Two days ago, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke passed away at the age of 90 in Sri Lanka. A "hard" SF writer and the last surviving member of the Big Three of science fiction, which also included Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, Clarke counted among his works the classic Space Odyssey series (2001--yes, he had as much to do with that as Stanley Kubrick--2010, 2061, and 3001), the Rama series, Childhood's End, etc.
I have read quite a few books by Clarke, including the whole Space Odyssey series. When I was a child--when I was 8 or 9, say--my uncle, who is a mathematician, then working in Utah, would narrate to me vastly simplified versions of the Space Odyssey stories over the phone; This got me interested in science fiction at an early age, and ultimately in actual science as well. Clarke's stories probably played as important a role in my deciding to become a scientist (and I am, graduate school admissions be damned) as anything else; I did start out wanting to be a theoretical physicist before getting involved in bioscience.
What distinguished Clarke, to me, from other science fiction writers was his fundamental optimism for the interplay between technology and humanity. Certainly he had very specific visions for our future technological and spiritual developments, which were recurring themes throughout his stories, and became especially noticeable in his later works. These concerned the construction of space elevators and geostationary orbital stations, the harnessing of vacuum energy, the ultimate integration of individual human minds into a purely energetic collective consciousness, etc.--but these things are not what I speak of. Clarke was convinced of the ability of technology to advance the human condition. For him, scientific enlightenment was philosophical enlightenment was spiritual enlightenment. Here was a man to whom energy meant more than global warming, information technology meant more than wiretaps and identity theft (indeed, hacking saved humanity in 3001), genetic engineering meant more than GM crops and loss of genetic privacy.
Was this belief naive? On the one hand, this was the man who thought humanity would conduct regular commercial spaceflights, designed semi-sentient artificial intelligence, and have built a manned ship capable of reaching Jupiter by the year 2001. On the other hand, to renounce this belief would be to abandon ourselves to the fear of one of the few things human beings actually do better than other species on this planet; it has become fashionable to associate technological development with paranoia of a high-tech apocalypse. When was the last time the hopes of science was preached in mainstream culture as much as the dangers of science? And who shall do it now that Clarke is gone?
Clarke knew his science--it wasn't blind faith he had. I wonder what he thought of our little civilization at the end of his life?
No comments:
Post a Comment