I wasn’t going to post about the passing this week of Arthur C. Clarke, the last surviving member of the Golden Age triumvirate of science fiction along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but this memoriam from Edward Rothstein in the NY Times, For Clarke, Issues of Faith, but Tackled Scientifically, was just too lovely to let pass.
I gobbled up the novels and story collections by these masters, finishing nearly all by my high school graduation, and choosing a favorite of them would be very, very difficult. If you put a gun to my head (though why would you?), I’d probably say Asimov by a thin margin due to his mysteries and terrific non-SF books on science.
Despite overlapping in time and acclaim, these writers seem fairly distinct in their voices and expectations. Asimov was the political liberal, valuing the effort and ability of individuals within commonwealth framework but certain that, at the end of the day, we do need a strong guiding hand; the multiple Foundations working behind the scenes as well as the role of unaging robot R. Daneel Olivaw across so many of his books makes that clear.
Asimov was proud to have been president of the American Humanist Association and his fiction showed this, consistently featuring men and women working together for the good of all. Even with help sometimes necessary from outside agencies. One of his early novels, and a personal favorite as it was one of the first novels I read, The Ends of Eternity, typifies this thinking: the protagonists work for a police-type organization that works to prevent changes to the timeline after time travel becomes practical in the 27th century.
Heinlein was at the other end of the spectrum, coming close to facism in his late ’50s/early ’60s novels before moving over the line to unabashed individualism and libertarianism. The former is exemplified by his 1959 novel Starship Troopers, which was nothing like the recent movie except at the most basic plot level, and the awesome story collection The Past Through Tomorrow, released in 1967 but whose component stories were published between 1941 and 1959. Most people point to 1961’s Stranger in a Strange Land as the watershed in Heinlein’s career, and I suppose it was, but for me the great work of his “mature” years was the (fictional) Lazarus Long biography Time Enough For Love, released in 1973.
Clarke, as Rothstein writes, was not really concerned with the conventional political spectrum along which Asimov and Heinlein worked. Instead, despite deeply disagreeing with conventional Western religion, he was interested in the mystical and life-shattering prospects enabled by massive technology change, whether the technology be hard or soft. That is, what fundamental changes will developments such as faster than light travel or accelerated biological evolution bring?
Consider his short story The 9 Billion Names of God; in it, an order of Asian monks bring their centuries-long task of writing down all the permutations of the secret name of God to conclusion by using an IBM computer. Pencil or silicon, it’s technical assistance either way to the monks, and with the final variation on paper the stars above being to wink out.
My favorite Clarke novel is 1953’s Childhood’s End. Friendly aliens come to Earth and help create what seems like Paradise, with no more war or disease or crime. There is a price to be paid, there always is, and the cost is that eventually no more babies are being born. The last generation evolves, guided (or driven, as you prefer) to a different level of existence as beings of pure energy.
All three were towering creative minds and their variety was a key reason why the ’40s and ’50s are known as the Golden Age. Now that they’ve all gone from this plane it feels as if a big star in the night sky has set forever.
BillSaysThis 