I purposefully read Childhood's End as the last book I completed before turning 25 last month. I thought it would be symbolic and poetic. It was neither. I put the book down and I was unchanged, thinking, yeah that was a neat idea. But ask me now, less than a month later, what I remember about Childhood's End and I can tell you very little beyond the main themes and plot. Perhaps that was Clarke's intention. And that's fine. It's just not what interests me about literature.

It makes for good reading. Not great reading. Great reading affects me. I remember great reads months or years after, because they become part of who I am, and--more importantly--part of my changes and progress as a human being. Great reads challenge and change me. I firmly believe--and Clarke has come the closest yet to challenging this belief--that such great reading requires emphasis on character over idea.

While not a great read by the above standards, I can say a book like Rendezvous with Rama is great writing by just about any standards. Because it isn't the idea that is so intriguing about Rama. It's the execution. It's the work Clarke gives on the sentence level that keeps me with the characters-- feeling what they feel and experiencing what they expeirience--even when I don't give a damn one way or the other if they live or die. I don't care about the characters, but I care about what happens.

Perhaps there is my attraction to Clarke, in spite of all preference to the contrary. His characters are so everyman, so similar to blank slates, that I can see myself in their shoes--as can many other readers, probably. Perhaps that is many SF readers' attraction to the many other authors who write books with similarly flat characters. If speculative fiction truly is the literature of imagination, what better way to engage readers than to put them in the story (or to make it mighty easy for them to put themselves in the main character's shoes). It doesn't work for me, but I can see how it could work.

Maybe I haven't been able to see it before because so many of the other authors I've read who make these choices don't have Clarke's skill in the execution. Before, I thought idea-driven stories just weren't strong enough to stand on their own. Now I'm beginning to think that most of the good writers simply choose not to write these kinds of stories. Those with Clarke's attention to prose tend to drift to character-driven fiction. Perhaps my previous thoughts about idea-driven SF as substandard fiction were simply based on substandard writers (Hubbard, Heinlein). Stuff to think about, anyway.

I do want to note one surprise I found in Clarke's longer fiction (and, now that I think about it, about 2/3 of his shorter work I've read so far). Clarke is known as one of the hardest of the "hard" science fiction writers--meaning his approach is more grounded in the "hard" sciences (geology, physics, etc.) rather than the "soft" sciences (sociology, epistimology, etc.). Given a choice, I almost always find the latter more interesting.

But here's the surprise: in spite of Clarke's focus on the hard sciences (which, in the hands of lesser writers, can and does get tedious and clinical in the execution. Clarke and others like Geoffrey Landis can consistently write science in an engaging, interesting way), I notice two reoccuring themes in his writing. The first is the idea of an external force operating on or otherwise affecting mankind. And the second is attention to religious and spiritual issues.

Both are especially interesting, since Clarke seems obsessed with Nietzsche in his writing; the growth and progress of mankind in Clarke's stories closely follow the patterns Nietzsche predicted in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But then: Nietzsche was all about self-improvement and the stripping away of all external forces, while Clarke feels that an external force is exactly the kick in the ass mankind needs for it to get motivated. And Nietzsche's criticism of religion (organized or individual) is as clear as Clarke's symbolism of these external (alien) forces acting as god-figures--sometimes distant and uninvolved, other times Christ-like and ever-present.

Books that inspired the above include:

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

2001 by Arthur C. Clarke

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