Re: I'm always a bit mixed on Clark - Edit 1
Before modification by Isaac at 29/06/2013 07:28:25 PM
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View original postRecently bought the collected stories of Arthur C. Clark...and been reminded what really good science fiction is. The road to the sea was one of the most interesting stories I have ever read and realistic (I can see us becoming that stagnated as a species). Transience was one of the saddest things I had ever read, and Trouble with the Natives one of the most hilarious. Anyone else read these what did you think?
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View original postNever read Transience, and I remember Trouble with the Natives as a bit humorous, but Road to the Sea was incredibly boring to me. It felt like I was being lectured on human behavior by someone with a minimal grasp of it. As is often the case with Clarke, I remember the settings and tech of his environment very well, but have a hard time really remembering the plot and barely remember anything about the characters. Excluding HAL, who was ironically a computer, his characters and frankly the plots too, tend to be kinda dull, slow, and lacking passion and that's a real hurdle in a short story. He put together some very awesome and super-realistic stuff and way out there cool ideas, and I do enjoy his work, but it doesn't entirely compensate for his only even vaguely interesting character being a computer.
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View original postHmm odd I had a very different response to road to the sea...I mean it seemed pretty much on the nose with human behavior. But then I believe in the ever expanding frontier a golden age concept that has gone out of fashion recently.
View original postThe problem is that a lot of the Utopia-lite this or that person writes sounds like a Vision of Hell to me, and the writer doesn't seem to have considered, maybe was incapable of considering, just how bad what they wrote really is past surface detail. You take Road to the Sea, at one point they force a town to move 'for their own good' so they don't stagnate. No reason is ever given or implied beyond that they'd dwelt in the same spot too long and that it was unhealthy for them. No threats to others, no implication they had begun preaching xenophobia to their neighbors or engaging in oppression locally, just that they needed to move their town for the sake of avoiding stagnation. Now its been a while so I may have misread or misremembered it, but that was jaw-droppingly immoral to me and a lot of Utopia-lite golden futures are like that, "You have absolute Freedom to do whatever we tell you to do, because 'science'" really bug me.
View original postIts sort of like Star Trek, sounds really good until you inspect Utopia and its clearly 'Gene's Roddenberry's naive view of human behavior which amounts to an oppressive theocracy'. Almost every writer does some of that, Clarke's hardly the worst, but a lot of their 'golden age' descriptions mostly just read to me as "why X has no idea how civilization functions but is sublimely convinced they understand it better than anyone else."
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View original postHe certainly does not make characters as memorable as say LeGuinn and some of his longer novels do not work well (the Ranma series comes to mind..first book wonderful when focus is on the technology, later ones slowly getting worse and worse till a terrible ending). Childhoods end though I though was very interesting and the 2001 series ended well. Certainly he is more of an idea/philosophy/theme writer than a character one. For example the ones I mentioned above I can relate the plots and ideas to you but the characters not so much. (The central idea in childhoods end for example still amazes me).
View original postWell I give him a pass on Rama because he co-wrote the sequels, Rendezvous with Rama is rightly a classic, but not for the characters to be sure.
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View original postMuch like Robin Hobb of red mars fame in that way (without the crazy uber-liberal politics).
View original postI think you mean Kim Stanley Robinson, he wrote Red Mars, Robin Hobb is the lady who wrote the Farseer Trilogy and some more fantasy, which I am by disturbingly freakish coincidence actually listening to on audiobook right now. I don't mind as much when a writer inserts their own dogma in their work, they all do to some degree, its just less obvious when they're far away from now or if they don't actually break into long-winded rants about it or blatant strawmen. The problem I have with Robinson is that he essentially relates stuff he clearly doesn't understand scientifically as an expert and it really shows and nags at the mind, yet he gets listed as 'very hard Sci-fi'.
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View original postYou should try to find transience it is very worth reading.
View original postI'll have to do that.
View original postHmmm ok the problem with the moving was that it didn't work...the culture was still stagnated as in they did no work (technology provided them everything they needed so they didn't have to) and they made no discoveries...rather than being utopia lite it was a very very very bad anti-utopia. Shown by when the spacefaring humans came and asked doesn't it excite you to go to space? And the main characters response was what are you crazy? As well as the city that they found being so so so much better and a great example of how much they had fallen. So yes having them move to avoid stagnation is immoral certainly even more so when it didn't work....
That's not quite what I was getting at but also in fairness I haven't read it in a good long while and may be mis-remembering.
View original postIn no way would Clark say the people left on earth lived in a utopia very much not so. If you interpreted it that way then yeah I can see how you would take it badly...
As I said, long time since read and I might recall it poorly.
View original postI did mean Kim Stanley Robinson yes. From what I know of science and engineering the stuff he talked about made sense, now my training is in biochemistry so my engineering knowledge is limited but I would certainly classify him as very hard sci-fi in that part of his books read like a technical manual. His issues for me came when he moved into socialism and communism. When he basically had the middle eastern character purposely badly make the capitalist argument as a strawman to argue against it I nearly stopped reading. Thankfully the very last book got back to interesting science and character development. I have yet to read any of his other books because the communist claptrap in that one angered me so much. (But then the capitalist manifestio is one of my most treasured books, so I am a little odd for this site I suppose). Larry's politics certainly don't line up with my own...
I'm way closer to Ayn Rand than Karl Marx but that still doesn't keep me from wanting to bash in my own brains halfway through Galt's 70-page long speech. It's hard for me to think of an author that doesn't do some strawman villains or mid-book author filibusters where they lecture on their pet ideology, and while its admittedly less onerous when I more or less agree with them the part that bugs me is when they do it for a long time, or devote half a page to it every blasted chapter.