The Collected Stories
Arthur C Clarke
966pp, Gollancz, £20
2001: Filming the Future
Piers Bizony
168pp, Aurum, £14.99
For more than 50 years, and in cleverly coded form, Arthur C Clarke has been rewriting the Book of Revelation. Under the cover of his sometimes astonishingly prescient scientific speculation, he has brought us fables of imagined futuristic worlds where, at the story's close, we are shown that "the former things are passed away". As his Collected Stories helps to demonstrate, there has been no popular writer since the days of C S Lewis and Charles Williams whose disposition is more nakedly apocalyptic, who takes greater pleasure in cradling eternity in the palm of his hand.
At its ambitious best, Clarke's grave and lucidly written fiction vaults metaphysically across millennia and contracts the near-infinite arc of astronomical time. It gives us not the usual picturesque bric-a-brac of sci-fi - the invading aliens, dogfighting spaceships and feuding interstellar empires - but the long, immortalising perspective within which humanity's brief lifespan looks either newly irrelevant, or newly purposeful and complete. All his finest books share the same, dwarfing John Martin-ish visual perspective, the sense of tiny human figures suspended against visionary galactic immensities, transfigured at the supreme moment by the ages and the stars. Again and again, in Against the Fall of Night or 2001: A Space Odyssey or the Rendezvous with Rama novels or his last-days-of-the-human race classic Childhood's End, we seem to hear in our heads, as we read the final pages, the age-old biblical testimony: "And I saw a new heaven and new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away."
To describe Clarke as a mystical fabulist may sound perverse when there is so much in his work that appears hostile to the religious view, or at least unsentimentally agnostic. But beneath its progressive science, its apparent faith in the rational calm of the technological mind, his writing has always been disturbed by that ancient, bedevilling sorcerer's itch: the hunger for mysticism and metamorphosis. Long before magic realism, Clarke's science fiction found ways to make the outwardly miraculous an expression of an inner emotional need without violating the literal, technical integrity of the accepted external world.
In a factual essay, "The Obsolescence of Man", written in the early 1960s, Clarke had speculated: "Although intelligence can only arise from life, it may then discard it. Perhaps, as the mystics have suggested, it may also discard matter..." Essentially, this evolutionary sea-change, its imminence and dreadful beauty, became the theme of all his mature novels. Something of the precocious child, eager but unhappy in the world, still clings to his fiction. It's as if, from the start, the rooted intractability of human affairs distressed him, and he turned instead to a new dispensation, far in the future, when the tarnished experiment of "civilisation" - with all its congen ital warfare and wearying psychic division - is approaching its end, about to make the quantum jump to a realm of pure intelligence, something closer to the Buddhist ideal of integrated spiritual creation that I suspect Clarke at least half-believes.
"It might seem a risky notion to drive sci-fi into magic," wrote Penelope Gilliatt in the New Yorker in the spring of 1968, when the film of 2001: A Space Odyssey was first released, before concluding, in a shrewdly far-sighted review (which is quoted in full by Piers Bizony in his judicious and well-informed account of the film's production, 2001: Filming the Future ), that director Stanley Kubrick and Clarke had nevertheless "made it the poetically just place to go". Probably, at the same time, a shade too much of the conceptual credit for the film's half-luminous, half-baffling structure went to Kubrick, too little to Clarke, who had in fact selectively plundered a number of his earlier works in order to bring to the screenplay a narrative and philosophical audacity unheard of in mainstream commercial cinema.
As those early, appreciatively tuned-in college-student audiences instinctively understood, the film's shape was poetic and metaphorical, not straightforwardly dramatic. The transition from the shrieking, war-hungry man-apes brandishing their bone-clubs, agog at the sense of infinite possibility that strategic murder creates for their species, to the effortless technological super-sophistication of a half-empty Pan-Am space cruiser, waltzing the heavens with insolent imperial grace, gave us, in a single provocative jump-cut, a taste of Clarke and Kubrick's scepticism and restlessness. It demonstrated their fascination with the umbilical cord connecting the barbarous past and the far-seeking, ambitious future, their urge to make their audiences think philosophically.
It's interesting to see how the seeds of virtually all his major novels are scattered across Clarke's Collected Stories , in tightly wrought tales of serendipity or suspense that, while they contain seductive pre-echoes of the metaphysical breadth Clarke would achieve in the longer form, reveal him also as a twist-in-the-tail, punchline-addicted contributor to sci-fi periodicals such as Thrilling Wonder Stories and Science-Fantasy. The central ideas of 2001 originate in a series of small-scale but ingeniously plotted anecdotes of discovery or confrontation - the alien pyramid, unearthed from the lunar surface, signalling to its maker the news of the human race's first giant leap beyond the earth in "The Sentinel"; the visiting star-voyager benignly steering prehistoric man towards the uses of technology in "Encounter at Dawn". As Bizony describes, Kubrick was nervous of Clarke's sometimes too-neat facility for exposition, and continually pared back the detail of the screenplay, to concentrate on what was allusive and poetic and visual.
In the event, the film proved one of the most dazzling artefacts of the late 1960s. It scrutinised a solemnly immaculate future as coolly as if it were the domesticated present, putting sequences on the screen that seemed initially to have nothing to do with the traditional wham-bang excitements of B-movie sci-fi.
Clarke's skill, in his prose, was to draw moments of epiphany with an engineer's precision. Kubrick matched this with breathtakingly well-realised images of spaceflight and weightlessness, of eerily silent docking procedures and bleached lunar surfaces, of the velvet-deep, star-scattered infinity of immeasurable interstellar distances. In a succession of coldly disturbing and forensically lit flight-deck scenes he created the banal, unforgiving ritualised remoteness of space travel, its chilling existential far-offness from home.
Like those other rare, defining interior cinematic journeys - The Seventh Seal in the 1950s, Apocalypse Now on the cusp of the 1980s - 2001, with its idea of human strain washed clean by the infinite, seemed to express a whole culture's underlying fears, dreams, collective neuroses.
Probably it is unwise to praise Clarke without also confessing that his work remains riven with contradictions. His characters are brightly drawn but psychologically flat and undifferentiated, yet enduring human values are nevertheless the most important element in his imaginary universe. He writes like a man adapting the tools of fiction to the exhilarating long-range intellectual excitements and discoveries of the essayist, and the conceptual ideas that flow most freely and profoundly through the skein of his work. Yet one of his strengths is that his prodigious gift for scientific and technical invention never really gets the better of him.
His stories don't claim to be "great literature", but they stand sensible comparision with the work of talents like Arthur Conan Doyle, H G Wells and John Wyndham. They throng with memorable images, situations that have the power to cast their own disconcertingly long emotional shadow into the reader's mind. The least of them are mere clever doodles, playful but Roald Dahl-ishly glib. The best are like fairytales - wise, light-hearted but emotionally compelling, calmly luminous in their descriptions of terrible or miraculous events vivid with a sense of sadness and loss, and, like all profound stories of magic, essentially improbable, essentially convincing.
