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Clarke Never Crossed Sci-Fi Humanities Divide

I'm a bit late weighing in on the death of Arthur C. Clarke, who was buried Saturday in Sri Lanka, having taken (me, not him) some much-needed time off to contemplate various things. (Hey, if there's one key element in Clarke's writings, it's long time spans where nothing much happens.) So here's my contrarian thought, amid all the laudatory obits about this sci-fi pioneer.

As visionary as Clarke was on the science front -- he famously predicted communications satellites -- he was sorely lacking in any ability to realize fully formed human characters. The only fictional creation of his which readily comes to mind is HAL, which is a computer. (Admittedly, HAL may prove visionary, if we morph toward metrosexually inspired mainframes.)

Clarke's other memorable character, at least as far as my youthful sci-fi reading goes, was Karellen, the Overlord leader from Childhood's End. But he was mostly just a demanding boss.

Clarke, of course, doesn't stand alone as a sci-fi writer noted for his wooden characters. He was actually far better than Isaac Asimov, who himself is notable for the astounding fact that his writing didn't improve one whit from his first book to his five-hundredth.

Failing to cross the divide separating science from the humanities is a common criticism of engineering and science types, writers included. We're constantly told how we're geeks with our heads buried in our books, to the detriment of our knowledge of the broader world. I guess I'm sensitive to that criticism, and am picking on Clarke and Asimov because they're easy targets for those who really believe such inane nonsense.

Truth be told, it's not that engineers lack humanity, it's that most people are scientifically illiterate. I won't belabor this point since it's so obvious.

I will add, though, that when you do get a writer who combines both a scientific sensibility with a real feel for people, you get wonderful stuff. Here, Ray Bradbury and Ursula Le Guin come to mind.

While 2001: A Space Odyssey is a great movie (presumably even more compelling when you're high), for me the screen version of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 takes the cake. Directed by François Truffaut, this was Truffaut's biggest flop but reportedly one of his favorite films. Now that it's been rescued from obscurity by incessant replay on cable television, I can see why. (I see that a remake is currently in the works, with Tom Hanks in the Oskar Werner role. All I can say to that is, yikes.)

If you watch Fahrenheit 451, made in 1966, you'll see various character actors who appeared in another iconic '60s work of science-fiction, Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner. This is my nomination for sci-fi which makes more of a concrete human connection -- though in a 1984 kind of way -- than 2001 or any of Clarke's other projects, science visionary though he may have been.

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