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Page xi
Introduction
The "Golden Age" of science fiction is generally taken to be 1939-1950, with Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Fritz Leiber being perhaps its most representative figures. Clarke, my subject here, is a very mixed writer, aesthetically considered, but his importance transcends his literary achievement. He may be best remembered for his association with the communications satellite, his work on Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001, and for his strenuous campaign to keep an American space program going, despite all its disappointments. His best novels do not come at his origins, but the early works interest me the most, so I will center here upon Against the Fall of Night (1948, 1953), Childhood's End (1953), and the revision and expansion of Against the Fall of Night in The City and the Stars (1956). All three fictions show the acknowledged influence of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930), at once Clarke's overwhelming precursor and perhaps also finally as much an inhibitor as an inspirer, if only because Stapledon sets an unsurpassable standard for future cosmological history. Stapledon has an imaginatively persuasive force that rises from obsessive conviction; his dying worlds and visions of the end of mankind can be said to have formed Clarke's imagination, once and for all.
Yet Clarke's early fictions survive as more than period pieces; they prefigure a popular mythology concerning space travel that does not seem to leave us even now, when no signals have reached us from across the seas of space and when it seems dubious that we can afford a continued quest for we-know-not-what. The Kubrick-Clarke 2001 increasingly seems a sadly optimistic title, seven years from the Millennium. Most of Clarke's secular prophecies have not been realized, but as Millennium beckons, one appreciates Clarke's firmly secular disposition. Against the Fall of Night locates Alvin, Clarke's characteristic quester, in the ageless city of Diaspar, an island in the wilderness of sand that constitutes the remainder of Earth. Glorious Diaspar is a prison-paradise of "gracious decadence" excluding the wonder of the unknown, of the star-world from which mankind has been driven back. As a city of the Immortals, with perpetually renewable life-cycles, Diaspar is not fully developed until its revision in The City and the Stars, where it does possess a certain grim, almost grotesque splendor. But here Clarke's literary flaws rather sadly enter in; his ironies are too obvious and uncontrolled, and he is seriously deficient in

 
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