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| "This colossal anthology covers the return of sf to themes based in the hard sciences. . . . A very satisfactory overview of a major portion of contemporary sf and a sterling achievement by Tor and the Hartwell-Cramer team."
Booklist
From Paul McAuley's tale of runaway technology ("Gene Wars") to Gregory Benford's story of evolution and murder ("Immersion"), the 41 stories in this annotated anthology provide a strong argument for the revival of hard sf as a major force in the genre in the 1990s. Library Journal |
Arthur C. Clarke: The Hammer of God
Arthur C. Clarke (1917- ) lives with his adopted family in Sri Lanka. He received a knighthood in January, 1999. He says, "On New Year's Day, the British High Commissioner gave me the splendid news that Her Majesty was awarding me a Knighthood for 'Services to Literature.' I regarded this as a compliment to the entire genre of Science Fiction as much as to myself. The English Lit mandarins could put this piece of news in their pipes and smoke it."
He was chairman of the British Interplanetary Society (1946-47 and 1950-53). In 1945, he made the first proposal that satellites could be used for communications. His first SF story, "Loophole," appeared in Astounding in 1946. His first SF novel, Prelude to Space, was published in 1951. It was quickly followed by The Sands of Mars (1951), Islands in the Sky (1952), Against the Fall of Night (1953), and Childhood's End (1953). Expedition to Earth, the first of more than a dozen collections, included the story "The Sentinel," later the basis for the film 2001 (1968), which Clarke expanded into the bestselling novel 2001 (1968).
As we said in The Ascent of Wonder (Tor 1994), Arthur C. Clarke is the poet of technology and cosmology in Modern SF. He is also as much a proponent of space travel as was his peer, Robert A. Heinlein. But Gregory Benford has remarked, "There's more similarity between Arthur C. Clarke and Thoreau than there is between Clarke and Heinlein." For Clarke, the beauties of vistas in space are the beauties of nature, and the exploration of space is the quest for knowledge and close experience of nature, for things never before seen and felt by an individual human. And the medium through which this exploration will be achieved is technology.
Technological artifacts may, in addition, be beautiful in and of themselves, interesting, mysterious, promising. Clarke, unlike Heinlein or Asimov, is also the poet of the big machine. And in this he has always been a leader in hard SF, and has maintained the bond between SF and the twin communities devoted to the construction of enormous machines for scientific exploration‹experimental physics and the space community‹for decades. Clarke's stories tend to be about the emotional rewards of the quest for knowledge as opposed to the power knowledge can confer.
In the 1990s, Clarke was unwell but still published a few pieces, and collaborated with Gregory Benford, Gentry Lee, and Stephan Baxter on projects. Clarke was important not only for historical reasons but because he was actively collaborating with Baxter and thereby having influence on one of the most important newer writers.
Clarke's politics are not often overt, but are neither of the Libertarian right nor the radical left. They hark back to the liberal "one world" United Nations ideals of the mid-20th century. At a crucial moment for hard SF in the early 1980s, Jerry Pournelle called together Robert A. Heinlein, Gregory Benford, and others to form an official science advisory committee to then President Ronald Reagan and promoted what was then called the Star Wars defense program. Gregory Benford tells in his essay "Old Legends" in Greg Bear's anthology, New Legends, of Clarke's visit to one of their meetings:
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The Advisory Council met in August of 1984 in a mood of high celebration. Their pioneering work had yielded fruits unimaginable in 1982. Robert Heinlein, the dean of American science fiction writers, attended; the Council had attracted interest from some speculative quarters and, historically, writers had provided many ideas basic to the space program. Out of the shimmering summer heat came a surprise visitor‹Arthur C. Clarke, in town to promote the opening of the film made from his novel, 2010. In 1950, Clarke had described an electromagnetic catapult to launch people and cargo from the surface of the moon. This idea evolved into the "mass driver" now being studied for use as a "magnetic machine gun" to shoot down ICBMs. Clarke had testified before Congress against SDI, and regarded the pollution of space by weapons, even defensive ones, as a violation of his life's vision. Heinlein attacked as soon as Clarke settled into Larry Niven's living room. The conversation swirled from Technical issues‹Could SDI satellites be destroyed by cheap rocks put into orbit? Would SDI lead to further offensive weapons in space? Would it help or hinder other uses of near-Earth orbit?‹to a clear clash of personalities. Clarke‹cool, analytical, mild-mannered‹was taken aback. His old friend Heinlein regarded Clarke's statements as both wrong-headed and rude. Foreigners on our soil should step softly in discussions of our policies, Heinlein said. Clarke was guilty of "British arrogance." Clarke had not expected this level of feeling among old comrades. They had all believed in the High Church of Space, as one writer present put it. Now, each side regarded the other as betraying that vision, of narrowness, of imposing unwarranted assumptions on the future of mankind. It was a sad moment for many when Clarke said a quiet goodbye and disappeared into his limousine, stunned. Later that afternoon he asked me tentatively, "Do most of the American science fiction writers feel this way?" |
We see this moment as symbolic of the developing divide between US and UK hard SF in the 1980s, of the consequences of the overt right-wing politicization of American hard SF that began in the 1970s. (See also the Gregory Benford "Immersion" note)
"The Hammer of God," about an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, appeared in Time magazine in 1992. It is didactic SF on a grand scale with characters only faintly sketched in. Although Gardner Dozois reprinted it in his Year's Best volume, it got less attention within the field than it deserved. It did, however, feed the prominent political discussions in the US government and elsewhere during the decade about what to do in the event of the discovery of an actual asteroid on a collision course with our planet. This is still in the news as this anthology is published.