The SF fans among you will recognise the title of this post as the final words of Arthur C. Clarke's "Death and the Senator". Now that Clarke's time has run out, I thought I'd take a little time to remember him.
My love of Clarke's work goes back a long way. The first two "real" books I ever owned (I'm unsure as to which was the first, but I still have both of them, well-read, though smelling a little dusty) were Malcolm Edwards' collection Constellations: Stories of the Future, which contained (among other things) Clarke's story "The Wind From The Sun", and Clarke's Islands in the Sky, a children's novel about a kid who scams a trip to a space station. And with those, I was hooked - both on science fiction and on Clarke. Over the years, I devoured pretty much every short story he had written - the libraries were awash with his collections - then moved on to the novels. Imperial Earth, Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama, 2001 and 2010. His later novels, written "in collaboration" with various others, tended to suck, so I gave up on them. But his classics are some of the finest works of SF ever written.
Still, it's the short stories I keep coming back to. Clarke was a master of that form, able to deliver a honed-down story (and his point) in just a few pages. Rather than focusing on logic puzzles (Asimov's trap - he was really a mystery writer) or scientific trivia, Clarke focused on people and big ideas - and yet his stories are the best I know for presenting the wonder and beauty and cold mathematics of space travel. His venture into film is the perfect example of this - the science in 2001: A Space Odyssey is perfect, but its just a backdrop for something else. That something else might be alien contact ("The Sentinel"), a crisis of faith ("The Star"), or the consequences of nuclear war ("If I Forget Thee, O Earth"). The best of these stories will be remembered long after Clarke is dust.
As for which is my favourite, paging through The Collected Stories (the same publishing technology which allows Robert Jordan to write 900 pages of nothing also allows the publication of almost everything Clarke has ever written in one fat volume), I'd have to vote for "Transit of Earth", the bleak story of a doomed scientist facing his fate with no hope of rescue, and nothing to do but record the damn numbers. Matter of fact science, sense of wonder at the universe, and tragedy all in one package. Unfortunately, it's not online, but if you can find it, read it.
