Joe Curwen <jcurwen@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
>In article <Xns9A65D05BE276Bkensuhotmailcom@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Chris
Schumacher
>says...
>>
>>Arthur C. Clarke, the last, and greatest of the four titans, and hence
the
>>greatest SF writer of the 20th century.
>>I always admired his boyish curiousity, love for ideas and gadgetry,
>The news reports have mentioned that he came up with the idea for
>telecommunications satellites, but didn't he also come up with the idea
for
>space elevators? Even if he didn't, I found his writing on the idea
completely
>fascinating - probably the best part of the novel 2010.
He didn't, in fact, invent the idea of space elevators: as
usual for this sort of thing, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky did [1]. But what
Clarke*did* do was present the idea, in such a neatly compelling fashion,
that it became respectable science fiction [2], and into slightly less
respectable but still discussable science speculation, both by his
novel _The Fountains of Paradise_ and in technical and semi-technical
explanations of the science behind the idea. Think of him as serving
the role Jules Verne did for submarines or spacecraft: the ideas were
around before him, but after him, people knew what they were.
[1] If you don't know to whom to attribute some grand idea in
spaceflight, guess Tsiolkovsky. You'll have quite a good track record.
[2] Charles Sheffield, who wrote _The Web Between The Worlds_,
featuring the building of a space elevator almost simultaneously to
Clarke's writing his novel, faced trouble getting editors to believe
this was even remotely handwavingly plausible before Clarke's novel was
known to the editorial world.
--
Joseph Nebus
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