Well, Arthur just made his step off, I guess. Damn.

Godspeed, Sir Arthur, and may you find it's full of stars.

MKK

Yes. And his work showed me that it was glorious to look out into that gigantic universe. It changed me.

Alas.

Earl, SciFi should probably change its name, right after BSG is
over, to something like "The Dumbass Cheese Channel." But they don't
actually have any announcement staff. They can put up a crawl, but they
don't have a news department. I turned to them on 9/11 because they
were the only channel that wasn't covering it, and I was tired of
hearing the same thing over and over.

Welcome to the Con at the End of the Universe, Sir Arthur.

I tell you, a frisson (or what ever a really big frisson is called) of fangirl squeeful excitement went through me at the time.

Ad Astra Sir Arthur

Yeah, but Clarke was better than Heinlein at engineering big with known science, without letting the mystical streak get in the way. Consider The Fountains of Paradise, among others....

Anyway, that's another of the Great Names fallen to the reaper.... :-(

I dunno--his very respectful New York Times obituary
is on the front page of their web site right now, and CNN ran one of
their top-of-page "BREAKING NEWS" banners on their front page when word
first hit. From here it certainly looks like the major media are
treating him as a cultural figure of unquestioned importance, and his
death as a big story.

And, you know, rightly so. But we inside the SF subculture, we
really do need to get over that reflexive assumption that the "major
media" will trivialize or misrepresent what's important to us. It's
2008, not 1988 or 1968 or 1948. For all my criticisms of the modern
media, I suspect that lots and lots and lots of the decision-makers at the modern New York Times or NBC or the Telegraph grew up reading Arthur C. Clarke. It's just not that esoteric to read SF any more.

I'm not sad today. I mean, I'm sorry he's gone, but I'm not sad. I think he's out there in Arthur C. Clarke Heaven. I hope he's enjoying the hell out of the Universe. In fact, I'm sure he is. He enjoyed it plenty enough when he was still just one of us, after all.

I feel orphaned tonight.

It's for exactly the reason you said (more eloquently than I could):
his optimism. Boundless optimism. His belief that humanity would
persevere.

As a pre-teen in the early 1980's, I needed that.

There's an enviable obituary. Good night, Mr. Clarke. Rest among the stars.

Like jmnlman, "2001" was one of the first SF movies I went to.
(During the first theatrical run, a few days after my parents saw it
under the influence of, um, enhanced brownies . . . my father had a
co-worker who was sure this would lead to Enlightenment.) It really set
the course for my life; once I knew what science fiction was I wanted
more, more, more.

I was delighted when I found the novel and the "making
of" and the "lost worlds" book a few years later. I'm sure I read
everything that ACC wrote until he started partnering up with others.

* * *

Like Freeman Dyson, Clarke seems to have been deeply affected by Olaf Stapledon's writing.

I am sad.

"So there I was at the New Orleans Nebula Award ceremony. Connie
Willis was the MC, and she decided that we needed a montage, like they
do of movie clips at the Oscars. So, she read a montage of SF lines and
concepts.

"I know where I came from -- but where did all you zombies come
from"..."First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or through
inaction cause a human being to come to harm..." We sat and listened,
but when she got to "Overhead, without any fuss..." a banquet room full
of science fiction authors was all murmuring along "the stars were
going out."

It was the only line the whole room spoke, and that said a great deal."

http://filkertom.livejournal.com/788725.html?thread=13379061

There were giants in the earth in those days.

Godspeed, Sir Arthur. May the road rise to you, the wind be at your back, and may God hold you in the hollow of His hand.

One measure of Clarke's ability as a writer: I actually read one of
his books about exploring the waters around Sri Lanka all the way
through. And enjoyed it. I dislike swimming quite intensely,
and can't imagine any other writer who could inspire me to read a book
on the topic. But it was the only Clarke book I could get that I hadn't read, so...

p.s. My replacement illusion will be that you particled the Joss
Whedon Musical based on my comment in the open thread. Please don't
disillusion me on that one.

I will miss him.

Go gently into the great beyond, and return with magic, indistinguishable from technology.

#34: Greg, your thumbnail summary of Stapledon is wonderful.

#28: Stefan, Clarke recently completed a novel in collaboration with Fred Pohl. It's in the pipeline, so far as I know. I'm intrigued.

That's how it feels to me.

On a more personal level, it was largely Clarke
and Asimov who got me twentyfive years or so ago into science fiction
when I discovered them in the children stacks of the local library.

Tonight, if it's not overcast, go out somewhere you can see the sky
clearly. Look up for long enough and you'll be bound to see one or more
of the points of light moving. It's full of stars and, my god, we put some of them there.

Then take the phone from your pocket and call someone who lives on the other side of the planet.

There is magic here already and it's in no small way because of him that we have it.

We take so much of our tech for granted, don't we?

Thank you - you just gave me one of those "This really is the
Future, sometimes" moments. Any minute I shall begin mourning the lack
of flying cars.

You know - a starship circlin in the sky - it ought to be ready by 1990

You gotta ride said the Doktor of space

I have lived here once before

The lites in the nite are a village of stars

Of stars that I have explored

Sunrise

Surprise

Civilized Man

You were keeper to me

Now your animal is free

you're free to die

Have You Seen The Stars Tonight?

Do you know

We could go?

We are free

Anyplace you can think of

We could be

I thank Arthur Clarke for all his brilliant common sense along the way, even if I could never make myself read much that he wrote after about 1975.

The land is green and you make it grow

And you gotta let go you know

You gotta let go you know

You gotta let go you know

Or else you stay ....

(The last link is to my favorite Clarke
work. For me, the stfnal era of the Big Three ended years ago. But the
greatness of their writing is alive in the work of a few contemporary
s-f authors who I won't embarrass by naming.)

Good bye, Arthur. Thank you.

All the rest of you - stop dying. Just for a while. Please?

No, but I think it's still a minority who continue to read SF past adolescence and let themselves be fascinated and awed throughout their lives. And for me, Arthur C. Clarke was one of the people who pointed me on the way. Thank you, Sir Arthur, and Godspeed.

Good night, Mr. Clarke; may your future be full of stars.

Last night, saddened by the news, I dug out my copy of Against the Fall of Night to read again. This copy (Ace, 1953, 35 cents) is one of a small number of SF paperbacks that I've keep for 50 years.

One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin. It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in the trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all
things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no
gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will
command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright
afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

Yahbut, he had Strauss's Giant Space Baby Music rising underneath him.

(I'm sure the Morning Edition clip will be available for download in a day or so.)

I read "The Nine Billion Names of God" when I was a wee girl, and I
still remember the 'whoa! - my mind has just been blown' feeling I got
at the end. It must have been one of the first pieces of science
fiction that I read.

It may be a minority who continue to read science fiction--a lot of
adults rarely if ever read fiction at all, though they do read and they
do watch fiction on screen--but people who grew up reading people like Clarke don't suddenly come to scorn him the day they're old enough to drink legally.

And if they needed to, to justify major attention here, they can
point not just to Clarke's fiction, but to the Apollo broadcast and the
invention of the telecommunicatiosn satellite.

ACC was one of those who attended the first SF convention to be organised.

Clarke
explains what orbital and escape velocities are (and how to calculate
them), the principles of multi-stage rocketry, why orbital refueling is
good for long missions, why takeoff and landing are so little of the
time but so much of the fuel, how to plan the most efficient orbit to
reach another planet, and lots more. Much of the book correctly
anticipates the next several decades of space flight.

Lots of people can write good fiction, and even make you not notice if their science doesn't quite add up. But Clarke could also write good science, and make it interesting too.

He probably requested Clarke purely to settle a matter of arcane SF reference he was arguing LeGaultian style with Heinlein & Asimov. Likely, Clarke is -- as I write -- backing Robert's take.

I can hear Robert now: "Err, weelll... let's just ask Arthur, why don't we?" With that smile of his that just broadcasts that he already knows he's right...

He probably requested Clarke purely to settle a matter of arcane SF reference he was arguing LeGaultian style with Heinlein & Asimov. Likely, Clarke is -- as I write -- backing Robert's take.

I can hear Robert now: "Err, weelll... let's just ask Arthur, why don't we?" With that smile of his that just broadcasts that he already knows he's right...

You sounded great, and if I am remembering correctly, they ran a bit
of Also Sprach Zarathustra under your last few words, which was a very
nice effect.

If I'd had someone else in the car with me I'm sure I would have been embarrassingly nerdy about it.

About Clarke: I distinctly remember eventually breaking through and masking-taping the binding of his essay collection Report on Planet Three
when I was in 8th grade or so. He was immensely knowledgeable yet never
seemed like he was talking down to the reader -- I got the sense from
his work that he was just as awestruck by the universe as I was.

At least I can add that NPR.com now has the segment online @ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88552259

Last of the Big Three, yes, if you're talking hard-science fiction. But Bradbury is still with us.

He will be missed.

The book of his that had the most impact on me was the collection Of Time and Stars.
I bought it from a spinning wire rack of the kind they don't have any
more, in a sweetshop in Amroth when I was nine. It was the second
science fiction book I ever bought, the first was Amabel Williams
Ellis's Tales of the Galaxies which I'd bought from the same
wire rack the day before. I can remember sitting in the back of the car
by the sea in the rain while my grandparents dozed off in the front and
the windows slowly steamed up, reading "The Star" and "The Nine Billion
Names of God" and "If I forget thee, O Earth" and having the top of my
head blow off again and again.

Actually having been resident in Canada counts too.

1: Most maple syrup and all good maple syrup comes from Canada,
usually Quebec (Note that one of the conditions required for maple
syrup to be good is for it to have been produced in Canada and not some
unstable break-away nation).

I feel like that bit where you have the standing ovation at the end of a magnificent performance.

Also, that anecdote about Clarke
and C.S. Lewis is awesome. What I wouldn't give to have heard *that*
conversation. (I wonder if any of the letters they exchanged have been
published?)

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4db_1205893786&p=1

ACC Video

I can't find any words to describe his writing that haven't already
been spoken far better than I can manage, but I'll add this - his work
on radar in WWII helped save a lot of lives, and his visionary writings
about geostationary satellites were cited as prior art in patent
rulings.

Because of him, nobody can control the steel stars that keep us all in contact.

Another of the nine billion names of God has been spoken.

I remember reading Rendezvous with Rama and being blown
away. And, so, too, with many of the short stories (which I think were
Clarke's best form; it's hard to wrap an entire novel around an
engineering problem.)

In honor of Sir Arthur, let us all go out and watch something broadcast by a geosynchronous communication satellite tonight.

It may have been a disappointing encounter, but it didn't lessen my
opinion of him at all. Nothing, not even the mediocre collaborations,
ever has.

I didn't go quite that far--or was it further? I was just turning ten, and took the whole omnibus collection that contained Childhood's End
to the beach *with* me. And kept coming out of the water, drying off
minimally, and reading some more. And read in the car all the way back
home. I did turn down an invite to come out and play hopscotch or
kickball the next day in favor of finishing, though.

The thing that always struck me about his work, at least up to about
1975, aside from the great glowing transcendence of the best of it, was
a dry, understated, totally Brit sense of humor, that I had never
encountered before. Totally captivating. Of the Big Three, he certainly
had the best sense of literary style.

I am currently involved in a debate with Canadian friends of mine
(who claim that I'm an honourary Canadian now) about exactly who makes
the best maple syrup. I grew up in a small town along the Mid-Hudson
Valley where maple sugaring still happens, and I am bringing some
home-style Putnam Valley syrup to my friends next week. We'll have a
syrup showdown.

As an honourary Canadian, I can't lose, eh?

(And according to the Maple Syrup Rule, I qualify as Canadian anyway
-- I lived in Guelph for a semester of vet school, under a work permit.)

Though I bet my most enduring memory of him will always be of
Saturday mornings or late weekday nights long after my bed time when I
watched this funny old man talk about the impossible in foreign places.

*it was such a cheerful set.

Plot summarized here.

Its Amazon sales rank is #9,837, not bad for a book that won't be published before December 2008.

I feel like Samwise Gamgee watching the last of the Elves on their
way to the Gray Havens. All the Olympians, a thing never known again.

Hearing of his death, I had a gleeful image:

Arthur found out who cranks the stars! And now he gets to play with the
crank. Keep your eyes on the skies, because some cool things should
happen in the next year.

Das's article here.

A giant rose from the Somerset coal,

A mind at home far out in the night,

or in the tides of the Center's light;

he lifted us up towards that cosmic goal.

He wrote of the fire the Titan stole,

future earth, alien air, the sight

of shapes in water in luminous flight,

and always the road to space and its toll.

He knew our path to be fraught and far,

filled with wonder and horror as well,

yet he never uttered a word of despair.

He found awe in the storms of a star,

in the well of life at the heart of a cell,

and showed us a starry road to fare.

First, of course, is his paper in "Wireless World" on geocomsats.
That was seminal, and ultimately changed the world for the better. An
*incredibly* positive change too (IMHO anyway). As Clarke himself has
it as the title of one of his books of non-fiction, "How The World Was
One."

But second, and mayhap just as important, was his proselytizing for
space throughout the 1950s. His book *Interplanetary Flight* was a Book
of the Month Club selection in 1950, and was the greatest sales job for
astronautics to that date reaching thousands of people who previously
had dismissed space travel as "just science fiction" (this sales job
was only eclipsed two years later by the von Braun articles in
*Colliers* magazine in 1952). He continued to write articles on
astronautics throughout the 1950s, placing them as well as he could in
magazines like "Holiday," "Harper's," and even "Seventeen" (!). (And
yes, I know that the sales to "Holiday" were made easier by Alfred
Bester being there. And I know about the BOTMC sf-world connection too.)

Great SF writer: Yep. 2001? Check. Clarke Orbit? Got it.

But he was also the man who sold the Moon.

Thank you.

My faith is convoluted at best...and that was, without a doubt, the
most personally affirming quote I've read in years. It buoyed up my
love for both men immeasurably in a few sentences.

I've been out of contact with the general world for so long, I didn't know he'd passed away until I happened on this thread.

"The City and the Stars" was the first ACC novel I ever read.
"Rendezvous with Rama" was the second. I re-read each of them once a
year. Each has left me staring at the stars at night more times than I
can count.

It is very unsettling to me to know that another of my favorite
authors has passed back into the collective energy of the universe. It
is so strange that contemporary things pass into the possession of
history and memory.

Asimov had the vision, Heinlein had the science, but only Clarke had both.

Farewell.

(*) Say that fast many times.

* Daily Kos runs David Brin's tribute to ACC.

I believe it was Shelley who said that "poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world." Clarke's life and work makes a strong case
that the science fiction writers have taken over that job.

I would start with Against the Fall of Night for some early Clarke, then Childhood's End for the reach of his ideas, A Fall of Moondust for the meticulous engineering that he brought to life, and then The Songs of Distant Earth.

Just about any Clarke novel is a good one.

Clarke was one of those I didn't get to meet. He, in the Tales of
the White Hart brought a lot of this stuff to the real. Sturgeon (and
Henderson) gave me a sense of the incredible.

Clarke, a sense of the conrete; and all of it wonderful. Everything
was magnificet: the world in a grain of sand, and the stars like dust
across the universe.

You write one helluva eulogy Patrick.

I
can remember sitting in the back of the car by the sea in the rain
while my grandparents dozed off in the front and the windows slowly
steamed up, reading "The Star" and "The Nine Billion Names of God" and
"If I forget thee, O Earth" and having the top of my head blow off
again and again.

That is the song that HAL sings, in the French version of 2001, as his mind is shutting down.

By the moonlight, my friend Pierrot

Lend me your pen, to write a few words.

My candle is dead, I have no more fire.

Open your door to me, for the love of God.

In the novels, you've had some good recs already. To those, let me add Imperial Earth and The Songs of Distant Earth
-- the latter of which is an expansion from an earlier short story.
They're not the ones everyone talks about, but both of them hit me over
the head with "godDAMN, that man can write!"

Thanks again for the recommendations.

http://texasbestgrok.mu.nu/archives/258063.php

And he got an early start. As I posted elsewhere, here is Arthur C. Clarke, age twenty:

Go out beneath the stars on a clear winter night, and look up at the Milky Way spanning the heavens like a bridge of glowing mist. Up there, ranged one beyond the other ot the end of the Universe, suns without number burn in the loneliness of space. Down to the South hang the brilliant, unwinking lanterns of other worlds-- the electric blue of Jupiter, the glowing ember of Mars. Across the zenith, a meteor leaves a trail of fading incandescence, and a tiny voyager of space has come to a flaming end.

Looking out across immensity to the great suns and circling
planets, to worlds of infinite mystery and promise, can you believe
that man is to spend all his days cooped and crawling on the surface of
this tiny earth-- this moist pebble with its clinging film of air? Or
do you, on the other hand, believe that his destiny is indeed among the
stars, and that one day our descendants will bridge the seas of space?

From a 1938 brochure promoting the British Interplanetary Society, quoted by Neil McAleer in Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography.

>“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Y'know, I always viewed that sentiment as more of a curse than a statement of conjecture.

Bastards. Does no one have any respect for anything any more? It's
not like he was tried and convicted. Dirty fucking bastards.

*In America this is called "fair and balanced," and it's bullshit here too.

Me, I try to think of this sort of thing as a reason to admire even
more those writers who manage, fitfully maybe, to help us bring
ourselves closer to our common humanity. We are plunked down into a
world where we are encouraged to feed off each other for our own
advancement, as this sort of thing demonstrates. Any writer who
manages, either through sensawunda or whatever, to help us in some way
counteract these forces gets my vote.

Me, I look forward to an authoritative, carefully researched
biography. No substitute for knowing Sir Arthur personally, of course,
but it's probably the best I can do. I think it will be a life worth
reading about in detail.

I remember reading Doc Smith and Asimov from my Dad's bookshelves at
an early age; a year or two later I came across Clarke and now I
realise it was his slightly British voice that I noted but couldn't
place at the time. It's not that stuff written in American seemed
strange (I'd grown up watching TV after all) but Clarke's writing felt
instantly familiar, like something that might exist in life rather than
on a page or screen.

I may have, um, borrowed a copy of A Fall of Moondust and never given it back at a the age of 9.

...excoriating him for not Coming Out during his lifetime

But... what? Wasn't it obvious from... well, reading between the
lines of everything I could get my hands for 7 or 8 years by him? I
thought he was openly gay. Well, another suprising thing I've learnt.

(I'd somehow never thought of Clarke and Lewis* as contemporaries,
despite reading them at the same age; it's like finding out that Elvis
was a Monty Python fan - two things you thought were separate turn out
to have connections)

* Not Lewis and Clark, who I suspect did indeed know each other

Alfred Bester described attending a meeting of a British SF group
while he was living in England. Clarke was attending, and offered to
bring some slides of his underwater photography to the next meeting.
True to his word, at the next meeting he presented a slideshow. After
about the third slide, Bester protested "Arthur, this isn't underwater
photography! You took those pictures at an aquarium. I can see the
reflections in the glass". Bester complained that the rest of the
meeting devolved into a discussion of whether it was necessary for the
photographer to be underwater as well as the subject to be considered
underwater photography.

I don't know if it was simply because I hadn't had much exposure to
SF, because it was simply the first "real" SF I'd ever read, or because
"2001" was really that much of a mind-altering story. But it was one of
the few book that changed my view of the world and myself. And I always
had a spot in my heart for Mr. Clarke for writing it.

Take out the waffling bits, and it becomes a provocative statement
that's true of other Big-Picture SF writers. You can see it in Wolfe,
Jay Lake, and many past greats -- as long as "religion" adds up to
something better than the same old matters of ritual, rules and
prejudice that drive this world's battling faiths.

Is anyone here interested in discussing or debating the issue for a
while? (Working for a future column, this week I've written a couple of
reviews of SF books with religious aspects, and next time I may plunge
into a bunch of big tomes that involve "angels" in one way or another
-- but *not* connected to Buffy -- so it's been on my mind).

I never took Clarke to be a religious person. I took him to be an extremely spiritual person.

Unfortunately, merriam-webster doesn't distinguish the two very
well, but religion is more of an institutional process, spirituality is
more about the individual's personal relationship to "all of it", where
'all of it' refers to all space, all time.

I think the best way to describe it to the SF-aware crowd is to say that a spiritual person could enter the Total Perspective Vortex and emerge unchanged.

When Clarke has David Bowman look into the monolith and realize that
it is full of stars, I think that's his own version of the TPV. He
doesn't have a fear of the infinitness of space, he wants his readers
to expand their minds until they can fit that infinity within their
minds, embrace it.

Douglas Adams' TPV implies that if you see your relationship to the
infinite, your head will explode. I just happened to watch "Serenity"
yesterday, and they were talking about the Reavers and there is a point
where Kaylee says something like "some say they were just men who went
to the end of space, looked into the black, and lost their minds".

So, Adams isn't the only one who can write that into his stories.
Whedon has incorporated the idea into parts of his stories. (Not that
either author personally endorses these views.) I'm sure there is someone here more familiar with all
of Clarke's works than me, but what I have read of his works, Clarke
seems to have such a comfortable relationship with "all of it", seems
to have such an easy relationship to his spirituality, and seems to
have at the heart of his stories the hope that his readers will expand
their own personal relationship to the eternal, that I can't imagine
him writing anything that would seriously entertain the idea that
seeing "all of it" would make a person go mad. (maybe a close minded
person, an extremely religious person, which might be the sort of
character Clarke would have go nuts when exposed to his version of the
TPV)

So, in that context, Clarke's stories (or at least the ones that I've read so far) are
very spiritual. Not just are indistinguishable from spirituality, but
truly are spiritual in that they tend to reflect the author's
comfortable relationship with the eternal and infinite and tend to
reflect his encouragement of the reader to embrace the eternal and
infinite.

I'm not quite sure I buy that characterization of Gene Wolfe. He
isn't writing about science in a way that becomes religion: he really
is writing about religion. Severian is the messiah, not
something else that fulfills the metaphoric role of a messiah. The same
for Frank Herbert, come to think of it.

Where I do think this observation is real is in much of the writing
about the singularity. Robert Charles Wilson, for example, definitely
approaches spirituality, or even religion, when he deals with the
unknowable, even numinous. Blind Lake or Darwinia
are about understanding our role in the universe and definitely have a
flavor of religion at the far end of the science. Vinge, too, although
I don't get quite the same sense of spirituality.

If I can stoop to using his books as tea-leaves [1], it wouldn't
have particularly surprised me if Clarke was bi but perhaps somewhat
more interested in men than women.

1: The only explicit romances [2] that come to mind off-hand in
Clarke are the rather passionless grappling in A FALL OF MOONDUST, the
affair in SONGS OF DISTANT EARTH and the abusive triangle in IMPERIAL
EARTH. The last one seemed to me to be show more vividly than the first
two.

2: Which rules out those two guys in EARTHLIGHT.

"Wife?" asked Taylor innocently.

And then at the end of Rendezvous With Rama, very shortly
after some mention that the 'end-of-mission "orbital orgy"' would be in
full swing', "Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one of how he had
wakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious
echoing in his brain: The Ramans do everything in threes."

... which I'd read a number of times over the years without it ever occurring to me that he might be referring to spaceships.

I know I've seen reply before, and better sourced, but all I can find now is this one:

Clark ...was long rumored to be gay by sci fi lovers,... but when
asked about his sexual orientation, his standard reply was, “not gay,
just cheerful.”
(http://visiblevote08.logoonline.com/2008/03/18/arthur-c-clarke-dies/)

Which if nothing else, made me smile.

http://current.com/items/88872821_arthur_c_clarke_1917_2008

I tried to make it a linky thing but failed.

And then at the end of Rendezvous With Rama, ... "The Ramans do everything in threes.

IIRC, in the forward to the second book, Clarke admitted that bit
was was a "generic hook", tossed in on principle. He hadn't actually
planned a sequel until Gentry Lee contacted him with ideas.

* I don't remember her name, or her parents' names, or any of the
rest in detail. That's quite deliberate; it was just too painful to
read for me to want to have it in my long-term memory. I wanted to
shake her parents and scream at them for what they were doing to her.

I also note that the Ramans might do things in threes, but Clarke didn't....

How much did Clarke have to do with the actual writing of the three
Rama sequels? I never finished the first one for reasons that might
most diplomatically be described as seeing Rama II as an
abomination (Although not to the extent of Benford's foray into
Clarke-fic, since I believe Lee actually read RwR) but most of the
other collaborations with Clarke that I have read have read more like
the fiction of the junior author than Clarke himself.

I don't know that there's anyone around right now who is preadapted to getting the tone of a Faux-Clarke right.

Discovery News on GRB 0803198, specifically the last paragraph.

Not just the twist at the end but the particular sort of twist at
the end that you really could have seen coming, but only if you were
already cosmically attuned in the right way.

Rendezvous with Rama was my favorite of his works: one of the
best instances of a novel changing its entire feel in the final
sentence. He never shoulda written sequels. (I refused to touch them.)

What did it tell you about SF fandom?

What it tells me about fandom is that a majority the subset of fans
that vote on the Hugos (or anyway, the ones who voted that year)
thought RwR was a better book. It doesn't tell me why, though I have
guesses (some of which are above). What does it tell you?

dhalgren never struck me as a difficult novel and i wonder why its
reputation rests that way. it is no more difficult then pynchon, for
example. but it was queer, fecund, and strange, it moved my brain about
in ways that Rama never could have, even if you found it impenetrable,
it wasn't boring.

i have found that people who read a lot of sf like rama enjoy cold
and shiny more then they like strange and human...i felt like they were
hostile to the best sf writing that happened during the 60s and 70s,
many of which was viciously satirizing Clarke's obsessions (including
but not limited to the Atrocity Exhibition, Camp Concentration, Palmer
Eldritch (i know Dick won for Man in the High Castle), Dhalgren and a
number of others.

The exception is Tiptree--and maybe i am reading hi/r with an
unusual lens, or maybe s/he was good enough at playing the game, but
that's the interesting one. (and work that results from Tiptree is
often loathed by a certain mainstream of fandom--look at how David
Truesdale ripped apart Karen Joy Fowler's win in 1987.

That criticism of fandom bears repeating (though the writing in the episode...well, let's just say it ain't Delany).

I suspect that a lot of people had trouble with Dhalgren
because of the sex scenes. Especially the gay sex scenes; remember that
fandom is mostly straight males, and was even more so at the time.

And even we who love it can't claim that the "Anathemata" section is
an easy read. In fact it's a special sense of the word 'read' that must
be applied in that part of the book; you keep having to loop back and
read something else on the same page, and if you want to really follow
the story, you have to keep trying to find all the pieces. And when you
do, you realize that there are several unresolvable event paradoxes in
it!

Rama, on the other hand, you can just read straight through.

I'm not intending a dis on either by the above. Popularity and
quality vary independently; I'm intending to explain why the Delany
book was less popular than the Clarke.

And I hope no one gets mad at you for your post at 149. It's not
like you stormed in here attacking Clarke in his memorial thread; you
were asked for, and gave, your opinion.

Besides, fellow big fans of Dhalgren are a rare and precious thing! Please don't go away. :-)

But I feel the same way about Clarke's novels. He wrote wonderful
short stories*, but Childhood's End bored me to tears. I had to read
2001 for a class in college, and the only part I liked was the sequence
with the hominids (apes?). And the film of the latter did nothing for
me.

(*The Nine Billion Names of God and The Star are my favorites.)

At the time Dhalgren was published, my favorite authors were
Herbert, Bradley, and McCaffrey -- so I may not have been the audience
Delaney was writing for...

That said, Delaney devoured, and loved all kinds of SF, the motion
of light on water mentions Bester, and he has written essays on Bradley
and McCaffery--he came from pulp, and never forgot his pulp roots.

And Clark did write the 9 billion names for god, which has one of the better o henry endings, as someone up thread mentioned.

But I like Wolfe and Bear, Paul Park and Vernor Vinge, and I've
never put myself in the position of voting for any Hugo nominee so I
guess I don't know what I'd do if I ever had to actually choose between
the First Best and Second Best book.

As to the scurrilous newspaper stories, Clarke was only 5 years
younger than Alan Turing, and left the UK forever only 2 years after
Turing died.

The 1950s are an alien place now, more alien than Mars was then.

But I like Wolfe and Bear, Paul Park and Vernor Vinge, and I've
never put myself in the position of voting for any Hugo nominee so I
guess I don't know what I'd do if I ever had to actually choose between
the First Best and Second Best book.

As you probably know, the final Hugo ballot uses a preference
system, so your second, third, fourth, and fifth choices may sway the
final result. Choosing between good works becomes easier, I find, or
anyway somewhat less guilt-wracking.

I think perhaps what I don't like is writing where I have trouble following the plot -- or discerning whether there is
a plot. And I'm not at all fond of the kind of lit-fic that's the
equivalent of a still-life, where by the end of the story nothing has
happened; IMO if you want to do still-life in text, you do it with a
poem!

I've never attempted Dhalgren, so I have no opinion to offer there. But just out of curiosity, anthony, what do you think of Barry Malzberg?

Words cannot express how happy I would be if it turned out that GH
Nordhagen was not actually Norwegian, but simply a precocious teenager
from the Mid-West who went through a phase of only reading things in
Norwegian for the sheer intellectual challenge of it.

I just discovered Childhood's End is *not* on my bookshelf,
even though I've read it loads of times starting when I was 10. Soon to
remedy. (Must have been that last move.)

This is silly, and some of the conversation following it is also silly, for several reasons.

First, Rendezvous with Rama was published in 1973, and won the Hugo in 1974. Dhalgren was published in January 1975. Even if Dhalgren had been a finalist for the Hugo (which it was not), it would never have gone up against that particular Clarke novel.

Second, how can antony know that this was "all [he] needed to know
about sf fandom"? Evidently "all he needed to know" excluded quite a
few facts I know, like the fact that Delany's work, Dhalgren
emphatically included, was and is practically venerated in enormous
swathes of fandom. Claiming that one knows all one "needs to know"
about anything is an almost infallible way to look dumb--like you're
simultaneously pretending to omniscience and being wrong.

Third, Xopher's attempts to explain "why the Delany book was less popular than the Clarke" founders on the plain fact that Dhalgren
was extremely popular, selling nearly a million copies in the decade
following its original publication. I don't know how its sales compare
to those of Rendezvous with Rama, but they're definitely in the same league.

Actually knowing some facts, and not jumping to conclusions, is
usually helpful. When you don't know the facts, or when what you know
is based on nothing more than hearsay or assumption, it helps to look
things up. Or ask around.

And by the way, antony is right about one thing: there's nothing particularly difficult about Dhalgren's
narrative style, beyond the highly imagistic opening few pages. Mostly
it's much more straightforwardly told than the Delany stories that won
him his SF awards in the late 1960s. The ways in which it's unlike the
average SF novel have little to do with "style."

Returning to my second point: I, whose high regard for Clarke is obvious at the top of this thread, think Dhalgren
is a great book. Does this perhaps tell antony something he might "need
to know" about SF fandom? Or has he made up his mind that he knows
everything he "needs to know"?

As far as sales go, I don't know Rama's sales figures either. But Patrick, we were talking about the novels' popularity with Hugo voters,
which doesn't necessarily map to sales, in either direction—or so I'd
thought. Perhaps the fans aren't so rarefied compared to the mainstream
culture as they think!

However...the fact that Dhalgren did not, in fact, get a Hugo nod, let alone win, while Rama
actually won, would tend to indicate that the former was less popular
than the latter, in terms of Hugo voting. I say "tend" because lots of
other factors can influence these things; for example, the number of
people who voted could make a difference, as could the "lots of other
great stuff that year" effect.

When Dhalgren came out I was a sophomore in high school. I got it because my mother bought it for me and left it on my bed without comment.
I think this was a gesture intended to encourage me to be open about my
homosexuality, but the fact is my mother wouldn't have known a Hugo
from a musk ox, and so she was part of the sales figure, but not part
of the Hugo-voting population. An unusual case, but I suspect there are
many others with the same net result.

I should have gone to the charts, and going thru the 1970s hugos,
there seems to be an attempt to settle questions about what the genre
meant, who the genre was for, and how the aesthetics and politics of
the genre would play out. i am basing this on the texts that i have
read, because i know very little about the culture, and that which i
know from the culture comes from unorthodox sources. i am interested in
knowing what happened there (ie 1970: Novel: The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin; Short Story: "Time Considered as a Helix of
Semi-Precious Stones" by Samuel R. Delany vs Dramatic Presentation:
News coverage of Apollo XI; 1971: Novel: Ringworld by Larry Niven;
1972: Novel: To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer; and a
Special Award for Dangerous Visions, 1973: Novel: The Gods Themselves
by Isaac Asimov vs Novella: "The Word for World Is Forest" by Ursula K.
Le Guin; 1974: Novel: Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

Novella: "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" by James Tiptree, Jr. 1975:
Dramatic Presentation: Young Frankenstein; 1977: Novella: "By Any Other
Name" by Spider Robinson and "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" by James
Tiptree, Jr. (tie)

Novelette: "The Bicentennial Man" by Isaac Asimov...i could continue,
but that list, just a selection of he winners in the 1970s, seems
dissiscative at best, what happened there?

and look what is missing: no ballard at all, no russ for the female
man, disch as a critical work in 1999, no spinnard, no elizabeth lynn
(but she did win the world fantasy award in 1979), the fan magazine
chanticleer never won anything at all, nor did its editor leibscher

and look what is not: tiptree is all over there, so is farmer,
leguinn, delany's most important early work is there, but not any of
his epic novels, but then so is niven's ringworld.

i think there should be a pattern here, a moving towards a canon, but i cannot seem to find any pattern at all.

(and the nebula's final ballot tells a similar story, what ever that
story is--in 1970 And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ nominated by Ringworld
won; "Poor Man, Beggar Man" by Joanna Russ nominated for Novelette, The
Queen of Air and Darkness" by Poul Anderson won, but two Silverbergs
also won, including the blasphemous Good News for the Vatican. Norman
Spinrad'a audacious and difficult Iron Dream nominated in 1972, lost to
Asimov--but Russ finally got hers. Rama won 1973's Nebula, against
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Are you really arguing that Rama
is a better novel than Pynchon?,but Tiptree won for her short story
that year; "Love Is the Plan, the Plan is Death";
LeGuinn won two
in 1974 and they gave one to Woody Allen, for similar reasons to Young
Frankenstien's Hugo I'm assuming; 1975 had a huge chunk of v. good
novels, and Dahlgren lost to The Forever War, not bad company, and they
had the balls to nominate Italio Calvino but they also nominated
Ragtime--which i never thot of as SF;1976--two winners that seem to
express the wide split well, both for Novella: "Houston, Houston, Do
You Read?" by James Tiptree, Jr. and "The Bicentennial Man" by Isaac
Asimov, but Delany loses again, for Triton. and in 1979 Disch loses to
Clarke.

so, sf fandom seems to not know how to depict itself, what made sf,
and who made sf, and made some really bad choices, in that decade--and
some not bad ones.

it leads me to some questions:

1) silverberg and tiptree seem to be the big winners of the new wave, why was this?

2) why did none of the literary fiction writers who were working thru
something resembling sf in the 1970s, including Pynchon, Borges, and
Cortazar do so poorly? were they read by fandom widely?

3) was there a fight between people who liked leguin and people who
liked lets say asimov, between people who loved ballard, and people who
pumped for rama--why is ballard never on these lists?

4) and the most difficult ones, considering the sensitive timing, with regards to clarke's recent death:

A lot of very smart, very capable people have told me that rama is
worth reading, that it was seminal to their self knowledge and
understanding--and its winning of a hugo and a nebula backs that up--so
can someone explain to me why, both in "sf" terms, in idea and genre
terms, plus in formal terms, in writing terms, why rama is worth
reading?

i should have been more open and less snarky, at he beginning. i also have idiosnycratic spelling and grammar, sorry about that

Remember also that the Hugos are determined by a preferential,
automatic-runoff voting system whose aim is to discern which candidate
is most broadly acceptable to the largest number of voters. Many Hugo
winners were the candidate whogot the largest number of second- and
third-place votes from candidates who came behind them in first-place
votes. Me, for instance.

Basically, it seems like you're expecting the Hugos to yield up a
kind of Science Fiction Hall of Fame for the ages, and they never will.
What they help inform us about is what loomed large at the time.
Obviously, it's disconcerting that They'd Rather Be Right by
Clifton & Riley won the 1954 Hugo, but it's also a worthwhile piece
of data to know that this slight novel seemed so important for a brief
time.

Adding to this list: awards are answering a different question than
cannons are, so even if both operated perfectly, they'd give different
answers.

The Hugo asks, which is the best book of a particular year? The
cannon asks, which are the best books in the genre? Not the same
questions.

The Hugo is given to one book a year (baring ties), whether that
year is a great or terrible. A year with three cannon-worthy books will
give the same number of Hugos as a year where everything was lackluster.

Thus even apart from the inevitable contingency, noise, etc, there are still fundamentally different questions here.

(The same is true for other questions -- "which is the best book of
such-and-such an author" won't be answered (necessarily) by which books
won awards, since those awards were asking a different question.)

SF

Both these films are excellent and would certainly belong in any
canon of great American films. The awards criterion alone would exclude
the former, which is to my mind the better film.

And that brings up another point. Works win awards in a given year
for all sorts of reasons. In the above case, the year both films were
made was in the McCarthy era, and the theme of Men was
decidedly liberal for the time (justice should be based on facts and a
dispassionate examination of same...come to think about it that's a
liberal idea once again, isn't it?), while Kwai, while complex,
was also patriotic. Were some Academy voters swayed by fear of HUAC? I
don't know, but it's certainly possible.

Another example: My Fair Lady
won Oscars™ for Best Picture and Best Actor, and garnered nominations
for Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. Audrey Hepburn,
an excellent actress (albeit not a good singer, all hail Marnie Nixon)
in the title role, wasn't even nominated.

Why? Because Julie Andrews created the role on Broadway and many
Academy voters felt she should have played it in the movie (one of my
favorite "DVD from an alternate universe" fantasies), so they gave her
Best Actress for Mary Poppins (another fantasy: Dick Van Dyke sobers up before
making MP rather than after). Does that mean Audrey Hepburn isn't as
good an actress as Julie Andrews? Not at all; in fact it doesn't even
mean people thought Andrews acted better in Poppins than Hepburn did in Lady!

When I checked into my room in the Minicon hotel on the 19th, I
swapped shoes for slippers and went down to get something to eat from
the bar before I slept for a while. When I told the barman I was there
for the con, he said "I bet everybody will be wearing black armbands."
I told him we probably wouldn't be quite that demonstrative, but I
expected we'd have a memorial. We did, as well as one for Gygax. (Had
to ask the guy running the film program to move 2001 from where it was scheduled because that was the only time for the Clarke memorial and people wanted to go to both.)

i have enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that rama is vital, i just dont know why?

I re-read it a few years ago and found much of it appalling. But it
isn't the appalling parts that stuck with me through the decades - it's
the parts about seeking and not finding, about watching and not
learning, about being one's best in the face of a challenge that will
not yield. And that's still good stuff to think upon.

I will make more conventional my capitalization and the like. When I
don't, it is the distinction between chatting and informal information
seeking versus more formal discourses. I found the paragraph about
searching and not seeking, moving, and the best argument in favour of
that work.

Thank You

Anthony

In turn, thanks for explaining your usage - never thought about it that way.