The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [2]
Such attention to technical detail shows that even at sixteen I was already a hard-core science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) writer. Credit for this must go to the book which had almost as great an impact on me as Stapledon’s epic—and which illustrates rather well the fundamental distinction between art and science. No one else could ever have created Last and First Men—but if David Lasser had not written The Conquest of Space in 1931, someone similar would certainly have appeared in a very few years. The time was ripe.
Although there was already considerable German and Russian literature on the subject, The Conquest of Space was the very first book in the English language to discuss the possibility of flight to the Moon and planets, and to describe the experiments and dreams (mostly the latter) of the early rocket pioneers. Only a few hundred copies of the British edition were sold, but chance brought one of them to a bookstore a few yards from my birthplace. I saw it in the window, knew instinctively that I had to read it, and persuaded my good-natured Aunt Nellie—who was looking after me while Mother struggled to run the farm and raise my three siblings—to buy it on the spot. And so I learned, for the first time, that space travel was not merely delightful fiction. One day it could really happen. Soon afterwards I discovered the existence of the British Interplanetary Society, and my fate was sealed.
When he wrote The Conquest of Space, the twenty-eight-year-old David Lasser was editor of a whole group of Gernsback magazines, including Wonder Stories. Later he became a labor organizer and was denounced in Congress—not only as a dangerous radical but also as a madman, because he believed that we would one day fly to the Moon . . . When I met him in Los Angeles just a couple of weeks ago, he told me he was working on a new book; a good title might be Lasser’s Last Laugh.
Despite all these influences, I was well over thirty before writing graduated from a pleasant and occasionally profitable hobby to a profession. The Civil Service, the Royal Air Force and editorship of a scientific abstracting journal provided my bread-and-butter until 1950. By that time I had published numerous stories and articles, and a slim technical book, Interplanetary Flight. The modest success of this volume led me to seek a wider public with The Exploration of Space, which the Book of the Month Club, in a moment of wild abandon, made a dual selection in 1952. To allay the alarm of its anxious readership, Clifton Fadiman explained in the BoM newsletter that The Exploration of Space was no crazy fantasy but a serious and level-headed work because “Mr. Clarke does not appear to be a very imaginative man.” I’ve never quite forgiven him, and my agent, Scott Meredith, has never forgotten my plaintive query: “What is the Book-of-the-Month Club?”
This stroke of luck—repeated exactly thirty years later with 2010: Odyssey Two, so I can claim it wasn’t a fluke—encouraged me to give up my editorial job and become a full-time writer. It was not a very daring or heroic decision: if all else failed, I could always go back to the farm.
I was lucky; unlike most of the writers I know, I had very few setbacks or disappointments, and my rare rejection slips were doubtless thoroughly justified. And because every author is unique, the only advice I have ever been able to pass on to would-be writers is incorporated in a few lines on the notorious form letter which Archie, my word-processor, spits out at all hopeful correspondents at the drop of a floppy disk: “Read at least one book a day, and write as much as you can. Study the memoirs of authors who interest you. (Somerset Maugham’s A Writer’s Notebooks is a good example.) Correspondence courses, writer’s schools, etc., are probably useful—but all the authors I know were self-taught. There is no substitute for living; as Hemingway wisely remarked, ‘Writing is not a full-time occupation.’”
Nor is reading