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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
For Clarke completists only,
By
This review is from: The View from Serendip (Mass Market Paperback)
Everyone knows Arthur C. Clarke as one of the best -- many would say THE best -- science fiction writer of all-time, but it is often forgotten nowadays that, at least up until the 1970's, Clarke was also one of the best and most prolific popularizers of science. Early in his career, before he ever really got into writing fiction per se, and certainly before he started writing novels, the majority of Clarke's output consisted of technical science pieces and popular science journalism. This collection of such pieces, which appeared in the last 70's, was one of his last of the kind before he began concentrating solely on novel writing and before he retired -- and came back -- and retired again... and so on (anyone who is a writer knows that a writer can never "retire".) The pieces themselves consist mostly of space articles (mainly projections of future society), a few articles about Clarke's home, Sri Lanka (once called Serendip, hence the title), a handful of speeches, autobiographical fragments, exactly one piece of fiction, and a smattering of various other types of articles. As the lifeblood of the book is a series of essays giving future projections for years that have now passed us by, it is easy to dismiss this book as dated, as most have; and, indeed, it will probably never again be in general circulation. However, there is a certain fascination about these articles when looked back upon with hindsight. It is always interesting to see where Clarke was dead-on (describing the internet in almost exact detail nearly 40 years ago, for instance), and where he was wholly off-target (predicting stellar conolization by the end of the 20th century). Few futurists have been as compelling -- and frequently accurate -- as Clarke, and these pieces always make for interesting reading. The two articles on Sri Lanka are very informative and make for great reading, infused with the love and admiration that Clarke obviously has for his home. These pieces, and some of the others, are of a very personal nature, which is quite unusual for the guarded and normally abstract Clarke -- quite a treat for long-time fans of the author who will probably never get an autobiography. His light piece about the perils of hiring domestic servants in the East is one of the most hilarous things I have ever read, reminding us once again that Clarke has a killer, if bone-dry, sense of humor that few other than his hard-core fans ever ackwnoledge. His classic diss "Introducing Isaac Asimov" is included here in full, as is the good Doctor's schintillating comeback. The one piece of fiction is a minor throwaway, and the remainder of the essays and speeches range from very good to moderate. The reason the book is not a superlative collection is because several of the essays are somewhat similar and, as always with a Clarke omnibus, many of them have been printed elsewhere. If you are a Clarke nut, you have probably already some, if not much of what is included here; if you are not, you will probably not even be interested. If you are that hard-core ACC reader, then it will be worth you while to track this long-out-of-print book down in order to read the pieces in it that are not available elsewhere. If you are a casual fan of his non-fiction writing, or a fan of his fiction and looking to get acquainted with the other side of Clarke, I highly reccommend the recent giant collection, "Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!" which collects the majority of Clarke's major essays into one large collection.
5.0 out of 5 stars
For Clarke completists only, certainly, but for them a treasure trove,
This review is from: The View from Serendip (Mass Market Paperback)
Arthur C. ClarkeThe View From Serendip Pan, Paperback, 1979. 12mo. 237 pp. First published thus, 1978. Contents Concerning Serendipity Dawn of the Space Age Servant Problem - Oriental Style The Scent of Treasure The Stars in Their Courses How to Dig Space A Breath of Fresh Vacuum The World of 2001 'And Now--Live from the Moon . . . ' Time and the Times The Next Twenty Years Satellites and Saris* The Sea of Sinbad* Willy and Chesley* Mars and the Mind of Man* The Snows of Olympus* Introducing Isaac Asimov Life in Space Last (?) Words on UFOs When the Twerms Came The Clarke Act Technology and the Limits of Knowledge To the Committee on Space Science The Second Century of the Telephone Ayu Bowan! * Reprinted in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! (1999). =================================================' The first and most important thing about The View from Serendip that must be stated unambiguously is that this is a book for Clarke aficionados. The subtitle is rather telling: "Speculations on space, science and the sea, together with fragments of an equatorial autobiography". There is a good deal of the former in Clarke's extensive bibliography, but the latter is something of a rarity. Like all great writers - for great writing is measured by its impact on you, not by stylish linguistic acrobatics - Arthur Clarke always had very personal writing style, combining simplicity and lucidity in the best Maugham-fashion, though in a rather different fields of both fiction and non-fiction. For my part, when great artists are concerned, the man and his works are the same thing, and it is terribly fascinating, to say the least, to have some glimpses how any writer who has attained such stupendous popularity as Arthur Clarke views his life and his achievements. The experience is extremely revealing, and these "fragments of an equatorial autobiography" are one of the main reasons for The View from Serendip to be a really great book. But I am only too well aware that if you happen to love Clarke's writings but for some reason disliking the man - a strange dichotomy, I should think, but it happens - you may find this book appallingly self-serving and impertinent. Needless to say, I don't. The View from Serendip is a very curious book indeed. For bibliographical purposes it is a collection of essays written during the 1960s and 1970s, more or less all of them appearing here collected in book form for the first time. Yet there are many introductory and concluding remarks printed in italics - indeed the whole of the first two pieces are thus printed! - which discuss the historical context of each piece, when and why it was written, and how the things have changed since then. Considering this rather desultory fashion, often spiced up with quotations from other works by Clarke, the final result is surprisingly coherent. Since many of these ''notes in italics'' go into detail about quite a few personal and professional moments from the author's life, the book can also be viewed as a kind of autobiography encompassing the period from the early 1950s to the middle 1970s, surely the most momentous one in Clarke's life, the accent being on the three big "S" that shaped it: Space, Sea and Serendip. For my part, the book is compulsively readable, stupendously entertaining and enormously thought-provoking on several different planes. Since the scope ranges from Indian politics to Moon colonization, I can do no more than merely point out few highlights. One bibliographical highlight is the only short story in this book, "When the Twerms Came" which is actually supposed to have been Clarke's last work in the genre, as he tells us in his notes. The story has subsequently appeared in the expanded 1987 edition of the collection The Wind from the Sun (originally published in 1972) and is omitted from the mammoth volume The Collected Stories (2001). It is no big loss, for the "story" really is a 400-word sketch for one that was never written. One of the many precious bits of autobiography is Clarke's mentioning that in 1973, after the publication of Rendezvous with Rama, he made up his mind to stop writing non-fiction, which others could easily do as well, and short stories, of which he thought he had written enough, but to concentrate entirely on novels - which nobody else could write he tells us, a somewhat immodest statement perhaps, but eminently truthful as well. In terms of short stories Clarke was almost as good as his word: he wrote very few during the 1980s and 1990s. Fortunately enough, he didn't stop writing "journalism", much of which is on uncommonly high level as the magnificent collection Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! (1999) amply testifies. So "Life in Space" - a compelling discussion of the nature of life and the chances to find it anywhere in the Solar System - was his ''last piece'' in this department only for a few years. And here is another fine definition of great writer: one that makes even the most hackneyed subject absorbing. Although the shadow of Serendip - just another name for what the ancient Greeks and Romans called Taprobane but we know as Ceylon or Sri Lanka - hovers over the whole book, there are several pieces entirely dedicated to Clarke's long-term residence there. These make a very pleasant contrast with space exploration and are just as varied. As obvious from the title, "Servant Problem - Oriental Style" deals with hiring Ceylonese butlers and other creatures no longer known in the West. In some other, less competent, hands (and minds), such stories about theft, cheating, adultery, drunkenness and whatever other vices you care to name would become a sordid and all but readable business. What Clarke makes out of it is a hilarious piece of non-fiction, full of good-natured fun and rare understanding of human nature. If you doubt the latter, put yourselves in Clarke's shoes and imagine your house servant - perhaps obsolete in the West today, but certainly not in the East few decades ago - asking you for a loan big enough to shoot a movie, or stealing your own colour film, using it and then returning it - for development, if it's not too much trouble. I don't even want to mention the first "boy" they hired, who actually was about forty years old and had a wife and nine children (the legitimate at least). In stark contrast, "Satellites and Saris" is a very serious piece, though dealing more with India than with Sri Lanka, recalling the giant endeavour in the 1970s to create an educational TV network in this superstitious-ridden country. I don't know about India, but worldwide, it seems to me, education has been one of the least successful incarnations of TV. And Internet doesn't exactly help the matter. But Clarke is not always so naughty when writing about Sri Lanka. Far from it. "The Sea of Sinbad" consists of two pieces written for the London Observer in 1966. Clarke is apologetic about his prose not matching the photographs of ....., but the fact is that these pieces do contain some of his most gorgeous prose. They are brimming with genuine affection, nay something more than that, for in the mid-1950s he fell in love with the small island. Unlike most love affairs, however, this one lasted for more than half a century. It is probably safe to say that Arthur Clarke is by far the most eminent resident Sri Lanka ever had. In these two pieces he has paid a moving tribute to this enigmatic place, going through its people, nature, history, and just about everything else in a most absorbing manner. In some other reviews of Clarke's books, I have deliberately refrained from quoting lest I end with ''review'' entirely comprised of quotations. Then again, this is probably the best kind of review of so rich and brilliantly written book. The first and last paragraphs of ''The Sea of Sinbad'' will give you just a hint of the ''small universe'' locked between them, but it is a pretty promising hint I think: The island of Ceylon is a small universe; it contains as many variations of culture, scenery, and climate as some countries a dozen times its size. What you get from it depends on what you bring; if you never stray from your hotel bar or the dusty stress of Westernized Colombo, you could perish of fulminating boredom in a week, and it would serve you right. But if you are interested in people, history, nature, and art - all the things that really matter - you may find, as I have, that a lifetime is not enough. [...] The drab, chill northern beach on which I had so often shivered through an English summer was merely the pale reflection of an ultimate and long-unsuspected beauty. Like the three princes of Serendip, I had found far more than I was seeking - in Serendip itself. Ten thousand kilometres from the place where I was born, I had come home. Somewhat disappointingly, the sea is rather slightly presented with only one short piece: "The Scent of Treasure", dealing with treasure hunts underwater of course. If anything, it shows that the part of Clarke's oeuvre concerned with underwater adventures is very unjustly neglected. It consists of at least four full-length books: The Coast Of Coral (1956), The Reefs of Taprobane (1957), The Challenge of the Sea (1960) and The Treasure of the Great Reef (1964). On the other hand, the biggest ''S'' in Clarke's life - Space - is more than amply presented with a number of pieces, most of them minor masterpieces. The range is typically Clarkian, encompassing everything from pieces of popular science discussing the ever-fascinating issue how long a man can survive in vacuum (''A Breath of Fresh Vacuum'') and tributes to legendary names in the field (''Willy and... Read more ›
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Dry, dated, lifeless essays,
By Dave Deubler (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The View from Serendip (Mass Market Paperback)
Not much good can be said about this collection of essays, speeches and reminiscences from science fiction colossus Arthur C. Clarke. Only one piece of fiction is included: the short short "When the Twerms Came" which could be considered clever, perhaps even cute, but hardly memorable. Not surprisingly, most of the offerings deal with space, or space travel, or predictions about future technological developments (many of which involve space and space travel), with the predictable result that as one gets further into the book, the essays begin to have a vague familiarity about them. Moreover, this volume closes with a piece written in 1977, so most of the collection is 25 years old or older; as a result, much of this material is sorely dated, although Clarke tries to rectify this by revisiting each subject in his introductions. All that aside, it's probably safe to say that the essay is not really Clarke's strong suit. His greatest gifts are his encyclopedic knowledge of science and its history, his almost poetic descriptions of nature, and his rarely seen but always pointed sense of humor. Many of these pieces demonstrate the first of these qualities, but very few take advantage of the latter two, much to the book's detriment. Clarke is at his most eloquent when describing his adopted country, Sri Lanka, (once known as Serendip, thus the title), or when he's discussing his passion for the world under the sea. So much of Clarke's work is borderline philosophical that he rarely indulges himself in humor, but when he does, he is usually very effective with it. (Does anyone remember his Tales from the White Hart? A classic of science fiction humor.) In this volume, he pokes fun at his competition in "Introducing Isaac Asimov" and gives a fascinating account of life in Sri Lanka in "Servant Problem - Oriental Style", but the rest of the book is pretty dry reading. Even die-hard fans of Clarke's work will find very little to get excited about in this one.
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