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Arthur C. Clarke
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 Arthur C. Clarke, like Isaac Asimov, has had a lifelong commitment to logic and rationality, has
written many impressive works of popular science (principally about space travel, astronomy, and the oceans), and
a fair number of humorous sf stories. Hard sf humor, invented in its modern form by L. Sprague
DeCamp, Anthony Boucher, Henry Kuttner, and Fredric Brown in the late 1930s and early 1940s, flourished in
the 1950s. Clarke joined the tradition with a series of stories collected in
Tales From the White Hart (1957), full of clever notions and (occasionally bad) jokes following the lead of L. Sprague De Camp and Fletcher
Pratt's Tales from Gavagan's Bar (1953).
A certain element of clever scientific puzzles and games has always been present in hard science
fiction, the legacy perhaps of Lewis Carroll, or of math classes and their word problems. And logic problems of all
sorts are the meat of hard science fiction. They can make such lovely, surprising plot twists. Rod Serling
took this kind of story, sometimes derived from the fantasy of John Collier and sometimes from this type of sf,
and made clever plotting an essential element of his own "Twilight Zone."
This tiny entertainment, an example of the short short story (of which form Fredric Brown, Asimov,
and Clarke are masters), is a gem by one of the greats of hard sf. It is the humorous translation of a recursive
series -- which is theoretically infinite -- from mathematics into prose. It is both a visual pun and an
intellectual joke, perhaps the scientists version of the concrete poem.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
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Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.