Clarke leaves behind a legacy of pushing minds into deep space

Take it as a sign of my innate Libran duality, or perhaps the company I keep, but I remember quite clearly a drunken conversation over a campfire about Arthur C. Clarke and his film/novel, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

I tend to think of sci-fi as a genre not often discussed across an open flame with a bottle of bourbon in hand. Sci-fi conjures images in my mind of smarter men than I debating the real-life merits of the hyper-drive, the elasticity of time and the corresponding risks of time travel, or the true nature of intelligence.

Then again, sci-fi also tends to get ghettoized by connoisseurs of literature, being pegged as genre fiction every bit as swiftly as Westerns or horror or bodice-rippers. Sci-fi, some might say, is as dependent upon stereotypes and simplistic formulas as any of those.

At its worst, perhaps. At its best, science fiction is the food of the gods, imagination-fueling trips to the other side of reality through landscapes that only exist inside minds more infinite than any stretch of the universe. In their own way, the great science fiction authors demand every bit as much out of their audiences as William Faulkner or James Joyce. Instead of challenging them with language, however, they challenge them with concepts.

People such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Frank Herbert, Kurt Vonnegut and Olaf Stapledon have done more for my intellectual growth than Steinbeck, Hemingway and Fitzgerald put together.

Then there’s Clarke, who’s on my mind partially because he died earlier this week. Mostly he’s on my mind because he’s always on my mind. Clarke’s life and his writing, for me, represent both the noblest impulses of the human spirit, as well as the greatest of society’s failings.

Clarke was that rare writer that actually spurred science to greater heights, influencing both the development of geostationary communications satelites and the still-in-development space elevator. Even more, Clarke was a storyteller. He was a man who tried to come to terms with the past, make sense of the present and envision the future through stories.

I won’t claim to be an expert on his work, especially because he wrote more than 100 books and I’ve only read a handful of them. Even if he’d only written “Childhood’s End” or “2001” or “Rendezvous with Rama,” though, that would be enough.

In “Childhood’s End,” he envisions the meeting between humanity and an alien intelligence that changes the course of human evolution forever. Both “2001” and “Rendezvous” deal with similar confrontations of the unknown and the unintended consequences they have on both individuals and the societies they make up.

In fact, if I were to offer a criticism of Clarke, it would be much the same criticism I’d make of Stanley Kubrick, his partner in the “2001” endeavor. Both men seemed sometimes to lose sight of the humanity in the midst of their grand portrayals of the forces that work on the worlds. While both men’s visions offered a level of scenic detail almost unequaled by their peers, they often forgot the key details that would have made their characters seem like more than two-dimensional representations of the big ideas they were trying to feed into our tiny little minds.

I said “if,” OK. Don’t bite my head off.

Reading “Childhood’s End” changed my life in the same way reading “Stranger in a Strange Land” or Herbert’s “Destination Void” altered it. Science fiction has the power to do that, to rewire your brain, to skew the way you look at time and the nature of reality. It’s a written hallucinogen, capable of being taken by even the straightest among us.

Or by me, which brings me back to the campfire, the bourbon and the debate about “2001.” It started with me extolling the virtues of the film, which I believe to be one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, the true transference of a brilliant idea, virtually unfiltered, to celluloid.

Some people think it’s a boring, pretentious gush of space flatulence. Personally, I respect their opinion, though I hate to think what the aliens will say when they hear about it.

But my debating partner that night wasn’t a hater of Kubrick’s pacing, nor of his non-character-driven narrative style. His name was (and is) Nick, and in recent years, he’s gotten paid to travel around the country debating right-wingers about creationism and intelligent design.

That night, however, he was just another guy sitting around a fire, and he told me that he thought Kubrick’s ending to the film was a lazy cop-out, a vague psychedelic spasm that the director had pretended meant more than it did. Clarke’s version of the story, he claimed, ended much more concretely, and thus served a greater purpose.

At the time, I hadn’t read “2001,” only seen it about 20 times. What I did know that Nick didn’t was that the movie was actually written before the book. Clarke wrote it in close collaboration with Kubrick, a man not given to sharing the reins with anyone. I’ve always wondered, then, if Clarke’s ending to the book was what he and Kubrick wrote down, or if it was his attempt to make some sense out of the madness of Kubrick’s visuals?

Or, was Kubrick’s ending the result of his attempt to visualize Clarke’s concepts, for which there is no cinematic language?

If you want to try your own science experiment at home, get a bottle of bourbon and a raging fire and see how long you can debate similar ideas. You don’t have to be brilliant to read science fiction, you just have to have an open mind, an active imagination and a willingness to stretch both.

Writers such as Arthur C. Clarke taught me that. He created worlds I couldn’t resist, then populated them with ideas that I couldn’t stop from changing my perspective. I’m not sure if aliens exist, but if they do, I bet they’re wearing black this week.

Jake TenPas can be reached at jake.tenpas@lee.net or 758-9514.