Fiction Reviews
The Sentinel
(1985) Arthur C. Clarke, Grafton, £3.99 / Aus$9.95 / NZ$15.99, pbk, 319pp, ISBN 0-586-21204-3
(1985 / 2000) Arthur C. Clarke, HarperVoyager, £9.99, pbk, 319pp, ISBN 978-0-586-21204-2
(1985 / 2013) Arthur C. Clarke, ibooks, £19.95, pbk, 302pp, ISBN 978-0-743-40721-2
This is a landmark collection of short stories from the British SF grandmaster Arthur C. Clarke. Landmark because it brings together a couple of space-themed stories from the 1940s and '50 before the launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, together with more recent (1970s and early '80s) work.
The other thing about this collection is that not only does it come with an overall introduction but each story gets its own introduction that places the story in Clarke's career timeline. In short, we get the feel that the author is having a conversation with the reader.
In terms of being an SF grandmaster, for the latter half of his career, he was known by Golden Age SF fans to be one of the 'Big Three' along with US AmericansIsaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein.
All the stories are hard SF, indeed mundane SF, though that term would not be invented for another two decades since this collection's publication. Clarke – as he makes clear in one of his stories' introduction – is uncompromising and of the opinion that SF has to have accurate, plausible science (and is effectively 'mundane SF') and anything else is fantasy! Authors hoping that there will be a 0.1% chance that Einstein's relativity can be hacked – and we have faster than light travel – are writing, in Clarke's opinion, fantasy! So, to Clarke, interstellar (wide-screen) space opera with faster than light, is fantasy! (Wormholes, though, are a possibility as touched upon in 2001: A Space Odyssey, as is interstellar travel by generation ships.) Clarke may not be as broadminded as many SF readers, both then and today, but then that is the thing: reading Clarke and you are dipping into SF in a pure form and, for my money at any rate and in this regard, Clarke is a better writer of SF than Isaac Asimov.
In the collection's introduction, Clarke talks of his early days and his writing career before ending with a lament that science fiction is (in the 1980s) booming! The lament is not so much that it is booming, but that for the SF aficionado, the genre's success means that Clarke's generation is the last that will have read all the new science fiction being produced: today there is simply too much stuff. I sometimes surprise folk have participated in a conversation about an author and citing some of their titles, and even plot conceits, by letting slip that I have not read that author. This is because being a core member of the SF² Concatenation team and having to follow publishers activities, I have a reasonable (though by no means encyclopaedic) understanding as to what is going on. Even with authors who I know I am likely to like, I pass on books received at Concatenation mission control to others to review: I can't do it all, and besides other have better review skills than I. But Clarke is right; there is now so much stuff out there, as can be seen by our seasonal news page's forthcoming SF and Fantasy book listings which itself only covers most of the major genre imprints and also only those in Great Britain: it does not represent all of Britain's SF book output. SF today is impossibly BIG, and Clarke cottoned on to this back in the 1980s.
Now onto the stories.
Written in March 1945 'Rescue Party' was Clarke's fist sale to John Campbell (though not his first sale) back in 1946 just after World War II at Astounding magazine. It concerns a mile-long alien space craft approaching a planetary system whose sun is about to go nova. Then they detect cities on the third planet. A scout ship lands but they appear deserted and the exploration begins…
'Guardian Angel' sees some of the human race unhappy with the alien 'Overlords'… Now, this was written in 1946 but was rejected by John Campbell and then re-written. The version here is the one that came out a decade later in New Worlds in 1956 in New Worlds. However the most notable thing about this story was that it was the seed for the novel Childhood's End (1953). Another interesting point is that the story foresaw what was effectively to become the European Union and some people's hostility towards it.
'Breaking Strain' looks at a ship's crew's response to losing their main oxygen supply to a freak meteor puncture…
'The Sentinel' was written in 1948 for a BBC-run short story competition but, Clarke says, it did not do well. It concerns an alien artefact found on the Moon and which predates humanity (actually it predates multicellularity). This story is said to have been the one on which 2001: A Space Odyssey was based but Clarke hates people doing that as it bears as much relation to that book and film as "an acorn to a resultant full-grown oak"… Which I find a little puzzling as surely that is the point: oaks come from acorns and the seed for 2001 came from this?
'Jupiter V' concerns an expedition to one of Jupiter's moons which faces competition from a rival team. What they discover is that the moon itself is not real…! In the course of this story we get one of Clarke's space science lectures, this one being on an aspect of orbital mechanics.
'Refugee' sees a future British Prince and his visit to a spaceship… Cue the Fireball XL5 closing theme song…
'The Wind from the Sun' is not only a Clarke short story (1963), and originally titled 'Sunjammer', but it is the titular story of another Clarke collection (1972). It concerns a space yacht race using Solar sails. The idea of a Solar sail was proposed, Clarke notes, in 1924 and NASA published a full feasibility assessment in 1973. However, NASA plans for a Solar sail mission were pulled in 1977.
'A Meeting With Medusa' is a novelette as opposed to short story told in 8 mini-chapters. It follows a mission into Jupiter's atmosphere and what they encounter there… It was written in 1971 and inspired Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds to pen a spin-off novel in 2016.
'The Songs of Distant Earth', originally published in 1979, betrays Clarke's adherence to Science Fiction: he is firmly of the view that films like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are fantasy as implicit in them is the concept of faster-than-light travel. With 'The Songs of Distant Earth' Clarke is attempting a truly science fictional interstellar travel story.
And there you have it, sample of Clarke's shorts post-World War II. By today's standards these stories are somewhat light, but that is only because we have had half a century's worth of science and technological development. What you are in fact getting with The Sentinel collection is a sample from the upland stream of science fiction before the river that it has become today. Enjoy.
Jonathan Cowie
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