Lavonardo

With the death of Arthur C. Clarke today, the trio of Grand Old Men of science fiction is now gone.

ACC was my favorite of the bunch, Asimov’s output was too uneven for my liking, and I never understood why people ranked Heinlein so high.

But then again, to each his own, Clarke was hardly without any faults and mannerisms of his own. The characters in the novels were often nothing more than paper-thin exposition machines, and the less said about the novels collaborated with the likes of Gentry Lee, the better.

Indeed, I was often among the first in line to pick up the translations published by Karisto in the libraries of Helsinki in the eighties. Back when science fiction was thin on the ground, and my skills in english were not strong enough to cope with originals. While 2001: A Space Odyssey was pretty hard to grasp, most of the other books were easy enough to understand. What I liked about Clarke’s output was the wide variety of topics handled in the books. And the fact that the plots were usually not very complicated - a single high concept surrounded with enough scaffolding to make the story work.

My favorites of his books were the duo of technological advanced not yet done - unlike the geosynchronous communication satellites famously thought up by the author, no-one’s yet built a space elevator or lit up Phobos (Fountains of Paradise and Sands of Mars, respectively). And the idea of a leisure society all wrapped in false reality as shown in City and the Stars cannot be faulted either. Rendezvous with Rama felt like an adventure game from the very beginning, and recollections of Childhood’s End are vague enough to warrant an immediate re-reading.

Unlike Asimov’s laws that center on the peaceful co-existence of humans and robots, Clarke’s are far easier to apply to real life. My personal favorite is his second law:

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.