Two men sit in the back of a taxi hurtling through New York.
They're talking about writing.
As they pass Park Avenue, they come to an agreement:
One of them will take the title of best science writer in the world,
and the other will take the title of greatest science fiction writer in the world.
The greatest science writer is Isaac Asimov,
and the greatest science fiction writer
is Arthur C. Clarke.
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Most people know Arthur C. Clarke for his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey,
and will surely talk about it when we talk about the growing impact of television and film on science fiction.
But here,
we're going to talk about his earlier work:
the novels that made him the final step towards modernity.
While Heinlein and Asimov popularized the genre,
broke out of the pulp mould and laid the foundation for much of the work to come,
it's Clarke's writing that feels both stylistically and tonally like something that could be published today.
He may not have the poetry of Bradbury,
who we'll talk about as the precursor for New Wave sci-fi,
but he's willing to let sci-fi be conceptually poetic,
dealing with transcendence and the apotheosis of evolution;
What life might become if it were so far advanced
we could not distinguish it from the gods.
His career begins like most of the other Golden Age greats:
working with astounding stories and Campbell's editorial oversight.
His early stories are often solid but standard examples of sci-fi fare from the period:
tightly focused stories
centering around a single idea
with the reveal or a twist at the end.
But by the '50s,
he breaks out into what he was meant to do:
Novel-writing.
Unlike Asimov in Heinlein,
whose early novels are almost always either fix-ups
or serializations for magazines,
Clarke wrote novels.
REAL novels.
Which weren't limited by any of the constraints of first being part of a magazine and
it was actually the constraints of the magazines
that inadvertently drove him there.
He was a huge fan of the "forgotten foundation" era writers,
and even wrote an introduction to one of the Lord Dunsany collections,
where he was fairly candid about borrowing heavily from Dunsany's club stories for his own:
"Tales from the White Hart."
And in 1948,
he took a stab at writing what he always wanted to write:
his Olaf Stapledon story.
It was called "Against the Night,"
but he published it in the pulps
and there just wasn't enough space for the story he wanted to tell.
So, in 1953,
he released a full-length book of it.
Then in 1956,
feeling he'd become a better writer and could now do it justice,
he added more to it,
did a major rewrite, and released it again
under the title "The City and the Stars."
And y'know what?
Both versions are worth a read.
They're the first place that he really got to experiment with the idea of cosmic intelligences
that so fascinated Olaf Stapledon.
It's also the first place where he experiments with beings
so far beyond us,
they're barely within our ability to comprehend.
The story starts out simply:
fifty billion years in the future, with the last city of mankind.
The people in it are immortal
and their needs are largely taken care of by machines,
but one young man is curious about the world outside the city.
I won't spoil too much,
but his adventure there involves an exploration of a totally different way of life,
the discovery of an ancient religion awaiting the return of the great ones from space,
and, finally, a journey to understand the true secrets of the past
that leads to the discovery of not one but
TWO different paths that the apotheosis of human progress might take.
And this is hugely important
because it brings the mystic or spiritual elements
back into sci-fi.
An element that had largely been lost
in the hard, practical writing of the Golden Age.
It made sci-fi, once again, ask the biggest questions.
The philosophical questions,
rather than merely the human ones.
It brought sci-fi back to wrestling with the question of the purpose of life.
Not on an individual level,
but on a cosmic one.
"The City and the Stars," though, is just the beginning.
It's the nascent steps towards the idea that Arthur C. Clarke will pursue his entire career.
"2001" will be him revisiting this theme in force,
trying to use the storytelling of cinema to get a different angle,
a different vector into exploring the unknowable.
Time and time again,
he'll return to this fundamental theme:
questioning if there's a purpose to the universe,
a purpose to humanity,
or if there's anything
so much grander than us out there,
that we could only get a glimpse of it -
only understanding it from its after-effects,
the traces
on the small small part of existence we could know.
This idea of using science fiction to give us entities that are godlike,
but not wrapped up in all the baggage of religion,
in order to inquire about our place in the universe is a powerful one.
Time and time again,
sci-fi will use cosmic intelligences as a higher power in the purest sense.
Prompting its audience,
who might never otherwise wrestle with the esoteric but fundamental questions of philosophy,
to introspect and think about their own lives.
So, join us next time as we talk about Clarke's other great Golden Age novel.
The novel where he really takes this approach to science fiction and brings it to new height
and the novel that may, in truth,
be his best:
"Childhood's End."
We'll see you then!
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