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Farewell, Sir Arthur C Clarke
Posted by Peter Crowther on March 19th, 2008 at 19:28
I got the news about Arthur C. Clarke’s death first thing this morning. ‘Today’ started (on Radio 4) and one of the announcers – it might have been John Humphreys – mentioned it just as I was spreading marmalade on my toast. I thought of all the homes that that news would be drifting into and about how tragic it is… and yet how calmly most listeners would receive it. It’s always sad when someone dies, of course, but there are certain people who, to the members of any close-knit community, should really be given an exemption card to show the Reaper when he appears at their door with that damn scythe. Arthur was one of them.
Ken Slater, much loved book dealer (Fantast Medway and, latterly, Operation Fantast) and, I seem to recall, a founder member of the British Fantasy Society and a member of First Fandom (that rare and exclusive band of SF-ers who were around at the genre’s Big Bang) was another; Ken died last month. Both of them were 90 years old; not a bad innings, as they say… but I hated being ‘out’ when I played cricket, no matter how many runs I’d notched up.
In the early 1960s I could be found tramping around the corridors of Leeds Grammar School, age 12 or so, with a paperback stuffed into my blazer pocket. The paperbacks – mostly Ballentines and Pyramids, and Corgis and Panthers (Pan seemed to have only Charles Chilton and C. S. Lewis… curious bedfellows when you think about it) – were pretty much all SF, though Ballentine did a lovely line in ‘horror’ (Fritz Leiber’s Night’s Black Agents, John Kier Cross’s The Other Passenger and Zacherley’s two anthologies, Midnight Feast and Vampire Stew being good examples). Anyway, two of the writers whose work would so enthrall me were Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke.
Not surprisingly, then, this past few years have been particularly rewarding for me here at PS. First we republished Ray’s R is for Rocket and S is for Space, with a new Intro by Arthur (we’re currently doing several more of Ray’s finest works) and then – just a few months ago, in fact – we re-published an all-time fave of mine, Arthur’s Tales From the White Hart… with a brand new story from Arthur and Stephen Baxter. Alas, it’s the last White Hart story that’ll carry Arthur’s byline.
All of us here at PS wish him well on that final journey. I trust it’s as exciting and as enigmatic in reality as it was on the big screen. And when he gets there – wherever ‘there’ may be – I’m sure Ken will buy him a drink.