Well, there's a damn good ripe old age to go out on. The science-fiction author would have been 91 in December. And he had set up shop in Sri Lanka, not exactly the most cozy outpost for a British-born writer, as of the early '50s.
It also speaks well of him that he was so selective about his film projects. He took his money and stepped aside as Hollywood roundly failed to adapt Childhood's End, proudly collaborated with Kubrick on the (pace Mick LaSalle) epochal 2001: A Space Odyssey, and offered a rejoinder to his own vision with 2010: The Year We Make Contact, on which he had a more prosaic directorial collaborator. (Peter Hyams actually said, on The Tonight Show, that he was AM to Kubrick's FM.)
It's not quite accurate to say he'll be missed; in fact, his influence will no doubt continue to be felt. But the way his influence has already been felt is less, shall we say, intelligent than what he himself propogated—as it happens, I was watching the Blu-Ray of Independence Day when I took a break and got the news, and that film is, while in itself a brilliant construction, a perfect example of a Clarke corruption (although maybe just as much a Heinlein corruption, and maybe that's the point).
2001's peculiar perfection is, I think the cinematic thing for which he should be remembered. And no small thing it is. I'm watching it now, and, like, whoa. And when I say, "like, whoa," I mean, some enterprising blogger should find and post the instructions for the zero-gravity toilet pronto.
UPDATE: And here they are. Kubrick and Clarke wrote them up as a goof—this is precisely the kind of elaborate extrapolation guys like Kubrick and Clarke would consider a goof—while sticking to scientific guns. I particularly enjoy the coinage "uroliminator."
Last year it was Bergman/Antonioni, this year Minghella/Clarke...
I think Roger Ebert summed up 2001 best:
'Only a few films are transcendent, and work upon our minds and imaginations like music or prayer or a vast belittling landscape. Most movies are about characters with a goal in mind, who obtain it after difficulties either comic or dramatic. “2001: A Space Odyssey'' is not about a goal but about a quest, a need. It says to us: We became men when we learned to think. Our minds have given us the tools to understand where we live and who we are. Now it is time to move on to the next step, to know that we live not on a planet but among the stars, and that we are not flesh but intelligence.'
Anyone into thought-provoking sci-fi should check out Clarke's 'The Nine Billion Names of God' - great short story with a killer ending.
Posted by: Mark | March 19, 2008 at 07:10 AM
As it happens, I just read Clarke for the first time this year. I read "Childhood's End"; what a strange and fascinating book, which bears some striking thematic similarities to "2001". A film version would be...something. Maybe it would be best if they left it alone.
Posted by: bill | March 19, 2008 at 08:10 AM
I discovered Clarke's work in my early adolescence, years after being mesmerized by a letterboxed presentation of 2001 on the CBC. For a child reared on Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler, Clarke's novels were excitingly cosmic and his work led me to other literary-quality speculative writers (Bradbury, Matheson, Dick and Ballard).
Clarke struck me as a passionate, articulate man whose interest in the sciences and the betterment of humanity had no peer. And any writer who can push a discriminating reader to expand his literary taste is worthy of praise.
It's time to watch the new 2001 DVD again!
Posted by: J | March 19, 2008 at 10:58 AM