Customer Reviews

From Narnia to a Space Odyssey: The War of Ideas Between Arthur C. Clarke and C.S. Lewis

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If you buy this book, buy it only for the stories and essays: the rest should be, as Hume well put it, committed to the flames. The introductory chapters are poorly written, betraying signs of hasty composition and nonexistent editing, and abound in "strained syntax"--the euphemism of an earlier reviewer--, misspellings, non sequitur, and even anacolouthon. He writes no better or worse than a fourth grader who has been told to write a paragraph about what he did over the summer.

His transcriptions are even worse. Lewis's handwriting is admittedly difficult, but if an unknown papyrologist can tease sense out of the faded writing on a two-thousand year old scrap of papyrus used to wrap a mummy, surely Mr. Miller could have spent greater effort upon Lewis's letters than the ludicrous slipshod once-over he has evidently thought fit for publication. Furthermore, Mr. Miller clearly did little research on the lives and times of his subjects, the bare minimum required to produce a few slovenly sentences of introduction, and for that matter very little research ever, period. The introduction reduces the complexity of Lewis's (and probably Clarke's, too, though I can't say for sure, since I have read nothing by him except what's in this book) views on space travel to the stale, shopworn "science vs. religion" formula, to the extent that he puts Lewis, who read the Bible in Greek when he could, in the same camp with those simpleminded bible-thumping fundagelicals who evidently believe that the Bible descended from heaven in King James English! The editor (ha!) also worships Clarke, which would seem to undermine the dispassionate impartiality that debate-moderators, as he seems to regard himself, ought to possess. But he evidently thinks that impartial editing consists in treating Clarke's introduction just as badly as he treated Lewis's, frequently repeating almost verbatim sentences from earlier in the chapter, sometimes even lapsing into the first person, as if all he bothered to do in writing an introduction is transcribe Clarke's emails about his current doings, and then to get the rest off of Wikipedia. He also suffers from what Lewis would call "chronological snobbery": thinking an idea good or bad not because it is true or false, but because it is "more modern" or "less up-to-date." I.e. Lewis is bad because his ideas are out of fashion; Clarke is good because he excites our current enthusiasm for space-exploration. Lewis's point of view is bad because it is moralistic, whose morality is founded upon stories told in an old and unfashionable book; Clarke's is good because it is scientific and (best of all) modern.

Worst of all, Miller seems to think that he is doing all us science fiction fans a favor by bringing this volume to print, with all its bad research, bad writing, and worse editing. And he has the cheek to post a review to Amazon saying so, and asking us to excuse his typos by blithely (and rather smugly) quoting the proverb "to err is human..."!!!!! As if there were only one or two! Sir, you have done such a disservice to us as publishing this book in so disastrous a state, and by doing so have shown us such great disrespect, that you don't deserve the respect we would be showing you by granting you pardon. You have not done your best in editing the volume, and so we are not obliged to give you the benefit of the doubt.

And who were your editors? Can they read? They let pass all those typos, all those repetitious insensible sentences, all that slapdash transcribing, the misleading title, cover art and jacket blurbs? Or did they simply think that two "big names" like Lewis and Clarke would sell lots of books, whatever was in between the covers (and stuck to the cheap Elmer's-Glue binding)? Clearly I should purchase nothing in the future published under the ibooks name, since they did not put a stop to your foolery before it could assault me with its contents. You should be ashamed to have produced, and they to have disseminated, a volume whose every page (at least those edited by you) somehow or other either insults the intelligence or tries the patience of the reader. I know middle schoolers who can write more satisfying prose than you! Get off your high horse and out of the editing business.

In a way, reviewer J Welsh has hit the nail on the head, in that editor Ryder W. Miller does seem to worship Arthur C. Clarke, and maybe now that in the interim Clarke has died, he will be able to re-write this book to tell us how he really feels. And yet Clarke love isn't the worst crime in the world, is it?

He tells us that Clarke actually married an American, Marilyn Mayfield, in 1953, though be the end of the year the marriage was over. He quotes Clarke as saying that he was not the marrying kind, "though everyone should be married at least once." Provocative, but frustratingly enough Miller declines to explore these matters further, and there is no attempt at finding out what Ms. Mayfield has or had to say about this shortlived union. Did they stay in touch, the way that Phyllis Gates stayed in touch with Rock Hudson, or Debbie Rowe with Michael Jackson? Or was the break so bitter that "never mention the name of Arthur C Clarke around Marilyn, she'll bite your head off"? Hmmm, well people have delved deep into the mysteries of C S Lewis' affairs with women, and his marriage also remains a giant mystery but at least you can say it hasn't been dismissed.

I give Miller high marks in his ability to talk Clarke (and the Lewis estate, famously hard to get anything out of) into letting him reprint all this material--not only the letters between the two men--but their stories and lectures too. OK, they're not transcribed well, so? It says here Ryder Miller lives in San Francisco--like I do! Maybe one of these days we'll meet up and share another "war of ideas"!