Arthur C. Clarke is generally listed among the giants of science fiction, thanks in large part to Stanley Kubrick’s seminal adaptation of his short story “The Sentinel” into popular a film, 2001, which Clarke simultaneously adapted into the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film’s reach and impact extended well beyond sci-fi audiences, with one of the most memorable movie soundtracks in film history and a bit of dialogue that made the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest Movie Quotes of All Time (although, strangely, they include the line “Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” rather than the more oft-repeated followup, “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.)
That’s a long bit of lead-in to reveal that I’ve always found Clarke’s writing to be dry and dull. He’s very science, as we might say on Twitter, and spends little to no time on character creation or development, and not a whole lot more on plot beyond the scientific aspects of his topic. I read 2001 maybe twenty years ago and was surprised by how thin the book was – HAL, a computer, is the most interesting character by a wide margin – and then had a similar experience two years ago with Rendezvous with Rama, which won Clarke the first of his two Hugo Awards for Best Novel in 1972. He won the award a second time with The Fountains of Paradise, in 1979, and while that latter book certainly is more novelesque than Rama, it suffers from the same problems as everything else I’ve read by Clarke: The scientific idea at the heart of the story dwarfs all of the typical considerations that go into whether a novel is good as a piece of literature or even popular fiction. (Both books won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in their respective years as well.)
The Fountains of Paradise is built around the idea of the construction of the first space elevator, a hypothetical device that could be used to transport people and goods to and from space at a fraction of the cost of current rocket technology, which is based around and thus restricted by the weight, cost, and supply of fossil fuels. A space elevator would involve threads of extremely strong (and as yet speculative) material that extend from some point on the earth out over 35,000 km above the planet’s surface, relying on the counterbalancing forces of the earth’s gravity and the centrifugal force from the earth’s rotation to with a robotic lifter climbing the ribbon using a still-undetermined method of power (until the lifter gets high enough to rely on solar power) to drive its ascent. The idea has been around for over a century, became a bit more realistic with the publication of a scientific paper on the topic in 1975, and, if it ever came to fruition, would be useful for endeavors like sending people to Mars or mining an asteroid.
The focus on the scientific underpinnings of the elevator and the engineering challenges in its construction means that when something goes wrong with the elevator itself or in its construction, the stakes are quite low. Even the book’s ultimate rescue scene lacks much suspense; it’s pretty clear, or was to me at least, how it was going to end, and to raise the stakes Clarke has to have Morgan forget some facts that would, I think, be obvious to an engineer of his experience. He also abuses Chekhov’s gun in the story, in the form of a heart monitor that telegraphs early on how the story is going to end.
The paint-by-numbers aspect of the main story is further exacerbated by the inclusion of a second story around the appearance, some years earlier, in our solar system of an interstellar probe with a sophisticated AI that proves to us the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. This subplot seems to bear no real purpose in the broader story other than to underline Clarke’s disdain for religion and to explain the disappearance of religion in general in the book’s 21st-century setting. Religiosity in developed countries has declined over the last hundred years or so, and may very well continue to do so, but to prophesy its disappearance seems like wishful thinking, and puts Clarke in the school of G.H. Hardy, who once wrote of his desire to find a single proof of the nonexistence of God that would convince all of humanity. I certainly respect any writer’s right to incorporate his own religious beliefs or unbelief into his/her writing, but in a book about the construction of a space elevator, it comes across as a distracting non sequitur, and does nothing whatsoever to advance the central plot or explain the motivations of any core characters. I get the appeal of Clarke to those who read science fiction for the speculative aspects of its scientific content, but no matter the genre, I need something more than that, and Clarke doesn’t deliver that in any of his best-known novels.
Next up: Mark Pendergrast’s Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed Our World.
I’ve found Clarke much the same, though I did enjoy Childhood’s End.
A couple of his earlier 1950s novels–“The Sands Of Mars” and “Islands In The Sky” are not as dry. (“Islands in The Sky” is really a juvenile, which makes it a bit livelier.) I like both of those, as well as “A Fall Of Moondust”. Still, all of Clarke’s books tend toward dryness.
I actually enjoyed some of Heinlein’s YA novels when I was younger; he definitely wrote them with more verve.