Customer Reviews

Arthur C. Clarke's July 20, 2019 : Life in the 21st Century

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Arthur C. Clarke is one of the 20th century's greatest writers of fiction-certainly of science fiction-and, as many of us know, of accessible science writing. However, this book is not an essential piece of his canon. It's interesting, to be sure, some of Clarke's visions of the future are novel and worth thinking about. There are several noteworthy situations outlined, including a possible scenario for World War III (this scenario however, shows the hazards of prophecy... apparently Clarke failed to forsee the fall of the Berlin Wall, for Germany is still referred to here as "East" and "West".) A lot of the writing doesn't really sound like Clarke... especially the medical chapter, it comes off as a bit dry and boring in places, lacking his trademark wit. It almost seems as if these chapters and scenarios were written by someone else and merely edited by Clarke. I'm not knocking the book-it is interesting, nicely laid out, and very professional and highly ambitious in scope-but Clarke has SO MUCH superior material available that there's no reason for you to pick this up unless you've nearly exhausted his output.

If you want a typical Clarke yarn, this is not the book you're looking for. However, if you'd like to see where a careful extrapolation of existing technology and trends would lead, this is incredible. Any writer can make up his own future; but few have taken the time and effort to project what the near future will be like both imaginatively and realistically. Clarke picks several aspects of daily life and writes a chapter each, about life 23 years in the future.

You must read this with its release date in mind - 1986 - because that's what makes it so compelling. Clarke's projections are firmly based on actual trends and emerging technologies of that decade. This is not so much a "what if" story as it is one of "where will such-and-such really lead?" His depiction of hospital care is deliberate if a bit dry; the Europe-based third world war is a miniature thriller; and only once does he really depart into a fantasy style. One chapter is nothing so much as a nod to Edgar Allen Poe, and is creepy enough to make you swear off any kind of home automation. But even in that chapter, the specific gadgets and technological capabilities are completely plausible. That's what makes this an engaging book.

This book tries to give us a small hint of what the future may be. Arthur Clarke tries to describe the future as his creativity imagine. It was writen in 1986, but I read it in 1997, so some of book's predictions seems idiot to me. In my point of view, Arthur Clarke should focus on a story, not fortune-telling. Of course science ficcion must do some wild guess, but a good book is sustained by the plot, not the situation.