Against the Night, the Stars: The Science Fiction of Arthur C. Clarke

207 Pages·1983·13.873 MB·English

by  John Hollow

• •
I
AGAINST THE NIGHT,
THE STARS
THE SCIENCE FICTION
OF ARTHUR C. CLARKE
JOHN HOLLOW
AGAINST THE NIGHT,
THE STARS
THE SCIENCE FICTION OF
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
JOHN HOLLOW
.,
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers
San Diego New York london

AGAINST THE NIGHT,
THE STARS
Copyright © 1983, 1976 by John Hollow
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
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retrieval system, without permission in writing from the ~ublisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work
should be mailed to: Permissions, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
Publishers, 757 Third Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10017.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
HoUow, John.
Against the night, the stars.
Bibliography: p.
1. Clarke, Arthur Charles, 1917 - - Criticism and
interpretation. 2. Science fiction, English - History and criticism.
I. Title.
PR6005.L36Z69 1983 813' .914 82-23366
ISBN 0-15-103966-6
Book Design by Mark Likgalter
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
BCDE
For my children:
John Patton, Elizabeth Lee, and Joseph Walter Hollow
A few ideas contained in this book are included in an essay
of mine published in the Southwest Review, and in a series of
taped lectures about science fiction that I made for the Everett/
Edwards Cassette Curriculum. I should like very much to
thank Margaret L. Hartley, editor of the first, and Richard E.
Langford and Mary Jane Urban, president and vice president
of the second, for their encouragement of my first efforts to
write about popular literature.
I should also like to acknowledge the receipt of a small
grant from the Ohio University Research Committee; it freed
me from the obligations of one summer's teaching so that I
might reread the science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke.
Contents
1. Against the Night •.. 1
2. Time's Arrow 20
3. The Lotus-Eaters 28
4. Prometheus 46
5. Childhootfs End 66
6. Harry Purvis 88
7. Not Yet the Stars 103
8. 2001 128
9 .... the Stars 155
1_ __
Against the
Night ...
I think that people are re-reading
[H. G.] Wells because they are tired
of ever-more-minute dissections of neu
rotic egos, and worn-out repetitions of
eternal triangles and tetrahedra. WeBs
saw as clearly as anyone into the secret
places of the heart, but he also saw
the universe, with all its infinite prom
ise and peril.
Arthur C. Clarke, Introduction to
H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man
and The War 0/ the Worlds (1962)
AN important thing to remember about the sci
ence fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, it seems to me,
is that it was written by an Englishman. Although he now caIls
Sri Lanka home, Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset (in
1917), and he is therefore, by nationality as well as by predi
lection, an inheritor of the tradition defined by H. G. Wells.
What I mean wiIl perhaps be clearer if I say that when I
read the science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein, who is not only
an American but also an Annapolis graduate, I am reminded,
2 Against the Night, the Stars
not of any of H. G. Wells' very-nearly passive protagonists,
but of boot camp, of the relationship between the promising
young recruit and the battle-scarred old veteran. When I read
the science fiction of Russian-born but New-York-bred Isaac
Asimov, I am reminded, not of any of Wells' visions of future
cities, but of the city dweller's constant fear of a breakdown,
of the short circuit that can ruin a machine, a life, a whole
culture. When I read the science fiction of American and Mid
western-born Ray Bradbury, I am reminded, not of Wells at
all, but of my own Midwestern and bookish childhood, of
cupola-topped Victorian houses and white picket fences, of
adults insisting that there is a real world outside of books.
"'"'
When I read the science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, however,
I am reminded of England's shrine to its most important
scientific formulation, of the matching statues of Charles
Darwin and T. H. Huxley in Kensington's Natural History
Museum. More than any of his equaily well-known contem
poraries, it seems to me, Clarke is the inheritor, not of Jules
Verne's desperate attempts to show-by having some
character name its parts-that Nature is controllable, or of
Edgar Allan Poe's equally desperate attempts to gain some
control of the subconscious by bodying forth its most awful
horrors, but of the bleak evolutionary projections of H. G.
Wells, Huxley's most famous pupil at the Kensington Normal
School of Science.
I will go further. I will suggest that appreciation of Clarke's
stories and novels might well begin by seeing them as having
appeared, as do the stars at evening, against the dark back
ground of the far future anticipated by Wells' best-known
scientific romances.
Wells' best-known scientific romances can be not unfairly
represented by the moment in The Time Machine when the
time traveller, who has voyaged far into the future, stands on