03.20.08

We’ll Go Dreaming

Posted in Rants, Site News, Writing at 4:33 am

I try not to make too much mention of so-called celebrity news around here. Most of the time I’m working a day or so ahead, and as a result anything I have to write about the events in Random Famous Person’s life is usually ancient history by the time it gets publicized. But the news on Tuesday that Arthur C. Clarke had died, though initially unassuming to me, wound up affecting me and really hitting me as I write this (Wednesday morning). So, I suppose it’s worth mentioning that ACC was, is, and will forever remain the man I look up to most as an aspiring sci-fi (or, more accurately, speculative fiction) author.

As I mentioned in the Twitter post yesterday (actually only about twenty minutes ago, for me), I didn’t understand any of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I did only watch the film, but that can be excused due to the fact that it apparently matched the book more or less exactly, both having been produced in tandem. The last twenty minutes of the film in particular are completely inscrutable to me, and I’ve long since given up any pretense of ever being able to produce a work even half as mind-bending as the combined efforts of Sir Clarke and Mr. Kubrick. That’s not why I look up to him, anyway. The answer is just a little bit more simple: Clarke was right.

Though I make no claim to any great familiarity with his work, his legacy is felt throughout all of modern science fiction, from Heinlein and Bradbury all the way to Card and Stephenson. Before Clarke, science fiction was largely the province of re-skinned Westerns; star-spangled adventure stories replacing cowboys, covered wagons, and Indians with astronauts, rocketships, and aliens. Where it tried to be deep, it wound up following the same forumlae as traditional fiction of the time. Clarke, and to a certain extent the other SF writers I mentioned, took a different approach: by seeing how the introduction of world-changing discoveries and technologies would alter the world, and the people within it. The character development was shifted away from the individual scale and moved into the cosmic level. Put another way, future tech like the rocketships and aliens were no longer taken for granted. It was dystopic at times, it wasn’t always sunshine and lollipops, and it very often needed relapses into the “Wagon Train to the stars” formula in order to fund the really thought-provoking stuff (incidentally, Star Trek also struck a wonderful balance between corny adventure and intellect stimulus). It was the birth of punk, if you ask me.

And, like I said, he was right. He was right about a ton of things, even if he fudged some details due to the world-changing events even he couldn’t see– he conceived of satellite communications, space lifts, and maybe a dozen other concepts that today seem, if not pedestrian and commonplace, then distinctly within the realm of possibility. So maybe he didn’t know about the transistor when he first surmised that satellites would have to be manned. It makes little difference in the long run (and actually, I think I would have rathered that satellites were manned– it certainly would have accelerated spaceflight research!). The point is, he saw these things coming, and he could more or less accurately predict how these world-changing things would, in fact, change the world and the people living on it. He could see technology’s effects on human culture.

The other thing that really makes me admire Clarke is the fact that throughout all of it, he’s an optimist. I often joke that my optimism hasn’t yet been crushed out of me, but in truth I hope it never does. Clarke’s work has an underlying sense that in the end, either through internal development or an external stimulus, humanity will eventually do the right thing. The threat of self-annihilation exists in his work, but it’s a plot device– a MacGuffin of global scale and microbial importance. It’s merely the ticking clock, a slight distraction. When faced with the wonder and beauty, the glory of the universe around us, choosing to focus on the petty differences and pathetic weaponry that threaten to divide us seems childish, inane, small-minded, and singularly stupid. Clarke taught us not just to look at the big picture, but to admire it for the single brushstroke that humanity is within it. Science shows us the picture, but Clarke told us that we need to appreciate it and exactly how to.

I think the most important thing to remember is one of his more repeated quotes: “I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.” And given the choice between being wrong 90% of the time when it comes to the big ideas of the future, or being right 90% of the time about the small ideas of the present, I will always take thinking big, because Clarke taught me that the reward is so much more worth it than the risk.

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