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sensible title than the more usual Journey to the Center . . .! Oddly enough, I do not remember my first encounter with From the Earth to the Moon or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the two books which relate most closely to my own interests. |
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Rider Haggard (When the World Shook) and Conan Doyle (The Lost Worldstill my candidate for the perfect specimen of its genre) had also swum into my ken. And occasionallyperhaps once or twice a year!I ran across other hardcover sf. (. . .) |
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Soon after it was published in 1930, I discovered W. Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men; I can still visualize the very shelf on which I found it in the Minehead Public Library. That such an imaginative work would be purchased by a provincial librarian was doubtless due to the reviews it had received. "As original as the solar system," said Hugh Walpole (how did he know?) while Arnold Bennett praised the author's "tremendous and beautiful imagination." Similar compliments came from a failed politician, then living by his witsone Winston Churchill. |
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Though its opening chapters have been completely dated by events which make some of their political ideas seem naive, no book before or since has had such an impact on my imagination; the Stapledonian vistas of millions and hundreds of millions of years, the rise and fall of civilizations and entire races of Man, changed my whole outlook on the Universe and has influenced much of my writing ever since. Twenty years later, as Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, I persuaded Stapledon to give us an address on the social and biological aspects of space exploration, which he entitled "Interplanetary Man?" His was one of the noblest and most civilized minds I have ever encountered: I am delighted to see a revival of interest in his life and work. |
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Arthur C. Clarke, Astounding Days: A Science Fiction Autobiography (1989; rpt. New York: Bantam Books, 1990), pp. 2224 |
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In the decade following The Foundations of Paradise, announced as his last novel, readers saw poignant evidence that Clarke, however right he had been in sensing that he had no more to say, yet found himself (and this is hardly to his discredit) unsuited to a distinguished retirement. Clarke in fact published more in the 1980s than he had in the 1970s, although evidence of flagging inspiration was manifest. His novels |
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