Arthur C. Clarke

So Arthur C. Clarke is dead, and I feel a little older and grimmer. It's not that I knew the man, or that I had signed on to an Arthur C. Clarke cult of personality. It's mostly a case that he'd been a part of my life since roughly 1968 and all of a sudden he's gone.

I'm not here to write a eulogy; I'll leave that to people who either knew him better or can write better than I can. Nor am I here to try to establish his place in the pantheon of writers; I can hardly find my favorite pair of socks, let alone figure out anyone's place in the Pantheon. Besides, I quit reading science fiction a long time ago and it would be foolish of me to try to put him into context because my context ends in about 1990.

But I will say this. When I was eight my mom bought me a book of his called The Promise of Space, which is partly a fairly light treatment of some of the notable technical difficulties that pertain to spaceflight, and partly a very effective appeal to emotion and sentimentality to justify the costs and risks of spaceflight. And for all the other books of his that I read and enjoyed - Rendezvous with Rama and Against the Fall of Night in particular - what I'll always most remember of his work are the closing four paragraphs of The Promise of Space, which even today, forty years after I first read them, resonate with me. And with this recitation of them I honor the memory of Arthur C. Clarke:

We must not let our pride in our achievements blind us to the lessons of history. Over the first cities of mankind, the desert sands now lie centuries deep. Could the builders of Ur or Babylon - once the wonders of the world - have pictured London or New York? Nor can we imagine the citadels that our descendants may one day build beneath the blistering sun of Mercury or under the stars of the cold Plutonian wastes. And beyond the planets, through ages still ahead of us in time, lies the unknown and infinite promise of the stellar universe.

There will, it is true, be danger in space, as there has always been on the oceans or in the air. Some of these dangers we may guess; others we shall not know until we meet them. Nature is no friend of man's, and the most that he can hope for is her neutrality. But if he meets destruction, will be at his own hands and according to a familiar pattern.

The dream of flight was one of the noblest and one of the most disinterested of of all man's aspirations. Yet it led in the end to that B-29 driving in passionless beauty through August skies toward the city whose name it was to sear into the conscience of the world. Already there has been half-serious talk concerned the use of the Moon for military bases and launching sites. The crossing of space may thus bring, not a new Renaissance, but the final catastrophe that haunts our generation.

That is the danger, the dark thundercloud that threatens the promise of the dawn. The rocket has already been the instrument of evil, and may be so again. But there is no way back into the past; the choice, as Wells once said, is the universe - or nothing. Though men and civilizations may yearn for rest, for the dream of the lotus-eaters, that is a desire that merges imperceptibly into death. The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one; but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to its close. Humanity will have turned its back upon the still-untrodden heights and will be descending the long slope that stretches, across a thousand million years of time, down to the shores of the primeval sea.

-- Arthur C. Clarke
The Promise of Space
Harper & Rowe, New York, 1968

I couldn't have said it better myself.