Stranger In A Strange Land is a classic of early 1960s American science fiction, and a game-changer for the genre's sexual politics, so long relegated to a weird ghetto of three-breasted Martian babes and earnest blondes defiled by tentacled monsters. It's hard to overestimate this book's influence: it was the catalyst for a neopagan religion, was adopted as a kind of manifesto for 60s counterculture, spawned a few neologisms, and accurately predicted the moral and religious trends of the decades to come, namely the birth of the evangelical corporate megachurch. It also, apparently, includes the first description of the waterbed, which did not yet exist in 1961.
As a side note, I've often read that Robert Heinlein is part of the holy trinity ("The Big Three") of popular sci-fi authors, along with Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asmiov, a commendation that I find, post-Foundation, to be absolutely ridiculous. Yes, he's as wry with his social commentary as any sci-fi great should be, but he's so obviously better, and patently sexier, than Asimov, who is a grand old bore, or Clarke, who has a nefarious tendency to keep the juicy stuff to his personal life. Of course, this is based on the reading of just one novel, one which made Heinlein an unlikely pied piper of hippie liberalism, when in reality his own views on the subject, although much-scrutinized, are definitely unclear, considering he penned Starship Troopers, considered by many to be a fundamentally conservative novel, around the same time.
Anyway, the "stranger" of the title is actually a human man, and the "strange land" is Earth: not exactly an epic set-up for a book proclaimed to be, according to the cover of my edition, "the greatest science fiction fantasy of all time." However, the man in question is Valentine Michael Smith, an orphaned human raised on Mars, by Martians, and returned to Earth in his mid-20s with all the psychic wisdom of his Martian forebears and absolutely no clue about human society, language, or mores -- a kind of infant superman. Through the eyes of a creature who is biologically but not psychologically human, we see our most hallowed institutions -- religion, money, monogamy, and the fear of death -- as they perhaps really are, which is to say, absurd. His ignorance is almost psychedelic: he takes rapturous, baffled joy in swimming pools, considering the practice of bathing in water to be a religious experience of high merit. Mike is, culturally, a blank slate, but with his typically Martian sincerity, not to mention his abilities (telepathy, telekinesis, and the willing "discorporation" of self and enemies), he wields a strangely mystical authority, giving Heinlein a quasi-legitimate voice for guilt-free hippie grandstanding. With his combination of loving sincerity and transcendent force, the Martian named Smith "preaches" a universal message of spiritual polygamy, cosmic patience, non-mainstream family structures, and social libertarianism. Without the aura of outer space, he could just as easily be a religious messiah. In truth, he becomes one, and singlehandedly rewrites history.
Stranger is a lovely, powerful book, one which has no illusions about its intentions (broad, clever satire) nor a lick of self-consciousness: Heinlein, through the mouthpiece of Mike and other characters, namely Jubal Harshaw, a curmudgeonly bon-vivant with an appetite for long-winded speeches on everything from Rodin to cannibalism, lambasts his chosen targets without prudishness, and with commendable intellectual zeal. Sure, there's some arguable stuff, like a brief, confused foray into homophobia and old-fashioned sexist patronizing, but it mostly reflects the time and the hesitant puritanism of some of the novels' characters; surely, compared to most science fiction books dating from the early sixties, Heinlein is practically Betty Freidan.
On the whole, I found Stranger In A Strange Land both funny and thought-provoking, and in a way, reading it is like going back to the fountainhead of decades of liberal thought, making hippie counterculture seem fresh again -- it did more to revise my opinions on polyamory than the entire "free love" movement. Of course, I'm not about to run off and join the Church Of All Worlds yet, but we would certainly not be remiss in adopting the worldview of Valentine Michael Smith, at least occasionally. In fact, it could be a formidable exercise for us all to wake up in the morning and approach everything in the world as a powerful Martian might: with sincerity, fascination, and one finger solidly squared on the "annihilate" button.
Foundation is a trilogy of Isaac Asimov novels that was honored with a special Hugo award for "Best All-Time" series. It beat out some heavy hitters for the title, including Lord of the Rings. After reading the first book of the trilogy, I can understand the semantics that make this award relevant: it's, like, the Best series about All Time, not the Best Series of All Time.
That's a joke. See, Foundation takes place on a massive time scale, chronicling the rise of a civilization over the course of centuries. No characters are around for long, as the story outlives them all.
The premise: a great psycho-historian named Hari Seldon uses a mixture of statistics and sociology to predict the fall of the Galactic empire. To prevent the inevitable eons of barbarism between this drama and the rise of the next great civilization, he sets up a couple of insurance policies for humanity: two isolated planet-colonies stocked with all the available knowledge of art, science, and technology. The primary colony, Terminus, is destined to become the seat of the next empire, and Seldon plots out its entire political future on a long-distance time scale peppered with so-called Seldon Crises, moments at which necessary and unavoidable political actions change the course of history.
The first book in the ludicrously expansive Foundation series takes us from the time of Hari Seldon to about 200 years of Terminus' history, beginning with scientists and encyclopedists, and finishing with merchant-princes and traders. It heralds the beginning of its own empire, the profitable novel series, which spawned some nine sequels and prequels, not all penned by Asimov, over the course of half a century. The books are evidently much-beloved, and I would be loath to dismiss them, particularly as there isn't anything especially offensive about them. I generally love books that span such huge time scales; Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, obviously an influence here, and Frank Herbert's Dune, which probably cribs a little from Foundation, both come to mind. Still, there is something remiss about this one: Asimov's style is so dry and concise that it lacks, to me, the pathos of such a generational story. Knowing the premise, I expected the sweat and tears of an entire race to parade before me, to witness the triumph of knowledge over savagery, some really epic, opening-ceremony-of-the-Olympics sort of stuff. Instead, it's men making plans, men making deals with other men, just another oligarchy in outer space.
Am I the only person to be disappointed by this? Given the freeing lack of constraints presented by science fiction, I was surprised to find intergalactic rulers in a universe millennia in the future doing business as usual, screwing each other out of resources and comparing the sizes of their atomic weapons like it's the Cold War. I think Foundation is supposed to be uplifting -- humanity, so strong, rebuilding itself through science -- but it comes off as a dry extrapolation of the present on a bigger scale. It's a novel about political machinations that wouldn't be out of place in United Nations back rooms, but seem pedestrian and silly in the context of a galactic empire.
Hence this joke, an alternate title for Isaac Asimov's Foundation: White Men Make Up History.
NEXT BOOK: EITHER BOOK TWO OF FOUNDATION OR ROBERT A. HEINLEIN'S STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND.
The Invisible Man is a fine modern tragedy.
In it Griffin, a young optical physicist, in an ill-timed fit of desperation stemming from his hope for scientific recognition and his inability to cope with people, renders himself invisible. He does this by lowering the refractive index of his body, bleaching his blood, and undergoing a painful and undefined process. His invisibility is total, but it is also a product of science, not magic, and hence is incredibly literal. Undigested food remains visible in Griffin's body, appearing as a floating murk in the air. The snow and dirt settling on his shoulders make his outline visible again, and he can only be invisible while naked, as clothes cloak his form. The reality of his trick is brutal: naked, cold, terrified of leaving a trace anywhere, Griffin cowers in the streets of London, homeless and totally alone. He is driven mad by the irreversibility of his predicament.
While other writers of his time might have made The Invisible Man into an adventure story, a slapstick romp of illusion, H.G. Wells saw a life of invisibility as it really might be. To be invisible is to be completely cast away from the most fundamental, underlying commonalities between all people: being, onus, and self. Griffin is, by virtue of being unseen, no longer human. And, faced with the hysterical reaction of regular folk to his predicament, he certainly acts accordingly: stealing, verbally abusing people, using fear to overpower the weak, and, near the end, dreaming of a reign of terror, of murder.
In the preface to my edition, George P. Wells (H.G's son), details the scientifically burgeoning era of his father's writing. After all, the late 1880s saw the invention of the lightbulb, the radio, the automobile; people could light and heat their homes at the touch of a button, all things that might have seemed like magical fantasies a few decades previous, and things which probably retained a little aura of the magical for many people. There really was a sense of unabashed optimism about science, about technology's potential to unveil new comforts and wonders for the everyman. Still, Wells saw the darkness. His son writes, "the scientific worker strives continually to give man a greater power to shape his destiny; the individual finds more and more than he holds the power of life over death, only as a power of death over life." Yikes.
"Why," said Huxter suddenly, "that's not a man at all. It's just empty clothes. Look! You can see down his collar and the linings of his clothes. I could put my arm --"
It's exactly these kind of juxtapositions -- between the commoner and the physicist, the glowing promise of science and its hard-edged underbelly -- though, that makes The Invisible Man so potent. Like all of Wells' early novels, it's set in the most brass-tacks landscape possible: a provincial England, populated by innkeepers and constables, ordinary folk, gossiping amongst one another as they experience the extraordinary. Wells uses specific, dry language, and it's a particularity of his style that when he shows us the unbelievable, it's through the unbelieving eyes of a common bystander ("No 'ed, I tell ye!"), whose attempts to remain objective in the face of unimaginable horror make the events far more chilling. I can't help but think of Clarke's third law: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And magic has no being, like an invisible man.
NEXT BOOK: ISAAC ASIMOV'S FOUNDATION
The Einstein Intersection takes place on an indeterminately future Earth: humanity is long gone, replaced by a genetically troubled race of people, largely mutants and idiots, living within the ruins of human society, struggling to make sense of abandoned technologies and enacting the remnants of our culture through exaggerated myths about the ancient heroes of Earth, such as the Beatles, Jean Harlow, and Elvis.
For example:
"You remember the legend of The Beatles? You remember the Beatle Ringo left his love even though she treated him tender. He was the one Beatle who did not sing, so the earliest forms of the legend go. After a hard day's night he and the rest of the Beatles were torn apart by screaming girls, and he and the other Beatles returned, finally at one, with the great rock and the great roll."
Incredible. Anyway, the central character is a kind of alien Orpheus, who sets out across the bombed-out world, defeating lush monsters and hanging out with psychics and Vikings, in order to rescue his love (an equally alien Eurydice) from Death. It's a doomed mission from the start, and he unwittingly enacts, undoubtedly for the millionth time, the tragic archetypes of human mythology.
I've never read Samuel Delany before, although I've heard his work represents a substantial segment of the literary sci-fi canon. I can see why: The Einstein Intersection is lyrical, intricate, and peppered with self-consciously meta author's notes that say things like, "you are twenty-one years old, going on twenty-two: you are old too get by as a child prodigy, your accomplishments are more important at the age at which they were done, still, the images of youth plague me, Chatterton, Greenburg, Radiguet." And here, a book that is essentially a fantasy, about a musical troll trekking across a sumptuous planet on dragon-back, but the references -- to the myth of Orpheus, Isidore Ducasse, Machievelli, and Yeats -- are spot on, and you know that it's all a kind of tragic allegory about love and myth. It's Joyceain in its scope, and childlike in its approach to the redress of wrongs: tears, music, and disbelief in the face of evil.
This book is positioned strongly in a kind of academic, trans-genre critical position. It's about mutants, but also: it's not about mutants at all. Hence, this is my entrée into a new kind of science fiction. It seems to me that the ultimate enactment of the genre's purpose is as a kind of subterfuge for academic freaks; since science fiction is ostensibly for outcasts, and is generally unread by the literary establishment, there is a safety blanket there, some room to get weird and still get published. At the same time, the primary demographic of science fiction is of the action-figure collecting persuasion, so the reaction to a book like The Einstein Intersection from traditional male geeks (i.e. Larry Niven fans) is one of terrified, shocked betrayal -- of alienation from their own culture. Can you imagine? Coming across a science fiction book that looks like it's going to be about talking dragons and mutant babes, but then finding out that it's written by a gay, dyslexic black man with, like, a hand fetish and an obsession with classical mythology. Seriously, start browsing reviews online, and you will find pages and pages of virulent nerds damning Delany's work.
Too deep for nerds, too weird for the traditional canon: it's the real borderland.
Ray Davis, in a critical essay (Delany's Dirt) about Delany's later, slightly-pornographic books, writes, "...genres may assume reading protocols which are not those of a particular ideal of literature. But a given piece of fiction can fit more than one set of protocols, and the set of 'literary' protocols is notable for its flexibility." Which is to say that the genre -- science fiction, as it were -- has a set of strict conventions, to the point that fans will become deeply betrayed when they aren't adhered to, but genre-specific content like this can often tell us things that mainstream books, non-genre books, can't. And the mantle of "literature" (flexible as it is) can float down, too, to grace the shoulders of the most unlikely books.
It's kind of a Catch-22: to understand Delany, you have to be at least somewhat fannish, willing to let down your guard and accept that genre-specific content isn't a sign of weakness. At the same time, you can't be so committed to the genre that you would sell someone like Delany down the river for getting liberal with the rules.
NEXT BOOK: H.G. WELLS' THE INVISIBLE MAN.
Larry Niven's Ringworld is the first book of the project that I have not liked. In fact, I disliked it so much that it shook the very foundation of my belief in science fiction as the greatest of all genres. All of a sudden: I was embarrassed. As I explained the plot to my friend ("So the cat-monster and the puppeteer are traveling across the planet in their flying motorcycles...."), I had trouble justifying the book as anything more than a glorified fantasy novel, a sexist, boring tromp through an admittedly cool universe. And here's a book that won the golden accolades of the science fiction world: both the Hugo and Nebula awards!
To be fair, the titular Ringworld is a fantastic invention, although totally a Big Dumb Object: a massive wedge of Dyson sphere rotating around a distant star, made by a long-dead civilization with inconceivable energy needs and technological prowess. What remains of the society which built the Ring are pockets of hairy, tribal herds, who worship the massive Ring as a kind of holy arch, and remember nothing of the great engineers that are their ancestors, nor understand the sheer scale of their world. The future anterieur aspect of this is among my favorite SF tropes: the Ringwold's history, as we discover it, is rich with poetic "will have been" moments. The civilzation which, from our perspective, is bafflingly advanced, has already fallen, become obsolete, become the distant past -- a past not unlike our own present.
Still, a great science fiction novel can't just rest on the crutches of a scientifically engaging premise, especially if it wants to stand up as something particularly literary for posterity. Ringworld takes place in Niven's Known Space universe, a place where many alien civilizations have already made contact with humanity, and some of the novel's main characters are aliens, ostensibly struggling to understand human social quirks, which is a neat excuse, I suppose, for the otherwise inexcusably flaccid dialogue. The human characters, especially the women -- a clueless ingenue and a prostitute, respectively -- are the pits, practically offensive, and a solid reminder that science fiction has long been a boy's club. Maybe this is the root of my embarrassment regarding Ringworld: why would I waste my time with a book that is pointedly written for a subculture of male nerd-dom too deep for me to parse? This is literature for physics-obsessed young men who have never hung out with smart girls, or any girls for that matter, couldn't sniff sexism if it bit them on the nose, and would much rather tabulate the obscure technical specifications of a fictional space object.
A particularly dark diss on Niven from a similarly minded Amazon.com book reviewer:
"Niven seems to reveal himself to be a sad, sexist nerd who had one solitary good idea and just really lucked out."
In the end this is just Rendezvous With Rama-lite (although, yes, I know, Rama came later). Or, rather, this formula:
Rama + the Mos Eisley Cantina scene in Star Wars = Ringworld
NEXT BOOK: SAMUEL DELANY'S EINSTEIN INTERSECTION.
It's been telling me via Google text ads.
Impetuously, a space-living
Man, still young,
Plots his first and last journey to
Earth, for him, a
Return to his long-forgotten birthplace.
In the ship, he trains for
All those forgotten rituals, including:
Life with gravity.
Everything he finds, including the most anodyne of
Animals, seems mystical, meaningful, alien.
Returning to his home on the moon of
Titan, he is
Humbled.
NEXT BOOK: LARRY NIVEN'S RINGWORLD.
I can't imagine what it would have been like to read William Gibson's Neuromancer in 1984. It's so absurdly dense and riddled with cryptic terms which have since become commonplace, that it must have been virtually hieroglyphic at the time. Part of the experience of Neuromancer is this incredible recent-history disconnect: to know that the course of 24 years have brought us a substantial step closer to Gibson's world than we might have anticipated, that it would make concepts like "cyberspace" and "matrix" the stuff of pop-culture movies and general, undisputed understanding. Is that the ultimate litmus test of science fiction, that it starts to come true while it's still fresh in the memory of its readers? Or maybe it's because of Neuromancer that any of these things happened. Either way, it's almost shocking to see how heavy-handedly the novel's themes have been borrowed over the years: The Matrix took most of it and tossed in some plagiarized Baudrillard, Blade Runner took Chiba, took Case, the look of the book and its the self-loathing antihero.
Whatever, I suppose that's selling Gibson short: reading Neuromancer in the light of its descendants is hardly fair, and the book isn't about extrapolation or future-conjecture anyway. It lacks the earnest explanatory nature of many "hard" sci-fi books or even the Popular Mechanics-zeal of Arthur C. Clarke, who always seems to be tugging on your t-shirt and whispering, "It could happen, and I'm going to kind of bore you with the details!" Gibson is just...already there, and he has little intention of drawing a reassuring point from A to B. In a way, that's what advances him beyond the genre, and why it makes sense that he's writing regular fiction now: he has nothing to prove. The world is fucked up and he knows it.
It's hard to talk about how good it is without feeling like I'm two decades late to a party I forgot to go to.
Here is a really awesome Neuromancer-related art project, in the works, from Brody Condon, which is a really cyberpunk kind of name, if you ask me.
NEXT TOME: ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S IMPERIAL EARTH.
The first book of the project is a play, which is an early indicator of how esoteric this list really is.
R.U.R stands for Rossum's Universal Robots, the latter term being coined by Karel Capek (an enigmatic Czech writer perhaps best known for his bizarre novel War With The Newts) as a derivation of the Czech word for "drudgery" or "labor:" hence, "Robot," in this context, transcends and pre-dates the early century's depiction of a tin man. Capek's "Robots" are automats, workers, but they are biological in nature, built from manmade parts that are vat-grown in a factory by some unexplained scientific process invented by the elder Rossum, a tinkerer. In this sense, these Robots are like Golems, brought to life from primordial matter.
R.U.R. is a B-movie play. Romance and revolution happen automatically, with little precedent, almost as though the story were meant to be mythological, allegorical, a kind of passion play with stilted deliveries and exaggerated, iconic costuming. Although it was never meant to be, I'd like to see it as a shlocky Hollywood production -- R.U.R.'s plot (robotic workers take over the world) is remarkably obvious. Still, its readers must always remember that Capek precedes Asimov, not to mention Ray Kurzweil. R.U.R. is the first in the genre: It formulates the fear of robots as well as naming it. It has no optimism about a future powered by automats, not even briefly: the manufacture of men is posited as a disaster before disaster even falls. These Robots, these workers, are not imbued with morality, or even a sense of physical pain, a combination which makes them ruthless from the start. Not to mention, of course, that the primary function of the manufactured men is as automatic soldiers, fighting human wars.
Summary:
The play occurs in three parts: first, the isolated Robot factory (an island), staffed by human scientists, facing criticism from a petulant politician's daughter, representing some kind of humanity league. She is troubled by the emotionless treatment of the Robots, but her pleas for compassion sound too facile, and the male factory workers both deride and fawn over her, the first woman they've seen in ages. She is quickly subsumed, falling for the charismatic company president.
In act two, the Robots have already begun an insurgence, killing millions of humans -- all of them, it's implied -- everywhere on Earth but the Robot factory. They surround the factory, armed to the teeth, psyching out the trembling scientists and their bride, who represent the very last dregs of humanity. The Robots have a manifesto, as well as a leader, and they aim to annihilate their creators. After a long stalemate, a blitzkrieg of violence finishes off the humans, all murdered save for one, spared because he was a worker himself.
In the last act, the Robots have been ruling the world for some time, actively building and fixing everything, until they have worked themselves to exhaustion. With no human scientists to repair them and the secret of their genesis murdered with the scientists who invented it, the Robots turn to the only surviving human, the worker, who has devoted his life to cracking the secret of life, to no avail. It seems the Robots are facing extinction, as they were never designed to last much longer than twenty years. As the story winds down, a pair of young Robots are introduced, expressing an as-yet-unseen romantic fervor for one another. Although R.U.R. never states it, it's implied that this couple will be the Adam and Eve of the Robot generation, a fortuitous return to biological reproduction. There's a kind of horror to it, like at the end of Jurassic Park when it becomes apparent that the dinosaurs are reproducing, despite being bred genderless.
I do wonder if Kapek was influenced by Freud's essays on the uncanny -- it seems that R.U.R. is largely about the human, sterile, too-similar faces of the robots as they stand in silent mutiny along the edges of civilization, clutching rifles. Although Rossum's Robots are created with a utopian vision in mind ("In ten years' time Rossum's Universal Robots will be making so much wheat, so much material, so much of everything that nothing will cost anything," a character proclaims in the play's opening scene), they quickly turn into a threat, tearing through the Robot factory like stylized automat hellions, stabbing all the remaining humans.
Freud wrote that the human desire to create a "double" -- a catchall phrase covering all likes of dopplegangery, and a mantle which fits nicely the human-looking Robots -- is a kind of insurance against the destruction of the ego, a preservation against extinction. Certainly this is the initial Rossum motive. However, the double is both comforting and alarmingly uncanny precisely because it is not human, not the self. The Robots lack all the fears that make humans tick; at one point, a baffled woman asks a servant Robot, "Aren't you afraid of death?" Coldly, the Robot answers, "No."
Freud writes of the double's ambiguous position between comfort and terror, that "from having been an assurance of immortality, it [the double] becomes the uncanny harbinger of death." Freud was thinking of puppets imbued with mysterious animism, and disembodied human hands dancing across the floor, but Capek's Robots are the ultimate doubles: manlike in almost every capacity, but manmade and precisely inhuman.
During the play's final stand between Robots and humans, a scientist remarks, "We made the Robot's faces too much alike. A hundred thousand faces all alike, all facing this way. A hundred thousand expressionless bubbles. It's like a nightmare."
NEXT BOOK: WILLIAM GIBSON'S NEUROMANCER.
The great (now late) Arthur C. Clarke had a longstanding relationship with Playboy magazine: they published the first excerpts of 2010: Odyssey Two, as well as a plethora of his short works, musings, and technical papers. It wasn't until 1986 that the magazine ran a full-length "Playboy Interview" with Clarke, then living in Sri Lanka in a compound next-door to the country's prime minister. Perhaps because of the nature of the magazine, Clarke was at his most liberal, going to far as to openly admit -- perhaps for the first time in the press -- his "relaxed, sympathetic" attitude about bisexualism.
I recently picked up the July 1986 Playboy at an estate sale, and have transcribed the better segments of the interview here.
ON EXTRATERRESTRIAL CONTACT:
CLARKE: I would like to live until we've made contact with some extraterrestrials -- at least know if they're there. I've had fantasies about that a lot -- a spaceship comes down and the first guy off the ship says, "Take me to Arthur C. Clarke."
PLAYBOY: Meaning that they've read your books, so they're saying the proverbial "Take me to your leader" line.
CLARKE: Yeah. But then again, of course, he might say, "Take me to Isaac Asimov" -- that's the nightmare, isn't it?
ON MYSTICISM:
PLAYBOY: You write about the mind's transcending, leaving behind, its material organic base, as you put it. Why do you regard the departure for the physical realm -- leaving planet Earth -- as desirable?
CLARKE: I guess that it's just hard to imagine another direction in which to go. I hope I'm making sense. I guess it's just pure laziness on my part -- I should think of a new evolutionary outcome. But I'm very much against any form of irrationality and mysticism. I guess I'm a mystic who's against mysticism.
PLAYBOY: What does that mean?
CLARKE: I'm so very sorry you asked that question.
PLAYBOY: Why?
CLARKE: It's tough to explain. This universe is so incredible, and we constantly find new things out; but what we know may be such a small part of reality, if, indeed, reality is finite -- it may be infinite. But one must always allow for the totally unexpected. So, in a way, talking about things that could be called mystical -- well, I guess, I do try to allow for the idea that, as the famous scientist J.B.S. Haldane once said, "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it's queerer than we can suppose." I've changed the word queer to strange, because, of course, the word queer has taken on a different context. And that calls to mind what I call Clarke's Third Law, which is "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- by which I mean things we take for granted now, such as transistor radios, that would be totally baffling, totally magical to even a man like Thomas Edison. I mean, if he saw a pocket computer, Edison would go totally crazy. He'd spend his whole life trying to figure out, "How does this work?"
ON THE MOON LANDING:
PLAYBOY: Let's go to the moon.
CLARKE: Fine with me.
PLAYBOY: You made a bet with the chairman of the Interplanetary Society, of which you were a member in the thirties, about when the first landing on the moon would occur.
CLARKE: Yes, I wasn't very clever. I never really thought a moon landing would occur in my lifetime. But, you know, even the space enthusiasts of my youth didn't believe it would be in this century. When I wrote my book Prelude to Space in 1948, I put the landing 30 years in the future, in 1978. I remember thinking when I wrote it, "This is hopelessly optimistic."
PLAYBOY: As it turned out, during the moon landing in 1969, you were a commentator for U.S. television, along with your friend Walter Cronkite. You cried then, didn't you?
CLARKE: When you go to a launch, it is an emotional experience. Television doesn't give you any idea of it, really. Walter wiped away a tear or two, as well -- as did Eric Sevareid. The last time I'd cried was when my grandmother died, 20 years before.
PLAYBOY: The crew of Apollo Eight circled the moon on Christmas eve, 1968 -- the first men ever to see the dark side of the moon. Didn't the commander of the mission later tell you they'd been tempted to radio back to earth that they'd discovered a large black monolith, as in 2001?
CLARKE: Alas, discretion prevailed.
PLAYBOY: How do you think 2001, which you began envisioning with director Stanley Kubrick in 1964, inspired actual space exploration?
CLARKE: Although most people thought space travel was inevitable by then -- President Kennedy had called for a moon landing before the end of the Sixties -- I think the movie did stir people's imaginations about the future. I'm especially proud of how well the film stands up -- even the moons-of-Jupiter stuff. The only thing we were wrong about scientifically -- everybody was wrong, because the information was incomplete -- was the surface of the moon as we depicted it in the film.
PLAYBOY: What do you mean?
CLARKE: We never dreamed it would be so smoothed.
