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humor. To think of the city in Borges's story, ''The Immortal," is to destroy Clarke's Diaspar as an imaginative conception. Borges's city of the Immortals is a complex and powerful irony, unforgettable as a critique of all Utopias, including the aesthetic ones. Clarke's own aesthetic Utopia, Comarre, in the early The Lion of Comarre (1948), like Diaspar cannot sustain comparison with Borges's Swiftian depiction of what it would mean never to die. |
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I find that, of early Clarke, Childhood's End best sustains rereading, perhaps because it catches so precisely Olaf Stapledon's speculative intensity as he broods on the saga of millions of years of ruined worlds. Childhood's End completes itself with a veritable apocalypse of Earth, as the human race pulses out to join the Overmind, which devours us, substance and spirit, and our world, in order to accomplish purposes beyond our ken. There is a singular dearth of affect at the novel's close, reminding us that Clarke lacks command of significant pathos even as he is rather deficient in irony. Though he helped establish the science fiction genre that is our modern mode of visionary romance, Clarke simply lacks the literary power of such great modern fantasies, with science fiction overtones, as David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and John Crowley's Little, Big. Yet it would be difficult to overestimate the pragmatic influence of Clarke's work, not only upon other writers but upon our lives, particularly upon our ventures into space, the few that have been, and perhaps (if he has his way) the many yet to come. |
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H. B. |
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