Arthur C. Clarke

The_Minister

What do you all think of Arthur C. Clarke? Space Odessey series rocked, as did Songs of distant earth, and rendevous with Rama, but Cradle sucked giant monkey-balls. I think on balence that he's one of the best si-fi writers around.

Tree

loev mr.clarke, he is the man, rivalled only by Azimov most days

mike65

He saw the future 50 years ago. Hav'nt read any of his stuff for years. Check out A Fall of Moondust which is a sort of lunar disaster thriller. I'm suprised no-one has tried to film it.

Mike.

Johnny Storm

IMHO Against the fall of night rewritten as The city and the stars is one of the very best pieces of SF ever written - poetic, imaginative, evocative, scientific, beautiful... etc. In fact I cant say enough good things about it.
In fairness, it's been a long while since I read it though and I wonder if it would seem dated now as a lot of its once-startlingly-new ideas have been reused by other writers.
Anyway that one piece on its own puts Arthur into the very top ranks of SF, IMHO.

Some of his short stories are great too. E.g. The nine billion names of God had a profound formative effect on the young Johnny Storm .

OTOH some of his novels are a bit stilted.

popebenny16

I liked the Rama series, as it was basicly a family story in space with a nice twist at the end.

Childhood's end, though, is a favourite of mine.

If you can find it, try to get your hands on "the lost Worlds of 2001" which is his account of the collaboration with Stanley Kubrick from start to finish, funny in parts, extraordinary in others (eg, Kubrick wanted the aliens to be "Giant Fag Robots")

Dirty Dave

He did a great short story called "the ambassador" or something.

Its essentially about an aliens races refusal to show humans what they look like when making first contact with them and for hundreds of years after.

When you find out why at the end, its pretty cool and clever.

The_Minister

I think I read that one.

CiDeRmAn

Loved his stuff, Fall Of Moondust is a brilliant disaster movie waiting to happen, although would have been best made in the late 70's with George Kennedy, Lee Majors and others of that calibre!
Big problem with Clarke, and a feature he shares with a others like Stephen Baxter, is he can't write humans for toffee, yes his tech and visions of the future are amazing, but his characters are hopeless, 2 dimensional figures.
That said as a child I devoured his short stories and 2001 and its sequels, loved most of his material, but there were better, Blish, Dick, Vonnegut, Brunner, Varley.

Goldfinger

CiDeRmAn wrote:

!
Big problem with Clarke, and a feature he shares with a others like Stephen Baxter, is he can't write humans for toffee, yes his tech and visions of the future are amazing, but his characters are hopeless, 2 dimensional figures.

I read an interview where he said as much, in particular he said he had an awful time writing passable romantic subplots.
Which is why, according to him, he hooked up with Gentry Lee on the last three of the Rama series and Cradle (none of which were exactly mind-blowing so he would probably have been better off just doing his own thing, really).

He's still up there in the top three sci-fi authors as far as I'm concerned, though, in particular for Childhood's End, 2001, and his superb short stories .