Re: Clarke - two questions

Mike Schilling schrieb:
> "Matthias Warkus" <Warkus@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
> news:frrv5c$1906$4@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> Mike Stone schrieb:
>>> "Anthony Nance" <nance@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
>>> news:frrjbq$4kq$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>>> Today's USAToday has a very nice half-page appreciation article
>>>> (written by Cesar G. Soriano, special for USAToday).
>>>>
>>>> There's an in-set box titled "1953-73: A Collection of Clarke
Titles",
>>>> and subtitled "Arthur C. Clarke's expansive body of work includes
>>>> these seminal titles:".  Listed are these five works:
>>>>
>>>> - Childhood's End
>>>> - The City and the Stars
>>>> - The Nine Billion Names of God (collected short stories, 1951-56)
>>>> - 2001: A Space Odyssey
>>>> - Rendezvous With Rama
>>>>
>>>> It is not said why they stuck to 1953-73.
>>>>
>>>
>>> They were being kind - sticking to (roughly) the period when he could 
>>> still
>>> write.
>> For a sufficiently low value of "write". Clarke's works, when they are 
>> good, are good in spite of having been written by him, not because of
it.
> 
> That's a silly thing to say, unless you're using a very restricted
meaning 
> of "write".
> 
> "Let's see, I'd like Clarke's ideas, with Clarke's method of presenting 
> them, and Clarke's sense of humor, but use Jack Vance's vocabulary." 

Style just wasn't his thing. His humour is heavy-handed and not very 
funny, IMHO.

"Laughtrack

Characters grandstand and tug the reader's sleeve in an effort to force 
a specific emotional reaction. They laugh wildly at their own jokes, cry 
loudly at their own pain, and rob the reader of any real chance of 
attaining genuine emotion." (http://www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html)

Clarke's popularity (with me, too) has nothing to do with him being a 
particularly great stylist, but with his having outrageously great ideas 
and fleshing them out in a way that relies heavily on his broad 
knowledge of science and engineering, while never boring his readers. 
OK, at least not in his short stories.

mawa
-- 
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