Recent Reads

Tales from Planet Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke. This seems to represent the second rank of Clarke's considerable output of short stories written from 1949 to 1968 (with one outlier from 1987), stories which didn't make the cut for his previous collections. Fortunately, most second-rank Clarke stories are still worth reading.

It struck me as I read these stories that, unlike much modern science fiction which presupposes that the technological innovations incorporated in the story are fundamentally incomprehensible to the reader, Clarke most often uses some fundamentally comprehensible concept as the foundation for his story. Most readers with a basic level of scientific literacy will understand the concept of, say, chemically processing seawater in order to recover its dissolved mineral content ("The Man Who Ploughed the Sea.") Or interplanetary travel, which is after all nothing but a further development of the principles that took us to the moon in 1969 ("Saturn Rising"). Or manned spacecraft returning from orbit to the surface of the Earth ("Hate"), or human beings cultivating and tending herds of whales the way that 19th-century cowboys tended their grass-eating "dogies" ("The Deep Range").

The stories that interested me the least were those in which Clarke resorted to vaguely metaphysical hand-waving, as in "The Other Tiger". In "Wall of Darkness", he combines both approaches. I felt a crashing sense of disappointment as the story, which had begun with a strange but plausible description of life on an ancient planet where tidal forces had stopped all rotation causing it to turn the same face toward its sun constantly, suddenly lurched toward a vague and unexplained twist of metaphysics at the end. I still haven't figured out what the Mobius strip had to do with the planet, and worse yet I don't care. I'd rather know how the planet's weather systems were affected by its lack of rotation and the consequent uneven heat-absorption from its sun.

Is this a hint of what's wrong with much modern science fiction?

Edit, 8/31. I have been trying for two days to respond to the comments from Carlos and Yam. Enetation, as usual, is either too incompetent to provide the service they promise or simply refuses to do so. Meanwhile, Blogger's comments link refuses to appear except in the permalinked version of the post, which is only accessible by clicking on the nearly-invisible number sign next to the date. Helpful advice would be welcome.

Response to comments:

C. I liked the portions of 2001 that dealt with the comprehensible and plausible prospect of space travel. The big freak-out at the end sort of lost me.

I've stuck with Enetation for the moment because (1) I can't get the Gmail comments to show up on the front page of the blog. They only appear in the permalink, which you can only get to by clicking on the little number-sign. And (2) I don't want comments from archived posts to disappear. I will eventually cut-and-paste them into Gmail comments if I can get the latter to appear properly where they should.

B., unfortunately none of the libraries in our local network seem to have any of the Niven collections that contain that story. I'll have to seek it out through other means. Thanks for the recommendation, if that's what it is. Hm, the library needs a collection of Niven's short stories anyway.