The three greats of the golden age of science fiction were Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke. Clarke didn't write as much as the others, I think, and it's also not really correct to say his stuff was more imaginative. But I think that there was a quality to his work that made it stand apart. His stories were, how to put this, further away than Heinlein and Asimov. Books like The City and the Stars and Childhood's End stay with me as images in my mind in a way that nothing written by Asimov or Heinlein ever did. Childhood's End, in particular, is quite haunting.

I just noticed an alert on the CNN website that said that Clarke has died at age 90. He had a long and full life; it's hard to feel as if death at age 90 is any kind of tragedy. But it means the giants are all gone now.

Clarke was an odd one for other reasons. I know he was born in the UK, but he chose to spend most of his life living in Sri Lanka. And he never sounded like a Brit to me. I think he may have been from Cornwall; he pronounced his R's even more strongly than Americans do.

Nope, just checked Wikipedia. Someone's already put in his date-of-death. And it says he's from Somerset, which is next to Cornwall. I knew that accent was from the SW of England, so I was part right.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 02:09 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 248 words, total size 1 kb.