We'd take a path to Jupiter and maybe very soon / We'd cruise along the Milky Way and land upon the

[austin_dern]

I'm not sure what the first Arthur C Clarke novel I read was. My suspicion is that it was the novel component to 2001: A Space Odyssey, since that was so very accessible and often on the reading lists used to get high school students into the habit of glazing briefly over the contents of a book during the summer. I wouldn't be surprised if I had read one of his books of science essays first, though, since I came to science fiction surprisingly late in the game for a fan and usually from the nonfiction side of things. I know he made a deep impression on me, even if I didn't always understand what he was getting at: in the unspeakably horrible science fiction novel I actually wrote, all the way to the end, when I was fifteen the resolution was imitative of Clarke. It was also a demonstration that Clarke's tone and control are such that a fifteen-year-old who honestly wasn't well-read in fiction could not imitate them.

Quite a few of his novels, particularly The Fountains of Paradise and Rendezvous With Rama and A Fall of Moondust, give off the feeling, to me anyway, of not being fictional constructs; they read more like the reconstructions of the stories of remarkable historical events. They have the peculiarities and small quirks and credible fumbles of reality. They satisfy the same part of my mind that wants to read how the transcontinental railroad was built, or the Erie Canal dug, or containerized cargo took over the world's shipping needs. I remember waking up one day thinking of the wonderful space elevator built in Taprobane and how lucky I was to live at a time things like that happened. It's easy to confuse reality and fiction while partially awake, but this was a very persistent feeling.

Another thing he did which always impressed me was that he could capture the feeling of deep time. Famously, The City And The Stars (rewritten as Against The Fall Of Night) posits a city in the distant future, a billion years from today. I've never known clearly whether that was the American billion or the former British billion, but either way it's a staggering time into the future, and somehow, he made me feel it. Who knows when we'll see that sort of ability again?

In memorial, I watched the ``Spider'' episode of HBO's From The Earth To The Moon miniseries. Clarke had nothing to do with the episode, the one where they build the Lunar Module, but there's really no reason he couldn't have composed it.

Trivia: Pan American Aviation's inaugural daily passenger service, beginning in 1927 with flights from Key West, Florida, to Havana, Cuba, used two new Fokker F-10 Trimotors and charged passengers $100 round-trip. Source: Naked Airport, Alastair Gordon.

Currently Reading: The Silver Metal Lover, Tanith Lee.

Comments

[orv.livejournal.com]

I suspect those Fokker Trimotors didn't stay in passenger service long. The Ford Trimotor made its debut around that time as the first all-metal transport aircraft, and quickly made those fabric-and-tube jobs seem obsolete.

I think the first Clarke book I read was Childhood's End.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Probably -- I'm stunned when I learn what short life-cycles commercial airplanes of that era had, but I suppose when the planes are the size of the average modern minivan and cost sometimes as much as $7,000 replacing them in three years is acceptable.

My references on-hand (I don't actually have Naked Airport, just a selection of information points taken from it) don't say when the Fokker Trimotors were replaced, but does note a 1931 commission for Sikorsky to produce the S-40 seaplane. So they were planning on replacing them by then, at least.

[orv.livejournal.com]

1931 is also when there was well-publicized accident involving a Fokker Trimotor. It flew into a thunderstorm and suffered a structural failure in extreme turbulence. It was by all accounts a good, sturdy design for the era, but that accident understandably turned public sentiment against it.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, that would be another issue. Naked Airport didn't go into that since it's based on the airport concept and implementation and delays and whatnot, and oddly enough I don't seem to have a general aviation history in my reading materials. I had the book on the Boeing 247, and some reading material about Henry Ford and his many personality disorders, but that didn't get much into Fokker.