{"id":3020,"date":"2019-11-05T16:29:40","date_gmt":"2019-11-05T15:29:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=3020"},"modified":"2020-04-22T02:34:54","modified_gmt":"2020-04-22T01:34:54","slug":"arthur-c-clarke-by-gary-westfahl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=3020","title":{"rendered":"Arthur C Clarke by Gary Westfahl"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Arthur C Clarke<\/em> by Gary Westfahl (The University of Illinois Press, 2018)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Gary Westfahl has been a bit unlucky. After reading his Arthur C Clarke<\/em> \u2013 an instalment in the \u201cModern Masters of Science Fiction\u201d series from The University of Illinois Press \u2013 and while I was trying to work out what to say in this review, I picked up two books. The first was No Laughing Matter<\/em>, Anthony Cronin\u2019s fine biography of Irish humourist Flann O\u2019Brien. The second was Working <\/em>by Robert A Caro, in which America\u2019s greatest living biographer (probably, he\u2019s certainly its most thorough) discusses how he gets to grip with his subjects. Both helped me crystallise the sense of frustration that\u00a0 kept growing in me as I was reading Westfahl\u2019s book.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n\n\n

For Cronin the city of Dublin is at the heart of the story,\nproviding not just the background to O\u2019Brien\u2019s life and literature but\nimmersing the reader in the world that gave birth to them. Caro, meanwhile, describes\nmonths spent in Texas winning the trust (with his wife\u2019s considerable help) of\nthe women who were the backbone of the rural community in which his subject,\nLyndon B Johnson, grew up. He describes nights spent alone in the wilderness\nnear the Johnson ranch. All done so that he might better understand the\ncrippling poverty and loneliness of Johnson\u2019s childhood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By contrast, Westfahl\u2019s book feels like an insular thing: a\nwork that rarely steps outside the covers of Clarke\u2019s books. Whether Westfahl\nis discussing Clarke\u2019s juvenile (both senses) \u201cindulgences in infantile humour\u201d\nor the sense of impermanence (perhaps even futility) in his description of\nmankind\u2019s attempts to control our environment, I never felt him get under the\nsurface of his subject. Any author discussing Clarke is, of course, somewhat\nhamstrung by the fact that his personal papers remain sealed but this book\u2019s\nlack of contextual weight bothered me throughout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not that I was expecting Westfahl to ape Caro and relocate to Somerset to grasp some of what it must have been like for a young man growing up in a rural community, without a father, in the depths of the economic and political crises of the 1930s. But this must have been important in shaping Clarke\u2019s outlook. And so must have been the experience of being a gay man in post-war London. And of being an Englishman in self-imposed exile in Sri Lanka as his homeland declined from pre-eminent global empire to modestly influential European nation. I would argue all these experiences can be seen in Clarke\u2019s work \u2013 indeed, give me the chance, and I can bore you at length about how Clarke \u2013 inheritor of Wells and Stapledon\u2019s tradition of English socialist (small \u201cs\u201d) science fiction \u2013 is, perhaps above all else, a writer of the end of empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Westfahl touches on some these things, but his prime focus is very much on the texts and on their genre trappings. So there are discussions on Clarke\u2019s predictive powers regarding technology, on whether he really<\/em> believed in aliens, and on his attitude to space flight. There\u2019s even a discussion on religion in which Westfahl seems determined to rescue a meaningful sympathy for religion from the scattering of polite words that Clarke, a public and avowed atheist, puts into the mouths of a handful of his characters. This literalism feels parochial and I don\u2019t think it does Clarke\u2019s justice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this is to deny Westfahl knows his subject. He has done his research. His familiarity with Clarke\u2019s work (novels, short stories and ephemera) is never less than prodigious and the book\u2019s bibliography (not just of Clarke\u2019s fiction but including poetry, non-fiction and even selected TV appearances) is a useful addition for anyone interested in Clarke’s work. Sometimes Westfahl could have been less keen to demonstrate that extensive knowledge, I would have been happier with fewer lengthy lists of plot summaries, but there\u2019s no denying the depth of his knowledge, the seriousness of his intent or that he draws out of all this some interesting insights. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, in never straying far beyond the pages of Clarke\u2019s published writing, and in rarely seeking to place those works in a meaningful historic or social context, Westfahl\u2019s book provides a useful introduction to Clarke\u2019s work without ever convincingly demonstrating why it should matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This review was published in BSFA Review no.8, November 2019.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arthur C Clarke by Gary Westfahl (The University of Illinois Press, 2018) Gary Westfahl has been a bit unlucky. After reading his Arthur C Clarke \u2013 an instalment in the \u201cModern Masters of Science Fiction\u201d series from The University of Illinois Press \u2013 and while I was trying to work out what to say in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[15,10],"tags":[160],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27AP7-MI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3020"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3020"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3027,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3020\/revisions\/3027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}