Seekers of Tomorrow (51 page)

* An all-but-forgotten name today, Warner Van Lome was a controversial author who appeared in astounding stories and astounding science-fiction from 1935 to 1939. For 25 years his true identity was speculated upon. People close to the magazine felt he was a pen name for F. Orlin Tremaine, one-time editor of astounding stories. It eventually developed that while Tremaine had written one Van Lome story,
The Upper Level Road,
the rest were the work of his brother Nelson Tremaine, now a resident of Glen Rock, New Jersey. Warner Van Lome's last story to be pub-lished was
Wanted: Seven Fearless
Engineers,
a distinctly superior bit of science fiction which ran in the February, 1939, amazing stories. today's body of science fiction. It is as if Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Ray Brad-bury, and the entire crew of "moderns" had never existed. He owes nothing to them and has derived nothing from them. His roots lie back before 1938 and his method has evolved from the older body of science fiction.

After emerging from college, he got a job in 1949 on the staff of the Institution of Electrical Engineers as assistant editor of science abstracts. This kept him abreast of the latest developments in science and gave him time to step up his writing schedule.

History Lesson,
published in the May, 1949, startling stories, evolved from the same basic idea as
Rescue Party
but took a different direction. Here, Venusians land on Earth after human life has been destroyed by a new ice age and they judge the life and inhabitants of the planet solely by an old Donald Duck cartoon they find.

The Wall of Darkness,
which appeared in the July, 1949, super science stories, is beyond doubt one of Clarke's finest short stories. Related in the manner of Lord Dunsany, it tells of-a far-off world at the edge of the universe, completely "separated" by a gigantic wall, a wall with only
one
side like a Moebius strip. It is a highly original and beautifully written story which deserves far more attention than it has received. Of particular significance was
Hide and Seek,
which ap-peared in the September, 1949, astounding science-fic-tion. This short story is built around the problem of a man in a space suit on the Martian moon Phobos who must keep alive and out of sight of an armed space cruiser until help arrives. How he does it is the story. This type of story is known as the "scientific problem" yarn: put the character into a difficult situation that can be solved only by legitimate scientific reasoning.

Ross Rocklynne popularized this type of story in a series concerning an interplanetary criminal, Deveral, pursued by an interplanetary cop, Colbie. The rogue Deveral always got away by figuring out a tricky scientific puzzle. A typical situation is the one in
The Men and the Mirror
(astounding science-fiction, July, 1938) in which criminal and cop have to decide how to stop sliding eternally back and forth across a frictionless concave surface on another world. This ap-proach eventually led to Clarke's
A Fall of Moon
Dust
where the problem of finding a ship in a sea of sand and bringing its occupants to the surface makes the puzzle.

In 1950, Clarke slightly changed direction. He secured a commission to do a short book,
Interplanetary
Flight, an Introduction to Astronautics,
for Temple, London. Though it was mildly technical, it sold well enough to warrant distribu-tion in the United States by Harper. This led to the sugges-tion that he try a longer, more ambitious work, and he began research on
The Exploration of Space.
A novelette written during this period,
Guardian Angel,
was considered strong enough by his American agent to aim at a higher-paying market. His agent was told by the editor of one of the better general fiction magazines that he might be interested if the story were trimmed from 15,000 to 10,000 words. James Blish, who was working for the agency at the time, cut the story and added an additional twist concerning an impending Armageddon that he felt would strengthen it. The yarn was nevertheless rejected, but eventu-ally it was sold in its full length to famous fantastic mysteries (April, 1950), with Blish's addition intact. The original version appeared the same year in England in the Winter, 1950, new worlds. The story concerned omnipotent creatures from out of space who stop all war on Earth and get mankind to behave. The big mystery is what they look like, since no one has ever seen them. The punch line comes when they appear, replicas of the Devil. With and without changes the story was a fine job, but the kernel of the idea was taken from John Camp-bell's
The Mightiest Machine
(astounding stories, Decem-ber, 1934, to April, 1935), in which a race of devillike crea-tures who first lived on Earth migrate to another planet and once again constitute a danger to the mother world.

Prelude to Space,
an ambling novel of the preparation for the first trip to the moon, written the summer of 1947, appeared in galaxy science fiction novels in 1951 and proved to be unexpectedly popular. The science was good and the motives of the characters involved were effectively portrayed, but the book was too close to the present and has already become outdated. We now know that that's not how the first trip to the moon is going to take place at all.

Another novel,
Sands of Mars,
published in hardcover by Sidgwick Jackson, London, in 1951, was documentary in approach, possibly inspired by
Wreck of the Asteroid
by Laurence Manning (wonder stories, December, 1932) and it concerned a science-fiction writer's trip to Mars and his efforts to win the confidence of the pioneers there. Except for the inclusion of several very adult inferences, the book, all protestations to the contrary, should be classed as a juvenile.

Superiority,
a short story published in the August, 1951, issue Of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY

AND SCIENCE FICTION, brought Clarke prestige when it was made required reading for certain classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol-ogy. The story had a moral for those scientists so determined to increase the sophistication of their work that they lose out to those aggressively using conventional methods. The same month, thrilling wonder stories carried
Earth-light,
the novelette originally written for Gillings'

short-lived fantasy. This story of a power struggle between the planets to gain control of the mineral resources of the moon contains one of the most vivid and thrilling space battles ever to appear in science fiction, not excepting the interstellar extravaganzas of E. E. Smith and John W. Campbell which it deliberately set out to top. The story was expanded into a full-length novel, published by Ballantine Books in 1955.

By far the most important event of 1951 for Clarke was the publication of
The Exploration of Space
by Temple Press Ltd., London. A feature of this book was four full-color paintings by Leslie Carr, derived from drawings by R. A. Smith (who also had some black-and-white astronomical drawings in the volume). Harper's distributed the book in the United States, where it was submitted to the Book-of-the-Month Club for consideration. Basil Davenport, a science-fiction enthusiast and literary critic, was then a reader for the organization. He understood the scope of Clarke's book and highly recommended it to the judges. It happened to be a month when no "important" work appeared, so after some debate the judges decided on a joint selection for the month of July, 1952, one of them
The Exploration of Space.
A report written by Arthur Jean Cox in the first April, 1952, issue of fantasy times stated that Clarke had re-ceived a $20,000 advance for
The Exploration of Space.
This was disputed by The Scott Meredith Literary Agency in the second (May, 1952) issue of that magazine as "an understatement." Whatever the amount, Clarke triumphantly sailed to America to pick up his check personally. A hero in the science-fiction world, he was feted at the May 4, 1952, meeting of the Eastern Science Fiction Association in Newark, N. J., and featured at The Third Annual Mid-western Science Fiction Conference in Sharonville, Ohio, on May 12. At these meetings members of the science-fiction community attempted to put their ringer on the quality that had caused Clarke's book to become the success it was. There had been other books on space travel before, some more definitive, embodying much more of the discoveries of research and even more fascinatingly written. Clarke's, they finally decided, was the first to define the "reasons why." He presented the case for space travel not only in terms of mechanics and economics but
philosophically,
and no one had done that as well before.

To write
Childhood's End,
Clarke used
Guardian Angel
(his own version) as the foundation of the early part of the story and then built from there to a Stapledonian finale in which all mankind unifies into a single intelligence and as-cends the next step in the ladder of evolution—which is to be sent to a spatial heaven in a mystical parallel to religion. Does this then make Clarke a subconscious religionist? As if to anticipate that question, on the copyright page of the book, Clarke prints in lieu of a dedication the disclaimer: "The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author."
Childhood's End
(Ballantine Books, 1952) received the major review in the new york times for August 27, 1952.

Admitting that the ingredients of the novel were science fiction, the reviewer, William Du Bois, acknowledged: "Mr. Clarke has mixed them with a master hand." He. termed the book "a first-rate tour de force that is well worth the attention of every thoughtful citizen in this age of anxiety." In conclusion he stated: "The review can only hint at the stimulation Mr. Clarke's novel offers." If a science-fiction novel had ever received a more favorable review in a publi-cation of major influence it is well hidden.
Childhood's
End
was certainly Clarke's most important and effective work of fiction and was generally recognized as such by a majority of the reviewers.

Clarke toured the United States. Finally decided he liked Florida and spent some time there skin diving. He married an American girl he had met and known for only a few weeks in 1954, but a separation occurred after a relatively short time.

Interest in skin diving brought him together with Mike Wilson, a crack photographer who had done work for life magazine in the Orient. They went into partnership engaging in underwater photography along the Great Barrier Reef of Australia and off the coast of Ceylon. Mike Wilson married a Ceylonese girl and settled down in Colombo; Clarke became a citizen of Ceylon and moved in with the Wilsons. He wrote a number of books on skin diving, but his science-fiction novel
The Deep Range
(Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York, 1957), which was dedicated to Mike Wilson, is one of the finest and most absorbing expositions on future farming of the seas ever done. Impressed by the potentiali-ties, the wall street journal reviewed the book as of interest to the business community (April 2, 1957). The highest honors in the science-fiction world were both presented to Clarke at the 14th World Science Fiction Con-vention in New York in 1956, where he was guest of honor and also was given the Hugo for the best short science-fiction story of the previous year,
The Star
(infinity science fiction, November, 1955). This story, dealing with the dis-covery of the remains of the star that became a nova at the time of Christ's birth and thus destroyed a noble race, poses a moral dilemma intended to strike the reader with consider-able impact. Despite almost a clumsy telegraphing of the punch line by the author, it still had the desired effect on its readers.

A far greater honor for Clarke was the receipt of the 1962 Kalinga Prize, awarded by UNESCO for the populari-zation of science. The honor carries with it $2,800 in cash, but from the prestige standpoint it placed Clarke in company with such past winners as Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, and George Gamow. The prize was given in acknowledg-ment of the fact that Clarke's writings in fiction and non-fiction, educating the masses in science, have resulted in sales of over two million books in fifteen languages as well as more than three hundred articles and stories in publications as distinguished as reader's digest, the new york times, horizon, holiday, harper’s, playboy, vogue, and Saturday review. Though there was admittedly an element of good fortune in Clarke's book-of-the-month-club selection, augmented by his own shrewdness in making capital of it, the momentum of his progress, particularly as a writer of fiction, could be sustained only by performance.

His "failings" as a writer are many in the realm of science fiction. For the most part he was not an innovator. As a literary technician he was outclassed by a number of contem-poraries. His style, by current standards, was not "modern." Yet, people in many countries bought and read him with enthusiasm and hard-headed critics applauded his efforts.

What is the answer to this seeming paradox?

In an age fraught with horror and despair he was optimis-tic. Mankind, in his stories, is essentially noble and aspires and triumphs despite all difficulties.

Behind each of his stories is a thought-provoking concept or philosophy. Whether these are or are not original with him is beside the point; some nugget of thought is always present and they read new to this generation. The ideas are never introduced obliquely or discussed in a blase, over-sophisticat-ed, or matter-of-fact manner, a method indigenous in too much of modern science fiction. Instead, he vests them with all the poetry, wonder, awe, mystery, and adventure that he is capable of conjuring up. Even if it is only the preparation of the first space rocket, he attempts to communicate the richness and implication of an overwhelming experience.

His science is thorough, authentic, yet easily followed.

These factors, together with his obvious sincerity, en-tranced the reader and won over the critics. For Arthur C. Clarke, the direction his science-fiction writing was to take was decided at the end of World War II. Consciously or not, he went against the trend. For him, a paraphrase of Robert Frost's famous lines certainly applies: He took the road least traveled by and that made all the difference.