light Of Other Days," each for their own reasons. But I can't. When I look back, it's just a pleasant blur, like that feeling you have after binge-watching a good - but not fantastic - television series. So, I have to fall back to the second level: What story made me think the most, even if it didn't change me?

That's probably The Songs Of Distant Earth, which gave me a lot to work with in the form of Clarke's ignorance - about future technology, about entomology, about civic planning, and about complex human relationships and romance. Clarke wrote this in 1958, which means he was 41 at the time -- coincidentally my own age now. I find that a little bit absurd. Not for any of the scientific inaccuracy, but because of his undercooked ideas about romance and sex. He writes about it like someone half his age.

I ranted a little bit about that in my original review, and I won't pick it back up here. Suffice to say that Clarke and I don't see eye to eye.

So hey, it took a little under SIX YEARS, but I actually went through every short story Arthur C Clarke wrote and gave each one some sort of review. I'm now much more familiar with his style. Also his flaws, and I have to admit that in spite of them, his title of "Grandmaster of Sci-Fi" is deserved. He may not know how to navigate a romance, but he sure knows how to build a story, and how to expand an idea at the corner of science, and on his best days he knows how to craft a great action scene and put you in the moment. I'm glad I went on this ride.

Thanks Arthur, wherever you are!

garote: (weird science)
Dial F For Frankenstein, 1964

The beginning of this tale is the ending to the amusing cult film "Lawnmower Man". If you know the latter, don't bother reading the former. Actually the plot for this story has been so thoroughly rehashed and explored in so many other stories that it's not even worth summarizing here!

Neutron Tide, 1970

Oh my god, it's a short story whose only point is to make a ridiculous pun. Ack!!

The Steam-Powered Word Processor, 1986

A charming story told in fragments, as though excerpted from multiple accounts, about a clergyman who becomes obsessed with steam power and decides to construct what he calls a "word loom." It's a monstrous room-sized tangle of gears and pedals, and when he plays it like a church organ, it spits out typeset sermons for his congregation. Of course the project ends in explosive disaster, as one might expect from any project involving steam and/or rockets.

This era of Clarke's short story writing shows a lot more playfulness than his earlier work, and it's a welcome change. This particular tale has an almost Terry Pratchett feel to it.

Transit Of Earth, 1971

An astronaut, stranded on Mars with no hope of rescue, ruminates about his mission and his fate while performing his last assigned duty: To record the transit of Earth and its moon across the face of the sun, from the vantage point of Mars - an astronomical event that follows a 284-year cycle.

I was hoping this tale would be better, justifying its length - but nothing happens while the astronaut slowly consumes his remaining air, except for the transit itself. No rescue arrives, no aliens intervene, and the astronaut is totally resigned to his fate. How depressing. What was the point of this story?

The Cruel Sky, 1966

When reading these stories so long after they were written, it's tempting to believe that every time Clarke talks in fantastical terms about a new technology, it's the first time anyone has talked about it. So with this story, it's tempting to think that this is the first time anyone has really explored the idea of a personal gravity field manipulator: A solid-state device you can wear like a backpack that cancels the effects of gravity for the wearer. Wow; this could change everything! Why hasn't anyone explored this before?

But if I give Clarke a little less credit as the fountainhead of all new future inventions, I start to notice the way his very specific predictions don't hold up to scrutiny. Not on a scientific level - it's easy to get a scientific hypothesis wrong, as any scientist will tell you - but on a social level, at the level where the science meshes into society, and society is transformed. That level is the most fascinating to explore, and also the core of science fiction in general, which is no coincidence. And like any human being, Clarke's vision is clouded by his personal context. His vision of future society - of the way society would or should be transformed - is defined by his surroundings. "What are people around me struggling with, that they shouldn't be?" "What are the current taboos, and is it right to eliminate them, or reinforce them?" "What are my own biases, and will future humans have them too?"

Most of the time Clarke shies away from these things, choosing to talk about technology without involving the social politics. And I understand why, because when he does try to make a social point he bungles it half the time. His contempt for women is legendary, his ideas about the inevitable and eternal nature of war are very of-his-time, his attitudes about animal intelligence are very hit-and-miss, and his scientist characters often behave like boys in a tree fort role-playing their action heroes, rather than the safety-conscious, highly collaborative professionals they should be. That last problem is what comes up in this story. The Cruel Sky has two scientists as protagonists, and Clarke wants us to accept a number of points at face value:

1. One of the scientists is "world famous", strictly for being a very good scientist. The media hounds him in public.
2. The personal gravity field manipulator is the work of this one scientist, working almost completely alone, in secret.
3. This scientist knows his invention is hugely important for humanity, but he also wants to make a splash unveiling it - like he's P. T. Barnum showing off some new circus act - so he takes the only two prototypes of the invention and uses them to climb Mount Everest in secret at night.

All these things are vital to establish the scenario: Two guys alone in the mountains at night, with little chance for rescue. It's an adventure story! But, all of these things are also totally ridiculous, for a reason that every modern scientist knows:

Amazing new inventions are always the result of a huge collective effort. An entrepreneur or a showman might claim the spotlight to unveil it, but the scientists involved are quick to acknowledge their collaborators at every opportunity, because their careers live and die on the strength of their collaborative ties. One of the most famous modern entrepreneurs is the late Steve Jobs, and people credited him with a lot of things - a lot more than he actually did - but even Big Steve with his obsessive showmanship would also take time out at the end of many keynote speeches to have the developers and engineers stand up, so the audience could give them all a round of applause with the world watching. That example rests at the top of a mountain of others that collectively make the scientists in this short story - climbing Mount Everest and risking their lives (and those of the inevitable rescue crew) - look like jackasses.

But, by Clarke's personal view, scientists are ignored and frustrated eggheads, so they need to act out, with theatrics and derring-do, and be world-famous. He sees scientists of his own time a certain way, and imagines the way they will correct for it.

What's especially frustrating about this story is that Clarke puts major effort into his trapped-in-the-mountains scenario, and spends no time at all discussing the implications of his gravity field manipulator for society. It would revolutionize every aspect of the world economy, and almost every scientific discipline. Everything from farming techniques to space travel to dance parties would be changed. Clarke could have bent his considerable imagination to the task of describing this, maybe with just a handful of well-chosen examples. Instead he says nothing. Some guys get into the mountains with less effort than usual, they get lost, then they get rescued - the end.

As I said earlier, Clarke's vision for how some new invention would change society is rooted in his own context. It can't be perfect. But it can at least be compelling, and I wish he'd indulged it more here. At this point I've gone through almost all of his short stories, and looking back, I can say with confidence that he is at his most entertaining when he breaks away from the standard adventure story format and just writes about people coping with change, like in "The Songs Of Distant Earth", "The Light Of Other Days", "Second Dawn", "Sleeping Beauty", et cetera. That's what keeps me coming back. His reach may often exceed his grasp, but it always inspires a great discussion.
garote: (bonk)
Playback, 1963

This story stands out from just about everything else I've read from Clarke so far, because of its narrative structure. The entire tale is a monologue, delivered under mysterious circumstances that slowly clarify for the reader at the same time they clarify for the speaker.

At first we think we are hearing from an astronaut delivering a report to his superiors. Then we deduce he is in some kind of man-made medical device, recovering from a serious accident. Then we quickly realize that is wrong too, and the astronaut is speaking to an alien life form, which is responding non-verbally with images. The astronaut establishes that he is not just injured, but has in fact lost his entire body in the accident, and now only exists as a consciousness embedded in a solid-state device. The aliens offer to rebuild his body, but first he needs to describe it to them, and that proves difficult because his memory is jumbled and distorted.

He describes a vaguely human figure, then lapses into nonsense and goes silent for an unknown time. Then the aliens show him an image of his description and he is so horrified by it he declares they need to start over, but his new description is even worse. More babbling, more silence, and we realize that we are reading the stream-of-consciousness of a mind as it is disintegrates. At the very end, he thanks the aliens for trying to rescue him, then the narrative breaks up completely into gibberish.

Impressive, and arresting. And exactly the right length. Lately I've been listening to these stories while doing chores around the house, but this one was enough to make me put down my work and just listen.

A Meeting With Medusa, 1971

Progress can spoil good science fiction. This tale is the longest one Clarke ever wrote that could still be called a short story, and he imagined some very interesting aliens for it and took his time describing them, but half a century of new information about Jupiter has turned those aliens from hauntingly plausible, to hopelessly absurd. A few moments of online research confirms it as fantasy. But it's still a fun read as fantasy, so ... there's that.

And, there's more going on in the story besides the fantastical aliens. The main character is a cyborg, one of the first successful fusions of man and machine - perhaps the very first - and he's been turned into a cyborg without his consent, by surgeons working to save his life after a horrible accident. This leaves him with a bit of an identity crisis. He decides that the only way to find meaning in his life is by acting as an ambassador, in the conflict that will inevitably begin as more cyborgs - and intelligent robots who were never human to begin with - appear in the solar system and fight with humanity for emancipation. It may take another hundred years before the conflict starts, but he can wait, since his cyborg parts makes him effectively immortal.

It all sounds like the setup for a sequel, and since Clarke never wrote one, a couple of other sci-fi authors have done the job. At some point I might pick up that book, but right now man-machine conflicts seem a little played out. I think the future is going to be all about conflicts mediated by machines, rather than conflicts with them. Death by drone-strike is just the beginning.

The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever Told, 1966

A silly exercise in recursion; a joke rather than a story.

Herbert George Morley Robert Wells, Esq, 1967

A followup essay Clarke wrote to explain an inconsistency in the previous story (The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever Told). More engaging than the story itself was, but not engaging enough for me to write about.

Besides, that would be yet another exercise in recursion.

Quarantine, 1977

A story short enough to be written on the back of a postcard - and no wonder, since that was the constraint Clarke was determined to meet in writing it. The idea is simple, and silly: A robotic alien intelligence destroys the Earth as a protective measure, because every time they send probes to it, the probes get infected with a kind of logic virus, and self-destruct. It's the old "I say we take off, and nuke the site from orbit, just to be sure" scenario. What is this logic virus? Clarke only drops a hint: It involves a king, a queen, a rook, a knight, a bishop, and a pawn.

Oho, it's chess! Computers try to ... solve? ... the game of chess, and get all frizzy and go boom, just like the old Saturday morning cartoon robots. DOES NOT COMPUTE, DANGER, DANGER, et cetera. In this modern age, the average smartphone can beat the snot out of all but the world's best chess players, and rather than explode from the effort, it will only get unpleasantly warm. (Usually. Insert topical Galaxy Note 7 joke here.) I guess that alien invasion can happen after all.
garote: (zelda minish tree)
Death And The Senator, 1961

An overly-long and very heavily dramatic story with the tiniest scrap of science in the fiction. Not at all worth the read. I have just one vaguely interesting comment: The story hinges on the discovery that living in zero-gravity has amazing health benefits, and may even help cure advanced heart disease ... but in the long years since 1961, we've discovered exactly the opposite: Linger in space, and your health will only decline. In fact, unless you take strenuous measures to emulate the burden of gravity, your health will plummet.

The Secret, 1963

The plot hinges on the supposed health benefits of low gravity, in the same way as Clarke's "Death And The Senator", except this time it's scientists on the moon living an extra 100 years, and trying to keep the secret of their extended life from the rest of the population back on Earth, so they don't trigger a stampede. I get the impression that Clarke was pretty well convinced of the truth to this idea, and was probably shocked to learn how much the body atrophies out in space.

It is a pretty counterintuitive idea. Shouldn't less gravity equal less "stress", and therefore equal longer life? Perhaps, if you forget the fact that the body is working really hard, all the time, just to keep you alive, and will eagerly cut whatever corners it can.

Before Eden, 1961

Venus didn't turn out this way, but whatever. Clarke tells the story of team of explorers reaching the south pole of Venus, through terrain similar to Death Valley (but even more death-y), and finding a large, extremely hot lake, and an alien life form nearby. The alien is plant-like, flowing over the ground, and looks like an enormous transparent Persian rug when they shine their lamps on it. A pretty fascinating sight.

But in a nasty twist, the scientists leave behind some trash buried under a pile of stones, and the alien consumes it, and becomes infected with Earth-style bacteria. In a matter of months the entire population of aliens - representing all complex life on Venus - is exterminated by the infection. It's a riff on War Of The Worlds: The humans come in peace, and bring their nasty germs along by accident. Kablam!

Fun fact: The surface of Venus is actually about 860 degrees Fahrenheit on average. I don't think there are any bacteria known on Earth that can survive that; not even thermophiles. (The toughest one I know of can take up to 230 degrees Fahrenheit.) 860 degrees is hot enough to melt lead.

Global warming: It's no joke!

Crusade, 1968

A strange story told from the perspective of a sentient being the size of a planet, floating in the vast darkness between two galaxies. The being decides to search for intelligent life within each galaxy, and spends millions of years methodically constructing probes and pitching them into the collective gravity well of the stars on either side, then examining the feedback.

The first thing it learns: Galaxies are hot. Stars are really hot. Duh. So it engineers the probes to be more heat resistant, a step at a time. The next thing it learns: One galaxy is completely devoid of intelligent life. No signals are found anywhere. The other galaxy is teeming with life, and flooded with communications, which the being sets about unraveling.

The being is confounded to discover a kind of intelligent life that it hadn't expected: Extremely hot self-contained creatures, with extremely limited senses and very poor computing power, that disintegrate after unbelievably short lifespans. How could such ridiculous things even organize themselves, let alone explore space? Eww, they're all tiny and sloppy, and they have sex and stuff. Eeeeeww.

Then, scattered among them, are more familiar beings. The reader recognizes them as supercomputers and artificial intelligences constructed by humans. The sentient planet, recognizing these beings as more like itself, and obviously superior to the gross hot critters swarming around them, concludes that the supercomputers have been enslaved by the humans, and ... many years later, the stars in the galaxy start winking out, as the alien robots built by the sentient planet invade to rescue their brethren. Bam! Surprise revolution!

Far-fetched, but short enough and silly enough to be worthwhile.

The Light Of Darkness, 1964

This story immediately reminded me of his earlier tale, "A Slight Case Of Sunstroke". Let's inventory the connections:

1. It takes place in an exotic third-world (to Clarke) location on Earth.
2. It involves the military.
3. It's about taking revenge on a bad man in a position of power.
4. The plan for revenge uses trigonometry and electromagnetic waves.
5. It's written as a confession, after the plan has been successfully executed.

This time, instead of a bunch of highly reflective playbills in a stadium, it's a high-power radio transmitter. Instead of immolating a man with sunlight, he is blinded by radiation. And this time, instead of inspiring me to do some basic math to see if the plan was feasible, I just had to shrug my shoulders, because Clarke doesn't supply enough numbers to plug in to his scenario for testing.

Alas, a forgettable story. And the audio version is flawed for another reason: The performer attempts to render the whole thing in a fake-ass South African accent that only makes Clarke's own Racefail™ proclivities stand out.
garote: (maze)
Saturn Rising, 1961

This story employs a character type that has been pretty common in sci-fi: The self-made zillionaire industrialist who personally finances a huge scientific breakthrough. Very popular for sci-fi writers because it's an easy character to write, and an easy way to get a bunch of scientists into a workshop, hammering doggedly at a problem with no concern about the expense. Just reaching back into my recent reading list, there are zillionaire industrialist characters in "Proxima" by Stephen Baxter, "The Light Of Other Days" by Baxter and Clarke, "Contact" by Carl Sagan ... and now, here.

I guess the archetype seemed fresher back in 1961, because there isn't much else to this story. It's pretty much just "rich guy finances vacation spots on Saturn's moons", as told from the point of view of a pilot that he consults with a few times. Pretty dull.

Also, Clarke admits in the introduction that his predictions about the environment on Saturn's moon Titan were way off: Any building on the surface would not have a view of Saturn rising, because it would be permanently submerged in clouds! Oh well.

The Last Command, 1965

A brief us-versus-the-Russkies tale delivered in the form of a "Last Command" from a war-ravaged earth to a military base on the moon. The twist ending falls into your brain about two paragraphs in, and the story just can't make itself short enough for the waiting to be worthwhile.

The Shining Ones, 1962

It took me a while to decide whether to spoil this story so I could more fully discuss it, or just give a summary. Then I realized that there have been such excellent adaptations of this story, in literature and cinema, that simply comparing it to the works it inspired would also spoil it - and possibly the other works as well. So I feel like my hands are tied either way. I guess the best point I can make is, if you've read Rendezvous with Rama and its sequels, this story is an interesting blueprint of Clarke's vision for the aliens in those novels. I look forward to seeing them on the big screen if Morgan Freeman's project ever gets enough traction.

The Food Of The Gods, 1964

A quaint little tale about the way food culture might change in the far future. When all food is synthesized from machines, the idea of eating animals - or even plants - may seem barbaric. I can't help pointing out that in the time since this story we've discovered that food - and our own digestion - is a whole lot more complicated than anyone would have guessed, and now it seems crazy to believe that a mechanical device could synthesize a better bowl of salad from scratch more quickly and more efficiently than a farmer could grow it with soil and sunlight. Especially if the farmer is a modern farmer using genetically-engineered crops. Millions of years of relentless optimization creates a pretty high bar for chemists to clear!

On the other hand, it's worth considering the secondary point Clarke makes in the story: A good way to synthesize appealing food might be essential when humans move off-planet, because soil and properly-filtered sunlight are pretty rare in space, and even if you launch the soil up there it's a huge pain keeping it viable for long.

An Ape About The House, 1962

I had low expectations for this story going in, based on the title. How insightful could a tale about a trained primate be, if it was written 50 years ago? I pictured three scenarios: First, Clarke could oversell the natural abilities of primates to make some kind of comment on the callousness of animal treatment in the 60's. "Hey, who solved professor Farnsworth's equation that he left on the blackboard last Friday? Oh my goodness, it was Mr Bananas! We've all been so wrong about you!!" I wouldn't buy it, and the story would annoy me. Second, Clarke could undersell his primates, making them into sullen brutes, and then introduce some fanciful medical technology - an implant, or a helmet, or something - that makes them hyper-intelligent. No doubt he'd spend most of this story describing how the humans had to destroy the apes or risk enslavement. A version of Planet Of The Apes six years ahead of the film, perhaps. Also not compelling.

Or third, Clarke could get his treatment of primates spot-on, and we could all learn a Very Important Lesson about treating our close evolutionary cousins with respect and empathy. This scenario would probably end on a sad note, since it couldn't help pointing out how terrible we've been at learning this lesson in the real world - with poaching, habitat destruction, abuse and exploitation by zoos and circuses, and so on. Not exactly a fun read.

But instead, Clarke found a personal angle that was more amusing than I expected. His story revolves around a genetically augmented version of an ape, in the future, that a well-to-do household employs as a housekeeper. There are still some edgy questions about slavery and personhood to grapple with, but they get muddled by the genetic tinkering. The ape's "owners" treat her almost exactly like a 20th-century household would treat a slow but disciplined maid. She is granted humanity - but not quite autonomy.

The head of the household, a rather shallow woman who seems to live to throw dinner parties and one-up the other neighborhood wives (Clarke uses his hatred of women like garnish around a meal), has the ape doing basic household chores at first, but eventually she decides to play a trick on one of her socialite competitors, and uses her housekeeper as the means. Her competitor likes to paint, and often shows off the paintings at gallery events. The woman has some painting skills of her own, so she decides to mock her competitor by holding her own gallery event, and claiming that all the art was actually painted by her primate housekeeper. To make the scenario seem real, she teaches the ape how to sit in front of an easel and slap paint onto it with a brush, and then brings her socialite friends over to see "the artist in action".

Everyone buys it, and the word gets around, and her competitor is thoroughly humiliated. Seems like an easy victory, and the end of the story, except one day while the woman is out, her competitor sneaks over to her house, locates the ape, and commands her to do a painting on the spot so she can see the proof with her own eyes. The ape dutifully sits down at the easel and starts messing around. To everyone's surprise, the resulting artwork is quite good - better than the woman or her socialite competitor - and the story ends with another gallery showing, this time heavily attended, and filled with authentic paintings from the world-famous artist ape.

Cute, humanizing without being preachy, and mercifully short. Well played, Clarke. It could have been worse.

The Wind From The Sun a.k.a. Sun Jammer, 1964

The prosaic title hides the juvenile origins of this story, in a 1960's magazine aimed at teenagers, no doubt filled with other gee-whiz adventure stories uncluttered by boring adult crap like philosophy and romance. A rich inventor builds a solar sail, and flies it in a race against other solar sails, on a route around the Earth and out past the moon. He's got some friendly competition from a Russian cosmonaut who has his own modular sail design. The Russian discards pieces of his sail at key moments in the race to try and overtake our hero, and it's neck-and-neck until an unexpected solar flare endangers them both, forcing them into a draw.

I listened to this while coasting across town on my recumbent at night. It was like a too-serious episode of "Wacky Races". Couldn't hold my attention. In fact, when the comparison came to mind, I went to Wikipedia to find a link about "Wacky Races", and ended up reading about that cartoon and its spinoffs for longer than it took me to read "The Wind From The Sun" in the first place! Oh Jimmy Wales, you rogue!
garote: (ancient art of war china)
The Other Side Of The Sky, 1957

This was a pretty interesting collection of short stories about life on a space station. The standout to me was a somewhat implausible one about an astronaut who brings a pet bird up into space, and one day the bird begins fainting from lack of oxygen, alerting the crew to a failure in the oxygen system and saving many lives.

I'm not sure if I liked it because the idea of a bird on a space station is kind of adorable, or because it brought up a series of questions that my skeptical mind began to chew on? Could a bird figure out how to fly, in an environment with no concept of "down"? Could a bird survive the launch into space, or would it have to be hatched from an egg on the station? Would the egg survive the launch? How would a bird deal with eating? Don't some birds tilt their heads up and use gravity to help them swallow or drink? Don't they rely on gravity to defecate cleanly?

I bet NASA has actually answered some of these questions.

The other stories were good, even if they didn't inspire so many questions. Clarke earned his lunch money here.

Out Of The Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting, 1959

A story framed as an interview with an old scientist, and based on an optimistic timeline for space exploration that has us heading off to colonize Mars well before the year 2000. A few minutes in, the old scientist describes the "second most awe-inspiring sound he's ever heard," and then announces that he's going to tell a story about the sound that beat it to become number one.

It's not that much of a story, so I don't feel bad for spoiling it, by saying that as soon as he made that announcement it was obvious exactly what the sound would be, just a matter of learning what parties were involved. Think about it: According to every trite storytelling trope in the world, what sound is a well-cultured adult male going to hear, that will immediately shove everything else he's ever heard into second place for "awe-inspiring?"

The birth cry of his first child. Duh. Damn it Clarke, you could have avoided telegraphing it so obviously if you'd just dropped the "second-most" setup. Oh well. (He's way too dead to care at this point.) Next story...

Dog's Star, 1962

A sappy not-science-fiction story eulogizing a dog. Not much reason for this to exist, except perhaps as a signpost for the beginning of Clarke's interest in earthquakes.

Trouble With Time a.k.a. Crime On Mars, 1960

I was certain this would be about time travel paradoxes, but it turned out to be a lightweight detective story, with a sci-fi flourish. The flourish is that the action takes place on Mars, which has no oceans, and so there is no convenient place to put the international date line. It just so happens that one of the cities on the newly colonized planet is laid right across the line, such that it's Friday on the East side of town when it's Thursday on the West side, and so forth. A burglar sneaks across town into a museum and waits until early morning to sneak out with a stolen artifact, only to realize that it's Friday all over again and the museum is open for business. He panics and the police nab him easily.

Undeniably silly, but reading it leads one to contemplate the international date line as it exists here on Earth, which can be very brain-bending. There's a good reason we've all agreed to stick it way out in the Pacific Ocean, and even zig-zagged it around various islands.

Cosmic Casanova, 1958

Like whoah. Some of Clarke's stories were first published in Playboy magazine (which all you young people may not realize was a monthly publication that was notorious from the 70's to the late 90's for being a source of naked-lady-pictures for curious teenage boys nationwide) and this story would fit right into those pages between the tastefully nude women and the advertisements for wine and cigars. But no, this was published somewhere else.

Here's the plot: In the far future, a man is doing the outer-space equivalent of long-haul trucking, spending large amounts of time alone on his ship, and repeatedly getting starved for sexual contact, then having a bunch of shallow sexual conquests every time he reaches a populated planet. (Yee haw!) This has repeated so many times that it's become a way of life for him, and he's developed quite a skill for recognizing willing partners and contriving a situation where they can get naked together. Then one day he discovers a beacon from a planet that's been out of contact with the rest of civilization for 5000 years, and as he heads for the planet to investigate, he starts up a remote conversation with an emissary from the planet, and she happens to be a pretty young lady. They plan his arrival on the planet so they can get some brief alone-time together, presumably for a quick bit of humpery, before she has to introduce him to the other officials. The plan seems perfect, and the man is practically salivating as his ship touches down and he runs outside to meet his interstellar booty-call, but then he gets a rude surprise.

The low gravity of the planet has affected this isolated group in a strange way over the last 5000 years: The woman is so tall that the man barely comes up to her knees.

What a tweeeest!

Well, even if the main character is a bit of a crawler, the story is still worthwhile, because the tweeeest ending makes for an interesting thought experiment. Could humans grow to 20 feet tall in a low-gravity environment, and still look more-or-less the same?

Well, evolution can do a lot in 5000 years, especially to species that have very short reproductive cycles. But reasonably civilized humans only reproduce every 20 years or so. That's 250 generations; doesn't seem like much... But I'm betting it's all a bit moot since a 20-foot-tall human would not be proportional, and would look quite alarming to anyone expecting a "normal" appearance.

Even if gravity is changed, physics still has its way. A person 4x taller would have 64x the mass but only 16x the surface area. Their whole physiology would have to be rearranged just to radiate enough heat and breathe in enough oxygen. Would they breathe, move, and speak at the same rate? Would their voice be the same, or would it be suspiciously deep? Perhaps we'd have to alter the atmosphere, the temperature, the light intensity, and the pressure, in very specific ways to try and counteract this - but how well would that work?

Would their hair be suspiciously dense-looking? With their eyes 4x larger on every side and 4x farther apart, would they still be able to focus them with the same muscles? The cornea takes in oxygen directly from the air - it contains no blood vessels - how well would that work in our re-jiggered atmosphere? Would they need redesigned tear-ducts to avoid dehydrating those huge eyeballs?

I'm not trying to make an argument from incredulity here, just saying that there are plenty of factors to consider in deciding how much a human's appearance might change if they were 4x taller, and reduced gravity does not eliminate very many of those factors.

Plus, we're already assuming that humans would naturally favor larger bodies in lesser gravity. Why would we do that? Perhaps because the largest mammals on Earth live in the sea, and they are less troubled by gravity there. ... But they also have pretty different body shapes, suited to moving through the water. It's not an ideal comparison since we're assuming a gaseous atmosphere on our hypothetical 5000-year backwater planet. Perhaps humans would get taller, and skinnier at the same time, and we'd end up with a planet full of gigantic slow-moving skeleton-people. Perhaps we'd have the Wookiee home world! (Except they'd be pretty lousy in a fight.)
garote: (weird science)
Into The Comet, 1960

A journalist accompanies a crew aboard a spacecraft that intercepts a comet and explores its core. The core generates massive electromagnetic interference (for some reason) that causes their computers to go haywire, buggering their calculations for the return flight, and they all believe they're stranded and doomed to starve ... until the journalist remembers that he knows how to build and use an abacus. He spends a couple weeks building an abacus for each crew member and they all crunch calculations by hand until they have a trajectory that gets them back into radio range with Earth, and everyone is saved; hooray!

Absolutely freaking ridiculous.

Security Check, 1957

A reclusive craftsman gets a job doing set design for a sci-fi TV show and starts turning in designs that are a little too accurate. Hijinks ensue. Amusing, but not memorable.

I Remember Babylon, 1960

Clarke gives himself a shovel-sized pat on the back for predicting the idea of a TV broadcast that cannot be subject to local censorship in this framed-as-nonfiction story, but he's buggered it up, because he's totally disregarded an obvious point: The Russians would never launch an unauthorized satellite into geosynchronous orbit over the United States, because it would immediately be seen as an act of war and all hell would break loose.

I mean, seriously, Clarke. First military chap who spots that rocket going up is going to assume the payload on the satellite is a big old dose of nuclear death. Before you know it, other rockets will be passing each other in the air. And you want to preach doom and gloom because someone might beam nudie pictures into American living rooms from space? Damn, you wrote this in the 50's for sure.

Summertime on Icarus a.k.a. The Hottest Piece Of Real Estate In The Solar System, 1960

A guy gets trapped on the dark side of an asteroid that has somehow remained close to the sun, like near the orbit of Mercury. Only a few hours before the asteroid rotates and the sun starts baking the planet. His robotic space-suit is hilariously crude, and there is no backup system to launch him on the return trajectory to his distant spaceship. Will he be rescued by his crewmates in time? Or should he just give up and depressurize his suit to avoid the torture of being burned alive when the sun rises?

Pretty exciting scenario, even if the numbers are all way off. But worth reading? Nah, skip it. Read the intro to 2312 instead.

The Songs Of Distant Earth, 1958

This was a long one, and I had high hopes for it going in, because the title sounded very familiar. Surely his well-known stories are his better ones?

It's a story about a young woman living in small city on a planet very far away from Earth, and a man who is an engineer on a space ship making an emergency pit-stop at the planet. Even though she's already in a relationship, the woman falls hard for the guy, and the guy falls not-so-hard for the woman, and the story is about how they deal with this doomed romance over a number of months while the engineer helps his crew to repair the ship and continue their mission to colonize another very-far-away planet.

As I was going, I tapped out four lines of notes to myself:

* No cities!
* Bees transported for orchards?
* World run by a computer brain?
* OMG the guy is a dick!!

Clarke has hypothesized that large cities would eventually vanish from Earth in several previous stories. His favorite justification is that once man invents an easy form of flight, geography won't matter, and so people will spread themselves out relatively thin just because they can. In a previous story it was the mass-production of the helicopter, and in this story it's a machine that can manipulate gravity directly. He glosses over all the other needs that might arise when living far away from others - food supply, energy supply, emergency services, ease of getting together in groups to work or play - by claiming that humanity either invented ways to supply them locally, or simply moved beyond needing them.

It's pretty obvious that he's projecting his own personality onto an entire global population when he makes this claim. There are many fantastic reasons for people to live very close together indeed, even in extremely large groups, and a good question to ask is one that turns Clarke's idea on its head: If effortless transportation can provide instant access to the outdoors whenever you desire, then why would you ever choose to live outside a major city?

Clarke doesn't actually propose it himself, but it's interesting to think of large cities as a kind of artifact of technology. Like, new technology has always given us ways to cram more people closer together with less waste and discomfort, but is there a new technology out there that would actually reverse the trend, and make everyone pine for the fjords? People often move to large cities to take advantage of the greater spectrum of opportunities there. Is there some future invention that would make the wilderness the go-to place for culture, employment, and socializing? I bet there were people in the late 90's who believed the internet was that very technology. Why live in a city when you can do all your work and play via telepresence?

Well, it turns out that telepresence is still an impediment to getting work done, for the vast majority of people and jobs. But that's just because the tech isn't refined enough, right? What about when we're all walking around in telepresence drones that look just like us, with senses just as vivid as our own? I'm pretty sure it'll still be an impediment, for a simple reason: Telepresence means people can get away with not paying their full attention, more of the time. And work will always suffer for it.

The next item on my list is about bees. Clarke declares that the orchards on the island where the woman lives are abuzz with bees transported from Earth specifically to enable pollination to occur and fruit to grow. He's making some gigantic assumptions about the ecology of the planet of course, the biggest one being that trees transplanted from Earth could actually grow at all in alien soil -- and that anything like soil would be there in the first place. It's pretty wacky, and it's not connected to the plot at all, so I had to wonder: Why is he throwing it in? Perhaps it's artistic, and he's trying to evoke nostalgia for Earth. The story in general is about how the vast distances in space travel can distort human culture and relationships. Yeah, maybe it's thematic. The bees are like furniture from an old victorian house: Evocative of a grander time, but a bit weird in your modern living room.

Next up is another Clarke favorite: The big computer in control of everything. He posits that the entire Earth is managed by a one giant artificial intelligence. This story is from the late 50's, after the invention of the first solid-state transistors, but a few years before the first MOFSET transistors and half a decade before the integrated circuits that would use them. So, Clarke was making a pretty big leap of faith that computers would be way, way more powerful than anyone knew.

He's a pretty smart guy for predicting that, and if computers had remained as expensive as they were (while still getting more powerful) we would probably live in a world closer to his vision. Computers would be instruments of large corporations and governments, and ordinary people would be acolytes tending them and subject to their whims. But instead, computing is cheap -- shockingly cheap. Nowadays we embed digital voice recorders in greeting cards for a laugh. You can make your own re-usable one for ten bucks. With computing power dirt-cheap and ubiquitous, the world is so much more complicated that one big artificial intelligence would have trouble just tracking everything, let alone managing it. Things have gotten even weirder than Clarke predicted!

Which brings me to item four on my list. I don't know if the humans of the far future are supposed to be callous, womanizing jerks, but the protagonist of this story sure is. He puts his pregnant wife into cryosleep, and a few weeks later (from his point of view) during an emergency landing, he spots a hot young woman - much younger than him - who seems to like him, and for months while he's repairing his ship and she's obsessing over his glamorous space-faring ways, he completely avoids telling her that he's already married, and already a father. Obviously he just wants to bask in this girl's attention and bone her a bunch of times, then ditch her when it's time to launch, returning to his slumbering, unsuspecting wife.

And that's exactly what he does. Ugh. I felt dirty after reading it. Along the way he decides to show his frozen wife to the woman, to drive the point home that she's just being used, and that they have no future together.

Now, I've certainly read stories about infidelity before, and had a whole range of reactions. But what got me here was Clarke's matter-of-fact treatment of the guy's behavior. He doesn't feel any shame, or even ask whether he should feel it, until the last possible moment before it's obvious he's dumping her. Likewise he feels no sympathy for her when he does - only for himself and how "hard" his pre-determined, self-inflicted ordeal is. No one else in the story has sympathy for her either, but I guess that's par for the course with Clarke, who wouldn't know how to construct a dialogue between two women even if he was taking dictation in a f*#@!% nunnery.

He apparently published several drafts of this short story - the second one no less callous than the first - before expanding it into a 280-page novel almost 30 years later. The novel has a similar doomed romance but hand-waves the jealousy and deception by claiming that the natives of the planet - including the girl - have a much looser sexuality and do not get jealous because they are not burdened by religion or poverty. Yeah, I dunno, Clarke. It's true I've met a number of people - men and women - who didn't seem to experience romantic jealousy. But they all either had obvious intimacy issues, or were psychopaths*. Not exactly the core of a new utopia.

(To the polyamorous: Please realize that I'm not bashing your category ... just those who are doing it badly.)
garote: (gemfire erik)

Hah! Thought I gave up on this, aye? (Well yeah I almost did.)

Hate, aka At The End Of Orbit, 1961

This is a story about a rather unlikeable brute of a man working on a sailboat, who recovers a downed space capsule and finds that the pilot inside the capsule is a representative of the government that destroyed his home and family. He decides to get revenge by murdering the pilot, and tells the pilot of his intentions while they are both isolated underwater. The pilot has limited oxygen and the man simply delays the salvage operation long enough to suffocate the pilot, returning to the water at regular intervals to deliver taunting speeches through the wall of the capsule as the pilot slowly expires. The pilot secretly records the speeches on tape. Once the crew of the boat pries open the capsule and finds the dead pilot inside, they pass the tape to the world media.

Probably the most relevant part of this story to modern times is the idea of an evil act being recorded and then broadcast worldwide to invite judgement and condemnation of the evildoer. Public shame campaigns have become a modern form of entertainment, driving network traffic and ad revenue, and it's all too easy for my generation to imagine the nasty fate that awaits this story's nasty protagonist. Give an ape a message box to type something self-righteous, and give them the impression that it's seen by others, and the ape will spend money to do it again and again, like throwing money into a fountain and hoping that increased social standing will come splashing out.

But that's building too much on what is actually a minor twist-ending to an otherwise unremarkable story. (It ain't even science fiction.)

Maelstrom II, 1962

This one starts from a good hook, and manages to get even better:

"He was not the first man, Cliff Leland told himself bitterly, to know the exact second and the precise manner of his death..."

A somewhat implausible chain of accidents in a moon-to-Earth transportation system results in a lone traveler doomed to crash to the ground in a set number of hours. Clarke's knowledge of orbital mechanics is on full display here, reminding us all that space doesn't need warp drives and transporters to be exotic, and in fact those things would make it less exotic than it really is. I won't spoil the story (like I do with most of these) just in case you decide to read it for yourself.

Love That Universe, 1961

A really weird one. Worldwide leaders convince the entire human population to perform a meditation exercise, trying to get everyone to express "love" all at the same time, in order to send a psychic signal to the alien civilizations around them, announcing their presence and asking for intervention to save them from a cosmic disaster. Conventional methods of communication all travel at the speed of light or less, but supposedly telepathic power is instantaneous, making it the only method that will work in time.

Not my cup of tea. I'm pretty firmly against the idea of depending on telepathy to do anything counter to the established laws of physics. That may sound like a strange way of saying "I don't believe in telepathy" but I'm being careful with my description because, after all, we live in an era of technology that's only a few steps away from surgically implanted low-power networking devices that could use the internet to send our thoughts around the world and back. At some point we're going to have to admit that "telepathy" is just the magical idea we can no longer distinguish from the sufficiently advanced smartphone.

The other thing that's always bugged me about telepathy is that it can supposedly transmit feelings - emotions - directly, as something separate from the physical signs and physiological symptoms of them.

Out Of The Sun, 1958

This one is a bit of a retread for Clarke. He'd already written a short story about an alien being with a very weird physiology emerging from the depths of the sun, and here he takes the same scenario but adds in a handful of scientists doing research on Mercury. They marvel at the emerging being, accidentally getting - and recording - a good view of its interior structure. Then it dies and there's some reverent eulogizing for it, like a professor might do of his favorite dead research project while raising a glass in the local pub.

I do appreciate the difficulty of writing, and I'm sure this story stands better on its own and not the way I'm reading it: Crowded in amongst its siblings and ancestors in an almost intolerably long family line. It's been a number of years since I started this task of reading every short story Clarke wrote, and that's given me plenty of space and time between stories, but sometimes it's still not enough space when the recycling is as obvious as it is here.

A Slight Case Of Sunstroke, 1958

For once, Clarke wrote a story that didn't feature a scientist as the protagonist, or scientific research as the setting. I kept waiting for some grey-haired gentleman in a lab coat to stroll up and introduce himself, and start explaining the big plot twist with flowcharts and a stick, or maybe some quaint anecdote about his aunt Fanny using a makeup mirror in bright sunlight and accidentally lighting her cat on fire; oh those silly women what bunglers they are. Thankfully, Clarke managed to suspended his jihad on women for the duration of this story ... but only by leaving them out.

I suppose I should explain the plot, since it was pretty good for a short story. A politician in a foreign country rises to power by forming a close relationship with the local military, and to keep the troops happy, he gets them all free tickets to a huge soccer game in a bowl-shaped stadium. He also has special playbills printed, and makes sure that each soldier in the stands gets a playbill. The playbills turn out to be highly reflective, and when the referee of the game makes a particularly offensive call, all the soldiers hold up their playbills to the sun and angle the reflection down onto the field at the referee. In an instant, he is burned into a pile of smoking ash. Revenge is sweet.

It was an intriguing idea, and I contemplated doing some research and some math to see if it could work. I would assume that the playbills had about two square feet of surface area, and reflected sunlight at 50% intensity, and just to make the calculations easier I'd assume that about 0.1% of that reflected light actually got to the referee.

Then the central question would be something like this: How much energy would it take to incinerate a man-sized object, and how much square footage of land in full sunlight would it take to match that amount of energy, times 1000?

If that square footage could fit within a quarter or so of the stands of a large soccer stadium, then the trick would work, right?

garote: (bonk)

Cold War, 1957

A silly story about a submarine captain who attempts to grow a gigantic artificial iceberg on the hull of his submarine and then push the thing onto the Florida beach as a practical joke. Clarke seems to think that one could create an iceberg by inflating a gigantic plastic bag with "supercooled air", laying it across a scaffolding, then spraying water at it. Maybe he did some math that I haven't done, but my gut feeling is that the process would totally fail.

Icebergs form in weather where vast areas of the sea and the sky are below the freezing temperature of regular water. (Saltwater can be well below the freezing temperature of regular water and remain a liquid.) If you had to spray water on a floating bag, the skin of the bag would have to contend with the heat in all the surrounding atmosphere, and you would need to be constantly pumping the air inside the bag through whatever you're using as refrigeration machinery. You'd need to make some incredibly cold air to overcome that constant loss.

Then consider that Clarke intends to do this in the ocean. Where is he getting the water? He can't just draw it in from the sea, that water is incredibly salty and will be very resistant to freezing. Did he invent some kind of instant desalinization technique back in 1957?

I suppose this story worked as intended since it got me thinking about the physics. Other than that it was not memorable.

Who's There, 1958

An astronaut takes a spacewalk in what appears to be a haunted spacesuit, in this brief and smartly constructed story. I enjoyed it despite knowing it was completely ridiculous, and in spite of guessing the plot twist only a few pages in. (A couple of red herrings could have eliminated that problem, I think.)

The Man Who Ploughed the Sea, 1957

One of Clarke's good-old-boy scientists goes on a meandering trip down the American coast and winds up on a boat that is actually a piece of prototype mining equipment, extracting tiny amounts of various elements from seawater. Clarke must have been obsessed with the ocean this year. Then more scientists get involved, and there's a sliver of dramatic tension as Clarke whips up an intellectual competition between them. If not for that tension the story would just be a plotless guided tour, past a few mildly interesting exhibits in a museum of technological spitballing.

The idea of extracting minerals from seawater has been repeatedly explored in the intervening half-century, but the general problem is always the same: None of the filtering techniques are passive enough to justify the energy expenditure in sorting out one atom of uranium from, say, 500 million water molecules. Plus the elements are usually bonded to others and require further work to separate.

Still, it's an intriguing idea. And it's unfair to fault Clarke for not being a fortune teller or a strict scientist. He was a writer, not a scientist.

Let There Be Light, 1957

This isn't really science fiction, and it isn't really a murder mystery since the murder is admitted at the very beginning. Harry Purvis just tells the story straight, explaining how a scientist decides to get revenge on his cheating wife by using a searchlight to blind a speeding car and cause a fatal accident.

With a little reorganization, this could be the plot to some overly-dramatic radio crime drama from two decades earlier. It would have suspiciously loud footsteps, interstitial organ music, and the constant noise of a thunderstorm. When the detective and his pretty assistant wander out onto the moors to examine the crash site, there would be enough twittering insects, yipping animals, and croaking amphibians to populate an entire zoo.

Also, the whole thing would be sponsored by "Clarke Brand Cigarrette Holders", and the detective would take a smoke break right in the middle of the story and ramble for almost five minutes about how durable his cigarette holder is.

Sleeping Beauty, 1957

This is a little story about a guy who gets an injection from his mad-scientist uncle, in order to eliminate his snoring, and instead it completely eliminates his need for sleep. At first it's a blessing, but eventually the sheer boredom of staying up all night - every night - frustrates him so much that he asks his uncle to reverse the condition. Instead, his uncle accidentally drops him into a coma, then inconveniently dies and takes all his research with him, so no one knows how to wake the guy up.

The story ends with the guy peacefully inert, and the rest of the family carrying on without him. There's some framing intrigue about his conniving wife and a promised inheritance, but it's not worth considering. We've already established at this point that Clarke does not think much of women and this is just fuel for the fire.

Perhaps I'm supposed to make some exculpatory aside about this story being a product of 1950's-era gender views - like I shouldn't be complaining if I deliberately read stories from an earlier era - but that wouldn't be honest. I read this stuff and it bothers me. None of the science, or the ficton, behind any of these stories actually requires that women be portrayed less like human beings and more like housecats wearing clothing, which is what Clarke does. No, really; women seem to exist in his stories as finicky pets who divide their time between chasing shiny things and throwing hissy-fits. Clarke is a man of far-flung scientific curiosity - why did he feel the need to dress-down his work with this unnecessary patronizing?

Still, I would rather focus on the central idea of the story, so I'm going to do that now. How would I react if I could do without sleep? Well, I have access to some pretty amazing modern technology, and I'm already a bit of a night owl, and I live in a big city. If I didn't need to sleep, I would probably spend each day like so:

  • 4:00am to noon: Put in a day at work. Schedule all my meetings to end before noon.
  • noon to 4:00pm: Engage in some kind of volunteer work, or a second job, involving the outdoors.
  • 4:00pm to 8:00pm: Take off via bicycle to some relaxing part of the city - a park, a coffee shop, a lake or hillside with a view. Walk, hike, chat on the phone, or bring someone along. End with dinner.
  • 8:00pm to 4:00am: Do home projects. Read and write, mostly, or arrange music, or fuss with electronics, or root around in the garden. I love stuff like this; I'm a major homebody.

Sounds great, really. How would you divide up a 24-hour day? Would you go crazy? Run out of things to do? What could you accomplish if you never had to stop for a nap?

garote: (castlevania library)

The Defenestration Of Ermintrude Inch, 1957

A scientist makes a device that counts spoken words, then challenges his annoying chatterbox wife to a contest to get her to shut up, then when she cheats at the contest, he allegedly throws her out the window.

I think can comfortably speak for female readers in this case, even though I have a penis, by saying to Arthur C Clarke: Grow up, you jackass.

Big Game Hunt, 1956

A very strange story about a scientist who invents a device that can "remote control" living creatures by electrically stimulating their nervous systems, making their muscles move. He eventually takes the device out into the middle of the ocean, drops it overboard, and uses it to compel monstrous sea-creatures to swim to the surface for observation.

I lost count of the holes in the premise - impossiblities in physics and biology, mostly - but the story was short and well-framed enough to remain compelling. Plus I always like it when stories end in disaster for the protagonist.

Critical Mass, 1949

A silly story about a bunch of scientists getting obsessed with radioactivity and panicking over a car accident. I saw the big plot twist way too early. Nothing to see here; move on ...

The Next Tenants, 1957

A rogue scientist is exploring some termite colonies, possibly mutated by man-made radiation. Another scientist in charge of a local nuclear test gets curious, and investigates. Turns out the termites are rapidly learning to use technology, and the rogue scientist is deliberately training them.

The narrative framing is only barely enough to justify the explorative conversation between the two scientists. That's okay - the premise is pretty interesting, even if a more thorough study of the mechanisms that drive an insect colony does not actually bear it out. It may be true that a hive mind is a kind of mind, and it's reasonable to expect that a mind is capable of learning, but to meet that expectation you have to twist and squash your definition of "learn" into something quite foreign.

I believe a termite colony "thinks" in a way closer to how our bodies "think", if one sets the brain aside and considers the body as a collective of individual cells. The technological advances made by the termites in Clarke's story would be equivalent to our bodies hanging around for a while and then suddenly redesigning the layout of our lungs to be more efficient, or making our eyes sensitive to infra-red, or turning our feet into hands, or whatever else makes life easier. Bodies just aren't that innovative - especially for no good reason.

Besides, fundamental changes like those would require a reworking of the way our bodies are grown, from the embryo on up. In the same way, sprawling insect colonies are grown in an orderly fashion from a tiny handful of individual insects. Where is the "hive mind" in this process? It can't dictate the terms of the colony if it doesn't even exist yet. No, changes in growth have to come from something more fundamental. Changes in genes, for example?

There's a bacterium that lives in the guts of all termites that helps it digest wood. It has its own genome, and its own genetic history, even though its symbiotic relationship with the termite is millions of years old. If you think about it, you can just about imagine how the arrangement started. Some insect was eating a plant that grew on wood, and ingested a piece of wood that also had this wood-eating bacteria on it. Perhaps the insect died, perhaps not, but this scenario probably repeated itself for quite a long while in some part of the world, and eventually the insects that could tolerate the bacterium outlived their peers. Then the bacterium started hanging out in their stomachs permanently, after the first time they ate it, and those insects lived even longer because the bacterium was excreting extra nutrients while digesting useless wood. The insects could now eat something their peers couldn't, giving them another food source. Then at some point an insect laid an egg that carried the bacteria along, which cemented the advantage. And the first terminte colony was born.

(Fun fact: Modern genetics has provided us with some specific details about this story.)

This process obviously took an incredibly long time, and was also thoroughly dependent on external factors. Selection pressures. How does this path to innovation compare to the simple "training exercises" that Clarke's scientist puts his termite colony through, building them little sleds and tools? Well, it's hard to imagine anything more different, actually. Selection pressures, working on a pliable organism, created a hive mind in termites over millions of years, the same way it gave them the ability to digest wood. How reasonable is it to expect that such a hive mind can be reshaped in a matter of days by handing "it" an instruction manual?

As an aside - another aside, really - this whole scenario reminds me of the "anthropic principle". Put simply, it means that things are the way they are around us because if they were too different, we wouldn't be around to observe and comment on them ... and invoke concepts like the "anthropic principle" in the first place. The definition is a little bit self-referential, yes.

Anyway it comes to mind because it makes an interesting comment about evolution, and the mechamisms of evolution on our planet Earth. Suppose rudimentary life formed billions of years ago, but the mechanism was a little too much like clockwork - a little too accurate. Natural selection can't operate very much on a life form that's highly resistant to change. Consider the opposite scenario - life formed billions of years ago, and was too pliable, constantly changing and mutating even without external selection pressure. Generation after generation, the organisms with good survival skills would reproduce - and then fail to pass on their survival skills. Life would quickly extinguish itself. In either scenario, there would never be any chance of constructing "highly evolved" creatures like ourselves.

But ... here we are. So, we can confidently assume that the organisms leading up to us were just flexible enough to mutate in interesting new directions, and also just consistent enough to pass good survival skills down the generations, and eventually even hang on to old baggage in case it becomes useful later on. Otherwise: No humans. No one around to make any observations or assumptions.

How many billions of planets all around us are absolutely stuffed with single-celled life, having independently created it from bizarre tidal chemistry, or having been seeded with it by frozen tough-as-nails spacefaring granules ... yet without any of those tiny organisms ever getting flexible enough to form bodies, and spinal cords, and limbs and brains and critters declaring their own anthropic principle?

What if we live in a universe that's sloshing with life in all directions, yet still contains no one else to talk to?

It's an interesting question, and it also defines a spectrum for us to consider. We may be surrounded by life, and it may even be large animals, and yet still not possess intelligence sufficient to hold a conversation with us. In fact the precedent here on Earth is not encouraging: Animals no more intelligent than the average chicken have been dominant most of the time, and in a hundred thousand years or so, our own rise to world dominance has already crossed the threshold from destructive to self-destructive. High intelligence may actually be a major disadvantage, past the first few thousand generations. Our fate as a species might have been sealed with the first symbol we carved on a cave wall.

garote: (machine)

The Pacifist, 1956

When I was a kid I had a silly fascination with making the computer - a cold and impartial box of wires and plastic - spew bizarre insults onto its screen, in BOLD CAPITAL LETTERS, or better yet, blurt them out loud in a mangled metallic voice, indiscriminately, to anyone passing by. Family members and fellow students, mostly.

It took a certain amount of obsession to get the computer to sound angry, by messing with the stream of raw phonemes that made each word, and my friends and I were divided on which was funnier - a robotic voice that sounded hostile, or one that called people things like "cack-headed pie crust snorter" in a flat, dispassionate monotone. We could never settle the debate, but as time passed, we did uncover a general rule: The more realistic the voice technology got, the funnier it was to call people hideous things with it in monotone.

We still amuse ourselves with stuff like this 25 years later, of course. The joke of making your phone fart and then excuse itself is today's variation on the theme.

Anyway, this short story is about an extremely early occurrence of a computer being manipulated to spew insults, and though it's fiction, I found it totally believable. It was a short, fun, read - and oddly nostalgic.

Publicity Campaign, 1953

This story was just long enough to make a funny point. Hit-it-and-quit-it, as James Brown would say. A mass-media advertising blitz to raise awareness of an expensive new "alien invasion" movie reaches its peak, just as an emissary for an actual alien race attempts to make contact by showing up in person and strolling around. Violent hijinks ensue, repeatedly, and the leader of the expedition blows a gasket and sterilizes the entire surface of the Earth. That'll show 'em!

Yes, there's the usual Clarkeian hand-wringing just under the surface, but this time he kept the tone light and fleet enough that I didn't mind.

Venture To The Moon, 1956

A series of short tales woven together, all about the antics of scientists on the moon. Just about all the science was shown to be inaccurate over the next decade, but it's hard to care when the stories are so entertaining.

This is Clarke writing to his strengths, using a scenario he's very comfortable with: What happens when you get a bunch of excited good-old-boy scientists together and drop them in the middle of an exotic phenomenon? Investigation - the forming of questions and the a-ha moment of discovering the answers - is the extent of the plotting here. Manly competition is the extent of the drama.

Actually, Clarke did extend the drama beyond manly competiton, in one part, and the result is kind of distateful. He brings in the only female character anywhere in the series of tales, and she turns out to be a repugnant gold-digger. Way to win hearts, Mr. Clarke.

The Ultimate Melody, 1957

A just-about-short-enough story about a scientist who invents a machine that reads brainwaves to zero in on the "ultimate melody", a tonal composition that is so incredibly catchy that it jams the brain of any listener into a permanent loop. I can't decide if this story was too long for such a paper-thin premise, or too short instead. Imagine the crime you could commit with a recording of that song and a good pair of earplugs. Imagine the havoc you could wreak on the battlefield.

Remember that Monty Python skit about a joke so funny that it made people die laughing, and how it was instantly militarized and used in the war effort? Clarke could have rolled in that direction and told a nice satirical tale long before the Pythons came along. Or imagine an orchestra passing out sheet music, only a few bars per person, and then playing it at a concert. Imagine them getting it slightly wrong, and causing everyone in the audience to babble incoherently for days, instead of merely going catatonic. Or scrambling their vocabulary around for some reason. Imagine some curious parishoners throwing the Bible through a borrowed analysis engine and discovering that various passages had a similar scrambling effect. One of the people involved could get overexposed to the "right" passages and turn into a prophet, then they could make the process repeatable and generate an army of whacked-out prophets, all claiming to know different versions of the future.

So many directions to go in!

garote: (zelda library)

Patent Pending, 1954

I was startled to discover that the premise of this story is a strong precursor to a film I saw called Strange Days, which was scripted by James Cameron and directed by none other than Kathryn Bigelow way back in 1995. The film is graphic, and bizarre, and flawed, and totally fascinating, and it takes a premise almost identical to the one in this story to a very dark and disturbing place.

Clarke's exploration is as lighthearted as the movie's is grave, mainly due to the framing device of his chatty storyteller Harry Purvis. I can happily recommend both the movie and this story.

Also I find it interesting that the central technology in both these stories - a device that can record and then play back the experiences of another person - eventually slips past the grasp of both Clarke and Cameron. With this technology loosed into the world they then have no idea where it will ultimately take mankind, or how it will ultimately settle into the cultural landscape, ... so they just leave it hanging.

For a possible exploration of this, in another flawed but totally fascinating story, check out "The Light Of Other Days".

Refugee, 1955

Sometimes listening to these short stories in sequence makes for some bizarre contrast. Refugee comes right after Patent Pending, but while Patent Pending is old-school speculative science fiction, Refugee barely qualifies as science-fiction at all. Instead it's concerned with the plight of British royalty, and the attempt by one fictional prince to escape the fishbowl of public scrutiny by stowing away on a spaceship and having a little carefree adventure.

Maybe it's a cultural thing, and I'll never understand the appeal of a royal family, or living vicariously through one, but I found this story as boring as heck.

Moving Spirit, 1957

A Trifling little Harry Purvis tale that's mostly a courtroom farce, and would barely fill out the corners of your average Law And Order episode. I'm surprised it was published.

The Reluctant Orchid, 1956

This story is basically a revenge fantasy gone wrong. Although the descriptions of the titular plant are interesting, the rest of the characters are cardboard.

Not one of Clarke's best. And boy, he really doesn't seem to think much of women. Yeah, the male protagonist in this story is equally repugnant, but with women, Clark's got a pattern going across all these stories. It's hard to miss.

What Goes Up, 1956

This tale was told amusingly enough, but the kinks in the treatment of physics were just too bizarre and inconsistent for me. With every paragraph I caught myself saying, "That doesn't make sense!" or "Hey that completely contradicts what just happened!"

I don't mind "soft" sci-fi; I really don't. But this story didn't even have internal consistency, and without a few interesting characters or some witty dialogue, I was adrift. I find it telling that Clarke decided to frame the whole thing in the context of an unreliable narrator. The fellow telling the story-within-a-story was charged with making the whole thing up to impress people ... and if he did, where does that leave us?

garote: (Default)

The Nine Billion Names Of God, 1953

Clarke must have felt pretty snug when he managed to work the big twist in this story into the last word of the last sentence. Other than that sleight-of-hand and some snappy dialogue, there isn't much to this story beyond the somewhat iconic title.

Armaments Race, 1954

Another cute story from Clarke's pub-full-of-scientists setting. Not science fiction, though. I had a feeling well before the end that he would never even try to explain the technological breakthroughs involved, and that drained my enthusiasm. Anyone can describe something fantastical. It's the plausible explanations that I find compelling.

No Morning After, 1954

In his stories, long or short, Clarke spends a lot of his time wringing his hands over the collective failings of the human race, through the mouthpiece of his characters. After a while he begins to sound like Eeyore from the Hundred Acre Wood.

In this particular story, the human race faces imminent death from a sudden solar explosion, and for ludicrous science-ey sounding reasons, a benevolent alien race that stands a chance of saving us can only make contact telepathically, and only through the mind of one thoroughly drunk human being. The human assumes he is hallucinating, and basically tells the alien race to go screw itself.

If it were funnier, it would be a black comedy, but Clarke overplays his hand - or should I say, over-wrings his hands - and the story remains mere tragedy.

Kaboom; world ends; we all die! Are you listening, rest of humanity? Booo! Carry on.

The Star, 1955

This story is told entirely through the interior monologue of one scientist on a spaceship, as he ruminates on the discovery an alien civilization in ruins.

The aliens anticipated their fate and built a gigantic monolith on the outermost planet of their solar system, completing it just before the other planets were engulfed in a supernova. For me, the setting invokes very strong memories of a computer game I played years ago called Alien Legacy. It too, was full of monoliths and artifacts from a tragically extinct alien species, and it was great fun to go digging through them and piece together the clues.

As an aside, it never stops being amusing to encounter the anachronisms in Clarke's world. Here we have a robust spacefaring civilization that has explored countless worlds ... and recorded everything on miles of magnetic tape and chemical film stock. Yeah! Why not!

The Deep Range, 1954

This was a bizarre exploratory work about whale farming. (That's FARMING, not FARTING!) A guy goes down in a sub, with a couple of dolphin sidekicks, and "protects" a pod of whales from one of their natural predators, thus ensuring that the great underwater farmlands of the future Earth are kept wholly for the engorgement of human stomachs. You can probably tell I wasn't very impressed with this tale.

I was also a bit surprised at my reaction. Why would I find the idea of fencing and policing large parts of the ocean to be so upsetting - or implausible - when just about every scrap of exploitable land surface has been utterly transformed by this same practice? Well, it's not the use of ocean space that's upsetting to me in this story. It's the firm line drawn between participants. Humans are masters, dolphins are pets, whales are cattle, sharks and orca are vermin. The master is in charge, the pets obey, the whales are grateful (until they are eaten presumably) and the sharks and orca are violently slaughtered, with prejudice.

It makes sense the story conveys these things because it's obviously constructed as an analogue of cattle ranching. But dolphins are not dogs; they do not live to serve. Perhaps some future custom-bred dolphins, but not the ones that winnow the oceans today. Likewise, whales are not as bonehead-stupid as modern cattle - and while I suppose "future whales" could be just as dumb as posts, that actually begs the point I'm trying to make: Humans are generally uncomfortable killing and eating an animal that's intelligent, or exhibits behavior too reflective of our own. Our modern ears are too familiar with the sound of whalesong to condone factory farming of these huge beasts.

(This is a pretty recent sea-change, pun intended. Humans have been hunting whales for at least 8000 years. Here; read about the International Whaling Commission!)

Attitudes towards predators have morphed since the 50's as well. It's no longer the most desirable outcome to just run out and shoot anything that tries to dig under the fence. These days if you're a clever farmer you trap the animal, or study its life cycle or biology and find more efficient ways to deter it from invading. In other words, violence is wasteful and tends to be pushed farther down the list of options. Not always - an infestation of rodents is still best solved with a cat - but then you go out and patch the hole in the grain silo.

Yes, Clarke's story can be interpreted through the attitudes of his time. That's a sensible thing to do. But I'm glad the times have changed. I read his "what if" scenario and the first thing I felt was a sense of loss, for all the genetic diversity that would need to be stomped out by millennia of directed breeding for whales-as-cows, dolphins-as-sheepdogs, et cetera.

Call me a hippie.

I was surprised to learn that Clarke decided to revisit this and create a full-length novel with the same premise, and name. I don't think I'll read it.

garote: (adventure destiny)

Encounter In The Dawn, 1953

Along time ago I watched an episode of The Outer Limits where the protagonist was an astronaut who was trapped alone on a newly discovered planet. He spent most of the time glued some kind of intergalactic radio device listening to the progress of a devastating war happening back home. By the end of the episode it looked like he was going to be the only surviving member of the human race, except in the meantime he's also encountered a native of the planet he's stranded on - a solitary survivor of some other apocalypse - and it's a human woman.

Not a vaguely humanoid woman, a woman with four arms and huge eyeballs, or even a woman with too much hair or bad teeth ... but a straight-up fashion-magazine human woman, about 19 years old, with shaved legs and a flattering Jane-Of-The-Jungle outfit.

In the last few minutes, he introduces himself as Adam, and the babbling woman - who is young and spunky but also as dumb as a bag of hammers (just the way they liked them in the 1950's) - reveals that the new planet is called "Earth", thus turning a sci-fi deep-space apocalypse into a lunkhead biblical origin story.

Three pages in, I was certain Arthur C Clarke was going to pull the same damn stunt in this story.

Turns out he had other things on his mind. The intergalactic archaeologists of this story encounter a creature that is obviously not human, but shows intriguing promise. Then the decline of their own space empire calls them away before their research can bear fruit, and the reader is left hanging. And perhaps that's the point: Maybe Arthur C Clarke was attempting to instill in us the same feeling of regret that his future scientists feel here, of an opportunity lost. On the other hand, maybe he just got bored with his own story. Either way it wasn't much of a read.

If I Forget Thee, oh Earth, 1951

This story tries hard not to be a big old heaping mountain of Arthur C. Clarke standard hand-wringing about the failings of fickle humanity. But no matter how intently you talk about the tiny rocks that crunch under your feet, you can't obscure the fact that you're mountain climbing.

I spent almost all the time simply waiting for this story to make its point and end, so I could move on to something more intersting.

Jupiter Five, 1953

The big premise is fantastic: An alien spaceship in our solar system, that has gone unnoticed because it's so enormous that we assumed it was a moon. Clarke does fine work getting us there and inside, carried along by the plot contrivance of two rival gangs of scientists. But then he tears his focus away from the wondrous ship and instead attempts to amuse us with gravity acrobatics. What the heck?

I'm glad he would eventually revisit this premise with Rendezvous With Rama. That's a great book. Brilliant, even. And don't get me wrong - this is a good short story too. It just doesn't keep the focus where I'd like.

At one point Clarke is describing a statue that the explorers find deep in the spacecraft, and he compares the expression on the vaguely reptilian alien's face to a painting of a famous cardinal. I googled it, and now the picture is wedged in my photo history, invoking memories of lizard people and giant spacecraft every time I thumb over it.

The Other Tiger, 1953

A short, playful, contrarian story that seems to think it's a lot cuter than it actually is. I was unimpressed. Perhaps I'd just eaten some undercooked sausage, or maybe the weather was bad.

Second Dawn, 1951

Clarke spends the first third of this story dealing with the aftermath of a war between two species on a distant planet. One of his main characters is a general in the army, who has discovered a way to destroy the minds of his enemies telepathically. This is significant because his entire civilization is a species of creature that has no prehensile limbs, and cannot use tools of any kind, so their minds are highly developed but their technology is not.

Anyway, after a bit of boilerplate Arthur-C-Clarke-standard monologue about the horrors of war and the burdens of sentient beings, the story takes a left turn and follows another character, who is in the midst of developing a new relationship with a different kind of sentient being from a different part of the planet. These are feeble creatures with very well developed hands and arms that can use a wide variety of tools, and with the telepathic guidance of the first species, they are beginning a technological revolution that seems to be highly beneficial for everyone. Nevertheless, by the end of the story, some of the characters are expressing doubt.

The symbiosis between the species was most intriguing in the ways that it was flawed. Deprive any thinking creature of its symbiote and its toolbelt and suddenly it was as useless and helpless as a barnyard animal, despite being a Wyle-E-Coyote "Super Genius". How much of our own technology has escalated beyond the ability of our own two hands to maintain? If something breaks, almost all the time our only options are to throw it away and do without it, or bring it to someone else who can fix it for us with special gear and training. In this respect, we have the same problem that the intelligent beings in the story do, without the added complication of a symbiote to make it obvious. (Unless you get wacky and think of our symbiote as electricity, I suppose.) "Helpless brain in a jar" is a state we all instinctively revile, but at the same time, we embrace it, eagerly. Gratefully.

Don't get me wrong; I don't bear any hipster nostalgia for working fields and chasing game and burning dung for heat in a dugout under the prairie. Instead, what I would rather see is a groundswell of interest in seeing how things work. All things, from indoor plumbing to outer space telescopes, from seeds to sailboats to sonatas.

But curiosity is an animal act, indulged under certain safe conditions, instilled from a young age. Clearly there is a lot of world-building yet to be done before we all feel safe enough to turn our minds to other things.

garote: (machine)

All The Time In The World, 1952

This one was a lot of fun! A few weeks later I read it again, in fact. Clarke hides the central invention of the plot and reveals it progressively, managing to make each reveal raise and answer questions in an engaging way. Plus, at the very end, it goes all Twilight-Zone cerebral horror on you. Always a great way to go.

A Walk In The Dark, 1950

Seems the inspiring concept for this short tale was the idea that one could get horribly lost on even a small piece of land, if that land is isolated in the unfamiliar environment of interplanetary space. Strange gravity, strange horizon lines, uncertain day-night cycle, or no day cycle at all, et cetera. Not bad, but a little clumsily escalated.

I remember walking home from friends’ houses, on an unlit road with forest canopy obscuring even the meager light from the stars, and getting freaked out the way the protagonist does in this tale, but I could at least rely on the fact that if I blundered into the woods like an idiot and got totally lost, I could sit on my butt and wait for the sun to rise.

Time’s Arrow, 1950

Among other things here, Clarke manages to sketch a bunch of amusing variations on his beloved archetype of the working-class scientist. I can almost hear the jazzy 50's-era lounge theme underscoring the dialogue. I can't say much about the plot without spoiling it, but it's worth a read as an early example of a concept that would later be mined well and truly to death in television and cinema.

The Parasite, 1953

Clarke claims that this story was the genesis for his later book "The Light Of Other Days", co-written with Stephen Baxter. I don’t see much of a connection, personally. It’s a bit of creepy psychological horror in the Lovecraftian tradition, but it's also a bit thin for even the short-form. Might as well skip it and read the later novel.

Nemesis, 1950

It's not too much of a spoiler to know that the titular nemesis enters a deep hibernation and accidentally wakes up alone beyond the end of human history. It's the second time that the cruel fate of being isolated for eternity has come up in this little collection of stories. Perhaps Clarke was going through a period of introspection, contemplating the dark side of a personality that is iconoclastic and generally happier working alone. It might explain why he revisited this story and repurposed it several times under different titles.

The Possessed, 1953

In the author's notes that accompany this story, Clarke confesses to having bad information about the behavior of the animal kingdom. However, since there's no way to correct the misconception without destroying the whole story, he leaves it unaltered.

As an aside, I'm noticing another pattern in stories from this era. Scientists and explorers were collectively enchanted by the phenomenon of radio at the time, and just like today, the yet unseen fronteirs of science - the truly fantastic ideas - tended to arrange themselves along the edge of the up-and-coming phenomenon, and filter through it. In other words, if a scientist of the 50's wanted to find a plausible way to explain something totally magical, like an invisible spacefaring consciousness, he or she would probably describe it by invoking an "advanced form of radio waves", or at least using radio-related words to give the impression of accessibility without actually explaining anything.

Before the era of radio, the big science phenomena were electricity and internal combustion. Automatons. Steampunk. Then later on, it was nuclear power and radiation. Monsters weren't just monsters, they were radioactive monsters. They weren't just deformed, they were mutated.

What's the zeitgeist now? Processing power and memory capacity, I suspect. We interpret the fantastic through our cellphone apps. If a spaceship travels the stars in our imagination, it does so at the capable hands of a solid-state, omnipresent computing device made of steel and glass, loaded with every piece of information ever generated, unobtrusively anticipating our every whim.

garote: (bards tale garth pc)
Earthlight, 1951

Two scientists bear witness to an exciting battle between a handful of starships and a secret government base. On the moon, of course. Amusingly dated in some ways, but still entertaining. I enjoyed the chatty interaction between the scientists.

The Road To The Sea, 1951

Clarke must have been on some kind of anti-urban-living crusade when he wrote this. Or perhaps he was just experimenting with an idea that didn't quite work. According to the history laid out in this story, Earth almost completely depopulated when space travel became commonplace, and the few collections of people left behind live in small villages and are forced to move from place to place every couple of generations in order to avoid some kind of "stagnation" that sets in whenever a society remains in one place for too long, or grows too large and centralized. So the whole population is broken into tribes and driven from one place to the next by "administrators" piloting huge floating spacecraft. Very odd.

Amusing that a human race so advanced it could synthesize food from a metal box, accurate down to the atom, would provide a nine-key grid of buttons as an interface, requiring that the user memorize codes, rather than an image-based or voice-based interface. Oh well. Clarke can't predict everything.

At first it looked like a trite love-triangle story, with at least two of the three participants being bratty, unlikable children. Then it took several left-turns and abandoned its earlier plot threads, to focus on a painting and a re-invasion of Earth. At first the main character is focused on his romantic competition for a fickle girlfriend, but then his mind is expanded by adventure and the girl drops straight out of the story. I know it's acceptable to leave a lot of things hanging in the short-story form, and a case could be made that Clarke was trying to make some kind of point about the transition from childhood to adulthood by dropping a big dramatic thread without resolution: The character just doesn't care any more - at least not like he used to. But even though I accept this, I still find it annoying. Clarke could have tacked a few sentences onto the end mentioning how the conflict resolves, but instead he takes the time to wedge in a metaphor about migrating spiders. It doesn't really tie the story together as much as defocus it.

Superiority, 1951

A cute little story about how "great is the enemy of good", told as a chatty flashback. The inventions were neat, and the ways they failed were amusing, but the story passed by without leaving much of an impression.

The Sentinel, 1951

A brief exploration of a concept without much plot to drive it. Could have been compelling as a piece of a much larger work, but it didn't have enough of its own gravity standing alone. On the other hand, it was neat to listen to a description of astronauts climbing a mountain on the moon while I was trekking around the rock towers of Bryce Canyon.
garote: (Default)
Hide-and-Seek, 1949

A neat little diversion exploring combat strategy with planetoids. A fun read even though I was already well familiar with the central ideas.

Trouble With The Natives, 1951

A farcical exploration of Earth by some bumbling aliens. Quaint. Especially since aliens in the 1950's were generally envisioned either as wise and godlike, or ugly and insane. Not much room for comedy there.

Breaking Strain, 1949

Two people trapped on a spacecraft with limited oxygen decide who will die so that the other may live. It was interesting to see how Clarke built up the personalities of the two characters around a few basic concepts, adding layers at different moments to integrate with changes in the plot. In fact, this story contained by far the most nuanced character study I'd seen so far, in my chronological run of his short fiction.

Holiday On The Moon, 1951

This story read more like a travel brochure for a fantasy version of the moon, than like a piece of science fiction. Right near the end Clarke pulls an interesting plot development out of his hat, then lets it drop without nearly as much fanfare as it deserves, so he can tie up the few loose ends in the snoozeworthy narrative. Did people really know so little about the moon, in the early 50's? I guess so.
garote: (Default)
Transcience, 1949

I suppose this would have been profound 60 years ago, but my eyes and ears have suffered a maelstrom of similar progressions expressed in music, television, novels, comics, and film.

The Lion of Comarre, 1949

Oh sure, perhaps it is naive with respect to lions and jungles and physiology, but I totally enjoyed it. It felt like the early stages of Clarke's long-running exploration of the 'uncanny valley', giving machines just enough of a sentience and soul to get the reader pleasantly confused.

I also really dig any setup where the character gets to explore a labyrinth that is operating to some mysterious purpose. (In this case, the underground complex.) It's fun to examine everything three times - first to see what it is, second to try and figure out the motives of whoever placed it there, and third to try and further deduce the grand purpose of the labyrinth.

E.g. "Oh look, a water fountain! How pretty!" "Now why in the world would the architect place a fountain here? Seems out of place... Oooh I see, this used to be a washing station for crew members to clean their boots!" "So this whole complex is a ... mining operation? Or some kind of medical facility?"

Clarke would later use this approach to smashing, award-winning success with his novel Rendezvous with Rama. Eventually I'm going to re-read that. I remember being captivated by it in the 8th grade.

The Forgotten Enemy, 1949

Saw the end coming a mile away. Heh. That's kind of funny...

Guardian Angel, 1950

The "action" scene and its breakdown in the middle of the story were the high point, because the big reveal at the end of the story has not aged well at all. First time while reading these stories that I've been really struck by the cultural divide of a half-century. A lot of what Clarke turned out was timeless, which I consider to be a hallmark of legitimate science fiction, but alas, the ending here was not.

Silence Please, 1950

The framing device was quite vivid and amusing for what has apparently been a one-time use. I can easily imagine a series of tales, five or six, spun by these nutty scientists in their cozy, atmospheric pub.

Perhaps Clarke did not receive a warm enough response from his editors and publishers to warrant it...
garote: (Default)
Castaway, 1947

Just a brief exploration of a "what if" scenario. My first reaction was to think, "a being made of ions? How absurd."

But on further thought I had to admit that I don't know enough about the behavior of matter in the depths of the sun to declare that it could not be a sensible environment for the evolution of life - at least, SOME kind of life, in a carefully defined sense of the word.

All you would need is for some common pool of matter to eventually churn into a pattern that perpetuates itself, and then for that pattern to fold in on itself to create distinct entities, and then for some method of variance in reproduction, and then some outside force to perform selection on the entities. We can simulate most or all of those steps for various environmental conditions, inside a computer, so .... What have astrophysicists learned about the environment inside the sun? What do our simulations look like?

I'm tempted to launch into a research project.

Nightfall, 1953

Kaboom! Apocalypse! Oh woe, oh dearie me, everything's in the crapper. The end.

History Lesson, 1949

Oh, if only Venus had turned out to be that interesting!

What I like about this story is the way two civilizations miss each other almost completely due to the "greenhouse effect". On the one hand, Earth declines into an ice age, and on the other, Venus emerges from runaway heat and begins a tropical phase, spawning reptilian life.

Unfortuantely for Venus, scientists now understand that the greenhouse effect has been going on far too long. The water that used to be on the surface of the planet was blasted so high into the atmosphere that it bled out into space, and is gone.

Venus will never be tropical again.

The Wall of Darkness, 1946

I had a feeling the story would end that way, due to the way it was framed in the beginning. Actually, what I expected was that the protagonist would return only to find that the stairway was abandoned, and appeared to have aged several thousand years.

One thing irritates me about the story: It stops well before any scientist would want it to. Having had such a phenomenon described to me, my mind was immediately bursting with experiments to conduct, to explore the details and technicalities of the phenomenon.

What happens when a single person walks in trailing a rope?
If someone walked in with a stopwatch, would it be possible to find the "halfway point"?
If two people walked in, and one turned around at the halfway point and walked back, what would happen?
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I enjoyed all of these.

Reverie, 1939

A bit of chatter about the state of SciFi in 1939, responding to the lament that "All good ideas have been used up." A lament that has not died down in the seventy years following.

Rescue Party, 1946

I really liked this one, and feel it is Clarke's first great writing. The plot sets up several questions to answer early on, and explores those questions all at once, resolving them in due time. If you don't want the story spoiled for you, you may wish to skip the next few paragraphs.

The first big question we ask is, "Why is a cabal of aliens so intent on rescuing humans at all?" On the heels of that we ask, "Where did the humans go?" And then we ask other questions more specific to the framework of science fiction stories, like, "How much are the aliens like us?" "What level of technology did humans in this story achieve, and was it enough to avert disaster?" "Did they achieve something that current readers would consider magical, or that current readers would scoff at as clearly impossible, or something else?"

I found it an interesting reflection of the 1940's, and perhaps of the author himself, that the humans in the story had phased out all roads in favor of helicopter travel and used nuclear propulsion to cross space, yet still maintained vast archives of paper-bound books to store their information. It was almost comical, like some steampunk-themed alternate universe where the printed circuit was outlawed in favor of clockwork and punchcards.

But don't let that stop you from reading it. It really was good.

The Fires Within, 1949

A framing device used to drop in a twist ending, and explore the uses of high-powered radar, which must have been hot stuff at the time. Drags a bit in the middle.

Also, Clarke seeks to have a fascination with tentacles as alien limbs. How does something without a skeleton build anything more substantial than a sand castle?

Technical Error, 1946

An amusing diversion made plausible with a little hand-waving over Einstein's theory of relativity. I enjoyed the unnecessarily grim ending.

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