With the death of Arthur C. Clarke, we have lost a great writer
and perhaps the last real futurist.

This blogger speculates that there are no great writers speculating, really speculating, about the future. There’s plenty of SF set in some future world, but not much of it is innovative. For instance, I just finished reading 11 books in the Honor Harrington series and they are just simple short term extrapolations on what is here and now projected to some future where everything has evolved a bit, but nothing much has changed. They are decent reads, but full of padding. each book could have been a few chapters in a tightly written novel, rather than a fat 500 page novel.

The future, as I have said many times, is Revolutionary, not Evolutionary. Extrapolation is a waste of time. Spec Fic writers have to consider the unanticipated in order to write good science fiction. Fiction that is merely extrapolative is merely space opera. Any one who believes that tomorrow can be predicted by the conditions in the present is either stupid or a Republican.

Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein, under John W. Campbell, Jr.’s guidance produced an extraordinary variety of possible futures, very few of them like the present. With the movement towards Mundane SF and Slipstream, this kind of story is rare. Some of it that you do find, like Rudy Rucker’s current novel, are a hard read and not the kind of romantic word candy that undereducated, TV fed, readers prefer anymore. Rucker, along with Bruce Sterling and a few others might be considered The Futurists – Next Generation, but they don’t have broad appeal or readership.

I hesitated to add my thoughts on the passing of Clarke. As J pointed out, his short stories were better than his novels. I have a worn out copy of Tales From the White Hart somewhere and it is the inspiration for my own series of Tales from the Silver Streak. I had to read Childhood’s End in High School and I found it tame compared to some of the other stuff that I was reading, so for a long time a pigeon-holed Clarke as a light weight. It wasn’t until ten years later that I found the short stories and I raised my opinion of him. 2001, a Space Odyssey is a great movie, but not so much a novel as a series of speculative episodes strung together on a theme. It is not typical of his short stories and I think the Rama novels were attempts at recreation of the vast themes of the movie. I also wonder how much of the last novels were written by others under the Clarke brand, much the way James Michener had a staff of writers that he would manage, polishing their work, and presenting it as his own.

It is interesting that the link above goes to a Croatian website and blogger. I browsed his blog and the guy is smart and a good read. His point about the end of futurism is well taken and I thought it was the right approach to the death of the last of the great futurists from the golden age of SF.

Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, and Sturgeon sold their first stories to Campbell in the Summer of 1939. I think that The Summer of ’39 might make an interesting title for an essay or even a short story.