300 words

On his blog, Frederik Pohl writes about collaborating with Arthur C. Clarke on The Last Theorem (a book I reviewed, asking, "One wonders how stable the manuscript was when Clarke died"). It sounds like an impossible task, and Pohl's blog post is more moving and interesting than the book itself.

For all the time between leaving Chicago and our actual boarding of the riverboat I hadn’t tried to keep in touch with Arthur. But our boat was well provided with email, and one of the first things I emailed him to ask him concerned some interesting alien characters in his notes. These were called the Grand Galactics. They pretty much ran things, and I could see how useful they might be in the finished story, so I invited him to tell me every thought he had ever had concerning these wondrous super-beings. His response, though, was a lot less helpful than I had hoped. Everything he knew about the Grand Galactics, he told me, was in those pages of notes his agent had passed along to me. At one time, he said, no doubt he had possessed any number of additional ideas about them. He didn’t have them any more. They were gone without a trace.

Marveling, worried, I asked Arthur for details. He could give me very few. Apparently a funny thing had happened to Arthur on a day in 2003. After signing all those contracts he had waked up one morning and discovered that he couldn’t remember how to write any of them..

Don’t ask me to explain how this was possible. Arthur himself wasn’t very good at explaining it to me, but there it was. Every word of how to write any of those books had vanished from his mind. He said that since then he had had reasonable luck in writing 300-word greetings to various groups around the world who wanted to honor him. But nothing more ambitious than that. It was as far as his writing skills now went.

Last (Not Last)

My latest Astral Weeks column looks at the late Arthur C. Clarke's last* novel, The Last Theorem, a collaboration with Frederik Pohl.

I was hoping the L.A. Times would link to an appreciation of Clarke I wrote earlier this year for them—but...it's no longer on the site. (You can find it at The Unarchivable, your source for all manner of forgotten EP articles.)


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*Don't bet on it...

File under: What the?!

On the never-made film version of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End:

Despite lavish production designs and several scripts, the project languished in development hell until its recent revival by Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Peirce, who has written a fresh draft and hopes to take it before the cameras next year.

—Times (U.K.)

Clarkesworld

Clarkewatch! There's my LAT appreciation, and (taking a similar his-books-are-sciencey-but-religious approach) Edward Rothstein's in the NYT (with a nice mention of "Rescue Party," possibly the first Clarke story I read, in the anthology Great Tales of Action and Adventure!); LAT's Nick Owchar blogs about Clarke (focusing on "The Star") on Jacket Copy, as does David Ulin, who looks at Clarke's EGOgrams (kind of like his Walter Keyhole....or New-York Ghost?!)

Also in the NYT today: A great review of Dizzyhead Bill's Gaming the Vote, which I/you/we need to read ASAP!

William Poundstone’s “Gaming the Vote” arrives amid unusually high reader interest in equitable voting. And Mr. Poundstone is a clear, entertaining explicator of election science. He easily bridges the gaps between theoretical and popular thinking, between passionate political debate and cool mathematical certainty. These dichotomies can be drastic. If politics is a realm in which emotions run high, he notes, mathematics is “one of the few fields where it doesn’t matter what other people think.”

Science and magic

I have a brief essay on the late Arthur C. Clarke in tomorrow's L.A. Times. Tomorrow in print—today online!

A couple of side notes:

1) Clarke uses the Keelerian word "web-work" at one point. But I failed to write down the page number and now I'll never find it!

2) Part II of Childhood's End, entitled "The Golden Age," must have influenced Chris Reynolds's comics?! (Here's my crazy "Connections" post from way back when.) In The Dial, the Earth has been taken over by alien overlords...and there's a story called "The Golden Age"...