But the first science fiction I ever read that had a distinct impact on me was Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night. It impressed me so much that soon I had dredged the family's old Royal typewriter out of the closet and was hammering away, using a ribbon so worn out the letters were no more than ghosts. I'd guess I was about twelve, but that's just a guess. The highest praise I can give a book is that it makes me want to write something equally good. The worst condemnation I can give a book is that it makes me think I could easily write something better. Against the Fall of Night definitely is of the former variety.
I've been a fan of Clarke ever since. I remember there was a lot of argument about the Clarke school of science fiction and the Asimov school. I was definitely a Clarke partisan. I liked Asimov well enough (though I never actually made it all the way through the hefty Foundation business), but if I had to pick one author to have dinner with, it would have been Clarke. I particularly liked the fact that his science fiction has all the usual technical elements, but it also had a strong metaphysical component, something that I thought was lacking in the Asimov/Niven tradition. That metaphysical element was present in Against the Fall of Night and would eventually reach fruition in the masterful Childhood's End.
It doesn't seem to me that science fiction today has figures like Arthur C. Clarke any more. It seems that everything I've read lately (meaning, since about 1985) falls into one of about four categories:
1. Hard science fiction in the manner of The Integral Trees, which is interesting as an intellectual exercise but not very much fun as a story. This also includes the later Ringworld novels, which I didn't find very compelling.
2. Cyberpunk stuff, where the authors try to imitate the power and style of William Gibson's short stories Burning Chrome and Johnny Mnemonic and fail every time.
3. Alternate history stuff of the Harry Turtledove ilk, which I find interesting for a little while, but these "what if Julius Caesar had a Piper Cub" speculations are a bit like shoestring potatoes - good at first, but I don't want the whole can, and they aren't good for me anyway. (Curiously, I had a cat that loved shoestring potatoes and got pretty good at hooking them out of the can with an extended claw. Maybe she would have finished the World At War series.)
4. Avant garde stuff that tries so hard to be "unconventional" I can never seem to figure out what's going on. Such stuff often takes on weird textual forms - multiple levels of indenting, lack of capital letters, strange out-of-context sentences that may well be snippets from a Maytag washing machine manual for all I can tell.
Where are the novels like Childhood's End these days?
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