GREETINGS, CARBON-BASED BIPEDS!

Reviewed 12/13/2001

Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!, by Arthur C. Clarke

GREETINGS, CARBON-BASED BIPEDS: Collected Essays, 1934-1998
Arthur C. Clarke
Ian T. Macauley (Editor)
New York: St. Martins Griffin, 1999

Rating:

5.0

High

ISBN 0-312-26745-2 558pp. SC/BWI $16.95

Fans of Sir Arthur will find this a very enjoyable volume. Others may deem it unduly self-serving, or a rehashing of worn-out themes, or both.

I enjoyed it, despite some familiarity with the essays. I knew little of Clarke's life on Sri Lanka, and this is the topic of an entire section of the book. There were other surprises, like the essay on Lord Dunsany. And one can always count on Clarke for a smooth, witty writing style with occasional poetic passages. On page 376, a new word: "Stories of such inspissated gloom, however superbly crafted, do not normally appeal to moviemakers."

I do have some cavils. The essay titled "Rockets", written in 1944, contains no mention of Robert Goddard. True, at that time the secretive rocketry pioneer was not so well known. But neither was his work classified, and an astronautics expert like Clarke should have understood its importance. (Essays written later correct the omission.)

Then, a puzzle. On page 38: "The first discovery of planets revolving around other suns, which was made in the United States in 1942, has changed all ideas of the plurality of worlds. Planets are far commoner than we had ever believed..." I'm not familiar with this discovery, which Clarke does not describe.

The editing leaves something to be desired. For example, the acknowledgement page refers to "David N. Samuelson's Authur C. Clarke: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography". But there is plenty here to satisfy all but dedicated Clarke aficionados, enhanced by 29 black & white photographs (even two of Hector Ekanayake, Clarke's housekeeper, who evidently does not like having his picture taken.) A list of sources and a detailed index round out the book.

Page 31: "Therefore even if there is no intention of using them except as a last resort, the Security Council should for psychological reasons posses long-range atomic rockets".
  Even today, all it does possess are posses.
Page 44: "In fact, one of the valid criticisms of pop science fiction during the first half of the century is that is was not pornographic enough — a situation now amply rectified by contemporary writers."
  S/B: "is that it"
Page 149: "But there is yet another theory, and this is the one that most astronomers would probably accept oday."
  S/B: "probably accept today"
Page 431: "During the pulp era (say 1930 to 1955) such magazines as Startling Stories lured their (almost exclusively male) readers with garish covers, usually featuring young ladies in brass bars, being menaced by horrid things."
  How does that poem go? Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bras a cage?

And here are some notable quotes.

Page 42: "The future of which I have spoken is now being shaped by men with slide rules working in quiet offices, and by men taking instrument readings amid the savage roar of harnessed jets. Some are engineers, some are dreamers — but many are both. The time will come when they can say with T. E. Lawrence: `All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.'
Thus has it always been in the past, for our civilization is no more than the sum of all the dreams that earlier ages have brought to fulfillment. And so it must always be, for if men cease to dream, if they turn their backs upon the wonders of the universe, the story of our race will be coming to an end."
Page 61: "To lament that `science has conquered fancy' would in any case be to ignore the lessons of the past. Fancy cannot exist without science. The stories that Miss Nicholson1 cherishes could never have been written without the basic scientific discoveries that inspired them in the first place — as she herself points out. Men had to know that the moon was a world before they could visit it; and the greater the field of exact knowledge the greater — not the smaller — the possibility of imagination becomes. Where the ancients had only a handful of planets and a single sun, we have entire island universes full of wonders undreamed of in earlier ages."
1 Marjorie Hope Nicholson, professor of English at Columbia University. Her scholarly book Voyages to the Moon, published by Macmillan in 1948, surveyed literary descriptions of such journeys. The survey stopped after the 18th century; in an essay of the same name, Clarke reviews her book and brings its survey up to date.
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