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Cosmic Fusions
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13568 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1988 |
1,908 Words |
| Author
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Robert F. Geary
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2061: ODYSSEY THREE
Arthur C. Clarke
New York: Del Rey, 1987
$17.95
Twenty years after sharing an Oscar with director Stanley Kubrick for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur Clarke returns to the environs of Jupiter with another sequel--2061: Odyssey Three. To judge by the commercial success of his rather disappointing 2010, which spent a half year aloft on the best-sellers list, this volume will also attract a considerable audience. Why it is likely to do so is not entirely clear to a reader upon finishing this mercifully brief book. Does the appeal of such a work reside in the alluring promise of transforming our condition with the discoveries of science? Or are the book's merits as fiction what are likely to gain it an avid following? Perhaps less obvious factors are involved as well. The answers offer interesting glimpses into the values of our culture.
Clarke's use of science is, no doubt, one source of his stature, especially among science fiction purists. This book, for instance, cannot be sneered at as a "space opera"--an intergalactic shoot-'em-up between good guys and bad guys all armed with ray guns instead of six-shooters. Nor do we have a struggle between chivalric knights and ogres to save a threatened land--the whole transposed from a fancied past into a future millennium. Clarke, who holds degrees in physics and mathematics, has a genuine interest in extrapolating what just might be from what is presently known by science. (His publisher does not neglect to remind us that the author won considerable renown for depicting in his fiction a communications satellite some two decades before such devices were launched.) In this novel, for instance, one of the characters (rather pointedly) cites a recent Nature article that speculates on the intriguing possibility that diamonds may form the core of gas giants such as Jupiter. Similar references, usually less heavy-handed, lend an air of plausibility to Clarke's description of what it would be like to walk on the surface of Halley's Comet (scheduled to return in the year of the novel's title). The author's familiarity with contemporary physics helps the reader believe that Jupiter might indeed implode into a miniature sun. More importantly, this knowledge serves as a kind of authenticating detail, overcoming readers' resistance to the idea of alien life-forms coming to our solar system.
Enlightenment Optimism in a Space Suit
This base of scientific knowledge does more than serve the literary purpose of creating a willing suspension of disbelief. Clarke, it seems, is not simply a successful author; he is also something of a guru of modern technology. To his residence in Sri Lanka come not only writers like Steven Spielberg, but intellectuals, broadcasters, and government officials. One suspects that the attraction is in part the mystique surrounding the possibility of rational control of the future, the lure of inside information that will permit us to master the events of the next century. Surely somewhere there must be a blueprint for the future, some recipe that will let us enjoy the power over nature our technology gives us without having to worry about our ferociously destructive passions, now augmented with new technological claws and fangs.
To judge by the sprinkling of political prophecies in this novel, Clarke
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