I’ve read 3 of the 5, have a fourth but haven’t opened it the cover yet, and better get cracking on the ones I haven’t, I suppose! Particularly glad to see Halting State on the list, for the relevance to this blog — way to go, Charlie! And Scalzi will feel left out if I don’t congratulate him personally too. 🙂
For me, Arthur C. Clarke was never defined by hard science; he was defined by the unknowable. Whatever lay on the other side of the monolith. The agenda of the aliens in Childhood’s End. And of course, what was for me his most resonant work, Rendezvous with Rama. These are not stories that offer understanding — they offer, instead, mysteries a bit too big to fit into one book, one story.
Sure, he may have invented the communications satellite, but what he may be best remembered for in the end is an aphorism: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. As we live in an increasingly magic world, it’s good to remember that there are always horizons — that any sufficiently familiar magic is merely technology — and that there are always new magic just over the horizon, barreling towards us and presenting new mysteries to attempt to resolve.
John M. Ford, who wrote the magnificent fantasy novel The Dragon Waiting: A Masque of History and the funniest Star Trek novel ever written, has passed away.
Listen up, kids. I remember. I was there the day it happened. I know, you’ll say there’s no way I could have been alive back then, but it’s true — the pace of change is faster than you young whippersnappers think, and advances in long-life studies have kept me going far longer than I ever expected.
So yeah, I was around back on the day when it all changed — the day when we learned that TVs outnumbered people in most houses.
Over the last few days, we finally finished watching Scrapped Princess. Coincidentally, a Hugo plug for Spin over at Making Light, a site I always forget to read regularly, reminded me that I had picked it up in hardback when it first came out. So I read that today.
Oddly, they are both about the world being stuffed in a box.
