| Posted: 17 December 2017 at 5:42pm | IP Logged | 3
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Clarke was as foundational to my worldview as any other artist working in any other medium. It's kind of depressing to walk into a bookstore these days and see how his catalog has been reduced to 'Childhoods End' and maybe one of the 2001 series.
For starters, Robbie, I'd recommend getting an omnibus of Clarke's short stories. There's almost not a clunker in the bunch. Clarke's dry, precise prose is probably the most elegant of the major science fiction writers of the middle 20th century. It always struck me as very British, but you'd probably be a better judge of that (it's not terribly far removed from C.S. Lewis, in my mind, particularly if you compare any of Clarke's earlier novels to something like Lewis's 'Out of the Silent Planet.'
And while Clarke's shorts always deliver the hard sci-fi good, there are a few that really stand out in memory and also show his breadth as a secularist thinker who wasn't afraid to grapple with religion and philosophy: Maelstrom II, Breaking Strain, The Nine Billion Names of God (with one of the best closing lines in all of fiction), I Remember Babylon (which pretty much came true), The Wind from the Sun... man, I could just list the entire catalog. Of note is his collection of Tales from the White Hart, a series of sci-fi tall tales set in a bar that let Clarke play around with all of his fun ideas that weren't particularly, well, scientifically accurate, which was always his key mission.
So may of his novels have disappeared, but up until 1986 or so, he never wrote a bad novel. His last truly good one, 'The Songs of Distant Earth,' showed the strains of a guy who didn't really much like to sit down and write anymore (this isn't me casting aspersions, mind you; he says as much in the afterword).
The original 'Rendezvous with Rama' is a stone classic, but do yourself a favor and skip the half-assed sequels. As noted above, Clarke really quit being a writer by the late 80's, so the later books were written in collaboration with Gentry Lee. Which is to say that Clarke wrote a general outline and Lee wrote the books, and it shows.
Clarke's run of novels from the 70's are probably his best, including Rama. Look for 'Imperial Earth' and 'The Fountains of Paradise.' His early ones mentioned by others ('The City and the Stars') are fun, golden-age mindblowers. Childhoods End is a must, of course. The first three 2001 books are all good (the last, 3001, is okay, but half-baked). And a good example of Clarke's general output is 'A Fall of Moondust' - not a classic, but a good potboiler by a guy who really knew how to make pots boil.
Have fun, and keep us posted. I'm a bit envious in that you're exploring an author I've run out of works to explore.
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