Mar 19, 2008
{ A tribute }
-ExcellentToday I’m trying to remember the fact that I am an employee of a public library. I hope that the main function of a library is still to house and dispel information. One of the greatest distillers of information who ever lived, the great scientist and author Arthur C. Clarke, passed away yesterday.
So ignoring comments of: “I thought he was already dead” and “Wasn’t he that monkey movie guy?,” I find it necessary to express some modicum of tribute to the life of one of the last great thinkers of our age.
The first novel I ever read in the genre of Science Fiction was Arthur C. Clarke’s mysterious “Rendezvous With Rama.” I was probably only about 12 years old, and my older brother had pushed me into reading it. In the book scientists discover a celestial object hurtling through the solar system at a tremendous speed. They name the object Rama, and then launch an exhibition to determine what it is. It turns out to be not a meteor, but a completely inside-out planet-like mass created by a mysterious and unknown alien civilization. The book is about their investigation of the interior of the object.
The whole tone of the book was mysterious, and the book ends without ever fully explaining what the object is or where it came from. It was my first taste of science fiction, and every sci-fi book I have read since then has left me slightly disappointed in comparison. There were several sequels to rendezvous with Rama, but they all had slightly religious zealot overtones and were not written by Clarke, but by Gentry Lee. I blame the crappiness of the sequels on Clarke’s uninvolvement.
Of course Clarke also wrote 2001: a Space Odyssey, and its sequels. (The basis of that “monkey movie”). Many of his other books were made into movies as well, but none as successfully or intelligently as Kubrick’s interpretation of 2001.
Clarke wasn’t just a writer; he was a trained scientist. His ideas led to the creation of the geostationary orbit for satellite communications. When he died he was working in Sri Lanka, helping research the effects of cell phones on Gorillas because of what he saw as a link between global cell phone use and the plight of gorillas in Central Africa due to prospectors hunting for tantalum, a material used in making many gadgets.
I credit Clarke with turning me into the book geek that I am today. If I hadn’t found the pages of Rendezvous With Rama, I don’t know that I would have devoured so many subsequent science fiction books, including such authors as Ray Bradbury, Carl Sagan, Orson Scott Card, and Isaac Asimov. These books have shaped the person that I am today, and I think I am a better person for them.
Thank you Mr. Clarke for being a thinker in a land of couch potatoes. I’m in your debt.
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