The Ambiguous Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke has always been something of an enigma to me. You can’t pidgin hole his writing the way you can  most of his contemporaries. Alfred Bester wrote about the struggle between emotion and logic. William Tenn incorporated sarcastic humor as a means to comment on social issues. Frederik Pohl and Poul Andersen both laced their prose with political, and social commentary. The list goes on and on. Clarke just wrote entertaining novels. Sure, he used the mysterious, omnipotent alien entity in the 2001 series and in Childhood’s End. However, he didn’t seem to be sending a “message” to his readers. It was used as a tool to develop the plot, and that is what I really love about Clarke. He weaves a story simply to entertain his reader.

Clarke was a scientist and inventor. He had a firm grasp of technology. Therefore, you would think he would BS with the best about how a light speed engine might work. He didn’t do that. If the story called for a craft with star drive, he simply said it had a star drive and left it to the readers imagination. I noticed this in Childhood’s End, not the first time I read it; it was years later. I would have sworn he described how the engine warped space and allowed the ship to move at tremendous speeds. Not at all, he just wrote so well that I subconsciously added the details without realizing it. However, probable technology was a different matter. We are all familiar with HAL, most famous computer in history. Clarke knew we were on the edge of a major breakthrough in digital electronics and extrapolated on what was possible. HAL is the most realistic representation of artificial intelligence up to that time, and perhaps an early warning of the singularity.

Plot and character are central to all writing. Arthur Clarke was a master at both. Where some writers tend to develop plot in fits and starts, he was smooth at building to the climax, which creates a page turner. His protagonist are not always likeable; they are usually interesting, and the bad guys are never truly evil, just misguided and often empathetic.

The only fault I ever found with Clarke is not explaining the controlling entity in 2001 or Childhood’s End. I wouldn’t really call it a fault, maybe a minor irritant. We never really know the who, what, when and where and that has bothered me for decades. Maybe that was his little joke on us. I don’t know.

If I had to pick one word to describe Arthur Clarke it would be ambiguous. I have already described his abstract writing and will end this with a note on his private ambiguity. He was once asked if he was gay. He responded, “No, mildly cheerful”.

 

 

Is Science Fiction ready for Virtual Reality?

A week or so ago,  Facebook acquired Oculus  and potentially changed the direction of personal entertainment. Oculus, in case you didn’t know, is a small virtual reality company in California that has created an affordable  headset (rift) that actually works.  With Facebook’s billions backing them now, developers should take notice and begin banging out code for this new device. My hope is that gamers won’t be the only target. Surely, movie makers will see the potential.  Perhaps some sort of hybrid experience that incorporates elements of both will evolve; a primitive holodeck that allows the users to immerse themselves in the action. Think about what a rush that would be.

It has taken a long time for the technology to catch up with the concept of VR. Back in the mid-nineties I bought a VR headset from a now defunct computer chain. It was big and heavy; looked like Darth Vader’s helmet. I brought it home and took two days to set it up. The CPU in my computer was top of the line at the time. However, it was so under powered that the latency caused me to experience motion sickness after about five minutes of use, and the resolution was terrible. From everything I have read the people at Oculus have over come these obstacles.

Science fiction fans would gladly pay to become a part of the action. I know I would. Think about sitting on the deck of the Enterprise laying in coordinates to Altair five. Hell, it gives me goose bumps.

Life as I know it

      Life can be a real pain sometimes. Job, family, and the miscellaneous other commitments and responsibilities we all share make leisure reading, mixed with a little escapist daydreaming, difficult to say the least. Not that I’m a Walter Mitty type. Most of the time I live in the real world, I love my wife and kids, and life in general is good. It’s just that on occasion I need to live in another reality so this one doesn’t drive me insane. Well, maybe I do have a little of old Walter in me. Maybe we all do. Whether it’s reading Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and imagining you’re strolling along the deck of a river boat or reading Walden and discussing the meaning of life with Thoreau, it’s all the same . My preferred vehicle is science fiction. Which brings me to the reason I haven’t posted in over six months.

      It’s hard to find decent reads in the scifi genre these days. I mean, most of the stuff I find is filled with amoral, unimaginative cartoon like characters, gratuitous violence, and  a jaundice view of humans. I miss the stories that leave me feeling good when I closed the cover on the last page; that gave me a sense of hope we could, one day, live with each other in an eclectic culture (Yeah, Yeah Kum ba yah). Unfortunately, that sort of writing seems to be out of vogue. However, like the old gold prospector, I occasionally find a nugget.

     A couple of weeks ago I was browsing the stacks at a local used bookstore when I noticed a tattered hardcover with an intriguing title. I picked it up and recognized the author as one of  the well known writers from the Golden Age, Poul Andersen.  The book was Starfarers, published in 1998, just four years before his death. I have read several short stories by Anderson, and found his style of prose very entertaining. So, I decided the price of two bucks was a value and brought it home. I googled the  title, read a few reviews and found the old adage about opinions being like rectums to be very true. That is why I won’t try to dissect the plot, and mention his characterization flaws and all that other rubbish  amateur reviews like to harp on. I’ll just say thank you to Mr. Anderson, where ever he is,  for giving  me a few hours of  adventure in my alternate reality.

OH YEAH!

Put two or more hard core Trekkers in a room and what do you get? Well, within five minutes there is a debate over the best episode from the first season of the original Star Trek. In ten minutes it has degenerated into an argument. In fifteen minutes there will be a physical altercation if someone doesn’t intervene. That is just the natural progression. Trekkers are adamant when it comes to the best episodes, particularly the first season. The topic is as sacred as Spock’s ears.

I use to be like that. That is, until I went through the twelve step program. You know, apologizing to those I offended in the past. Calling my sponsor when I feel like punching someone that says J.J. Abrams makes good Star Trek movies. So forth, and so on. However, recently I fell off the wagon, so to speak. So, I will say with absolute certainty that Balance of Terror is without  doubt the best episode, not only of the first season, of all incarnations of Star Trek. There I said it.

If you’re not a Trekker I’m pretty sure you’re saying to yourself, “WTF is this idiot talking about?” Well, this idiot is talking about the holy grail of modern science fiction, the first season. it was the best written, best produced, and best all around science fiction television that ever existed. Just ask any Trekker, if you’re unfortunate enough to know one.

The first season was like falling in love the first time. The second season was like breaking up with your first love, and the third season was like a really bad divorce. There were a lot of reasons for this. Mainly, it was the networks jerking Roddenberry around so much he totally lost interest in the project and left it to others that just didn’t have the passion necessary to create a quality show. So, you get episodes like Spock’s Brain.  Truly, I shutter to think about some of the garbage that was put out on the air waves in the third season. If only the suits at NBC had the foresight to see the real economic potential of Star Trek maybe the series could have lasted at least five years. Oh well, I guess we’ll never know.

Heretic!

Not Asimov, me! At least that’s what my friends call me when I say anything critical about his work. Nothing makes an Asimovite, Asimovian, whatever, more rabid that to mention Issac Asimov in anything less than glowing terms. OK, he was a really good writer. Not great, just really good. In fact, I can think of five writers from the same period that were better: Theodore Sturgeon, A.C. Clark, Cyril Kornbluth, Alfred Bester, and Poul Anderson. Sure, he came up with the Robot laws, the positronic brain, and his “epic” Foundation series, which should have ended with the first Foundation, and he did use plausible science. However, his characters were lacking, especially the women. Maybe that was because he was a virgin until he was thirty. I think that could be explained by those pork chop sideburns, and the birth control glasses he wore. His attempt to be original often caused him to go off on tangents that left me with the feeling he was bored and uninspired.

Sorry about that, this isn’t suppose to be a personal attack.

Later in life he did a series of “Asimov Presents” books. I used these for toilet paper. I mean, I know he didn’t write this crap. He did approve it though. Hence, the “presents” part of the title. Stories with aliens that are described as looking like a “slab of bacon” hardly inspire empathy. They ramble and stumble like a drunk on New Years Eve. What Rubbish!

Sorry about that, this isn’t suppose to be a personal attack. Wait a minute! Didn’t I just do the obligatory apology one paragraph up.

Issac Asimov was an intelligent, thoughtful, kind man. But he sure wasn’t a Scifi God!

Q->

Theodore Sturgeon was an odd man. But then, all writers are odd, if not completely loony. Ernest Hemingway ended his life by sucking on a shotgun, and Hunter S. Thompson did the same thing. I intend no disrespect. In fact, I have a great deal of admiration for Sturgeon’s writing ability. He not only wrote great science fiction, he did mystery, nonfiction, and poetry successfully. He just had some quirky characteristics, like Q->. He said this symbol means, “ask the next question.”  OK, but why not just ask the next question? Why take a simple idea and create a pictograph to represent it. Maybe it was the times. He did come up with this in the 60’s when the peace sign was popular. And that cross looking thing with the loop at the top, I still don’t know what the hell that one means. I’ve often wondered if Prince got the idea for his “symbol” phase from Theodore Sturgeon. They look kind of similar.

The point is: I’m an American, and you know what they say about us. We only speak one language, and that one not too well. Sturgeon was an American and he should have understood our mutual short coming.

Based on everything I’ve read about Theodore Sturgeon, he had a great sense of humor. So, I’m sure, wherever in the universe he is, he’s looking down with a big grin, giving me the uplifted middle finger symbol.

Sleeping With The Lights On

Rod Serling was the coolest guy when I was a kid. Unfiltered cigarette in hand, neatly tailored suit, fresh haircut. He looked like one of the Rat pack. Frank, Sammy, Dean, and Rod has a nice ring to it; like John, Paul, George and Ringo. There is one big difference though, Frank, Sammy and Dean didn’t scare me shitless, Rod did.

The Twilight Zone was an anomaly. It was an exercise in intellectual sophistication that was almost nonexistent in the late fifties, early sixties. Serling’s scripts had deeper meaning than the surface story. He dealt with issues of racism, bigotry, and intolerance in a subtle manner. You never felt preached at, and it was entertainingly scary too.

To this day I can’t watch It’s A Good Life without looking away when Billy Mumy turns that guy into a jack in the box. The first time I saw it, I had nightmares for a week. It’s not that the scene is so scary, the image is shown only in shadow, its how my imagination made it more horrendous than the actual image would have been. I’m sure Serling knew this and that just shows what an artists he was. Of course Jerome Bixby’s script was great too.

Night Call is the episode that made my butt pucker. When you’re seven and your parents tell you not to watch something, you should listen. I sneaked into my older brothers room, where there was a small TV, and watched anyway.  I actually peed myself because I was too afraid to go into the dark hallway where the bathroom was. Many years later, my mother told my wife  about this incident. So my wife, having a rather sophomoric sense of  humor, set the ring tone on her phone to the old style, like in the show, and gets  special amusement setting it off in the middle of the night. Guess I’ll never live that one down.

All things considered, I think it was worth the trauma of  personal humiliation at the hands of people I love, and the inability to sleep in the dark until I was eighteen to experience this one of a kind Television show.

L. Ron Hubbard: A Matter of Matter

Even though this blog is about science fiction, particularly the golden age, you won’t find anything about L. Ron Hubbard. There are two reasons for this deliberate oversight. First, I have always been a firm believer in: “If you can’t say something nice about someone don’t say anything at all.” Second, I don’t want those NICE PEOPLE at Scientology getting upset with me. I’m nuttier than a squirrel turd to begin with. So, I don’t need my paranoia aggravated. However, I recently came across an August 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, and there, on page 59 was

A Matter of Matter by L. Ron Hubbard.

I have always considered Hubbard a mediocre writer. So, I reluctantly read the fourteen pages. Boy, talk about insight into the mind that developed a world wide religion….philosophy….whatever. The basic story is about a guy, Chuck , that gets swindled in an intergalactic real estate deal by a guy named Madman Murphy. With pedestrian plot twists and turns, Chuck ends up rich and famous, with the girl …Yada,Yada,Yada. All very predictable. What struck me, among other things is a bit on page sixty nine. Shortly after coming in contact with the easily manipulated indigenous inhabitants of “his” newly purchased planet, Hubbard writes, “Instantly Chuck knew he was a god. Now there have been many men in the human race who have found themselves gods and never once has it failed to bolster their drooping spirits nor spur their lagging wits.” You have to remember he wrote this while developing Dianetics and a few years before he actually enlightened the world with his revelations.

The perplexing thing to me is how John Campbell, a great editor and writer himself, allowed this crap in his magazine in the first place. Maybe, just maybe, Ron cast a spell on him. You know, from his days as a follower of Allister Crowley.

Of Time and Third Avenue: It’s Science Fiction Dammit!

If you are into science fiction you know Alfred Bester is the author of The Demolished Man. It consistently ranks first among fans, critics, and fellow writers as all time best Scifi novel. If you don’t believe me, take a look at James Wallace Harris’s site where he laboriously analysed the data and posted the results. I like The Demolished Man; I liked it so much I read it twice. However, it’s not my favorite novel. That’s neither here nor there. This post is about his short story, Of Time and Third Avenue.

Bester says in the introduction to Of Time and Third Avenue that he always did an extensive outline before he began to actually write. The exception was this funny, original short story. Bester explains his reason for this deviation as originally planning to write a story about his favorite watering hole. Something happened and the story wasn’t written. Some time later, feeling disgusted with the state of “knowledge of the future” tales, he sat in front of his Smith Corona and began banging the keys. The result was Of Time and Third Avenue. He’s right about these “temporal displacement” themes (I got that from Star Trek). Even today there is a rehashing of this tired and predictable line. TV shows, movies, you name it and somebody, somewhere has done it. Hell, several years ago I was in Thailand and there was a mini-series on that dealt with, you got it, knowledge of the future. I have to admit though Bester did about as good a job as any I have ever read. The story is humorous, original, and most important entertaining.  Alfred had a sardonic wit he reveals in a statement about having to go to the bank in order to find out who’s picture is on a hundred dollar bill. If you read the story you’ll get it.

I have an on going argument with a friend about which genre this story should be in. My friend says it’s fantasy. I say science fiction. My reasoning is that most fantasy gives me projectile vomiting, explosive diarrhea and erectile dysfunction. Of Time and Third Avenue gives me none of these. So, logically I must be right. It’s science fiction dammit!

The “War Effect” and Cyril M Kornbluth

A while back Charlie Jane Anders at io9 did a piece on how serving in the military influenced science fiction writers. She did a good job. However, since my interest is in the golden age writers, I thought a world war two veteran would be a good subject to analyse.

Most science fiction writers of the post world war era served in one capacity or another; some in civilian jobs, and a very few in combat. This latter esoteric group contains an author I have always admired for his unique style. He not only served in combat,  he was decorated for bravery.

Cyril M Kornbluth received a Bronze star and at the same time a chronic heart condition during the Battle of the Bulge. Fred Pohl, Kornbluth’s friend and writing partner says Cyril wouldn’t talk about his experience as a heavy machine gunner. Evidently his commanding officer was impressed enough with Cyril’s action during the battle to nominate him for the fifth highest combat decoration the United States awards her service personal. Undoubtedly, the experience traumatize Kornbluth. I am quite sure he saw his share of dead and mutilated men,  men cracking under the strain of combat, and all the other madness that occurs in war . Rather than portraying men that couldn’t “take it” as cowards, he exhibits compassion for them in his writing.  He probably knew it could  just as easily have been him.

One of his post war stories, The Quaker Cannon,  has as it’s protagonist an officer captured and tortured twice; both times he breaks and reveals what he knows to the enemy. This soldier is treated with a great deal of empathy by the author, revealing an understanding for those that could not hold up under strain. In fact, this character receives the Distinguished Service Cross. Perhaps giving this character a decoration higher than the one he received shows more than empathetic understanding. Perhaps he is expressing the “why me?” so many men that survive war ask.

Another of Kornbluth’s stories that allows us to gain some insight into the influence his war experience  had  on his writing is The Silly Season. The title refers to a term used in journalism for a period, usually in summer, when decent news stories are in short supply, and not quite news worthy stuff gets printed. This story’s main character is a journalist investigating unusual happening in the Midwest that begin during the “silly season” of late summer.  A few pages in Kornbluth introduces a secondary character that was once a rising star in journalism. Blinded while serving as a combat correspondent, he returns to his hometown and resumes a “normal”  life. He is the one that breaks the story of the strange occurrences, and ultimately is the only one that understands what is actually happening. It seems obvious that Cyril Kornbluth is encouraging men, wounded so severely, to live a productive life.

Combat changes values and perspectives. Some men become hard and cynical accepting death as inevitable. Others see death and destruction as happening to those around them but not to themselves. This is done as a means of managing the constant threat of sudden oblivion and keeping ones sanity in an insane situation. A few can’t develop a coping mechanism at all and loose their ability to reason.  All are permanently scarred either physically or mentally; some just hide it better than others.

Cyril M. Kornbluth died suddenly at the age of 35. Whether his heart condition was cause by exposure during Hitler’s last gasp or just aggravated by it we’ll never known. The point is he died a young man. If he had taken better care of himself or not shoveled the snow from his driveway that morning maybe he would have lived another 40 or 50 years…or maybe not. One thing is for certain the world of science fiction in particular, and the world in general would be a much richer place if he were around….. even a little longer.