[ExI] the view from 40 yrs ago

Sat Aug 20 16:06:59 UTC 2022

From: Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> 
Subject: Re: [ExI] the view from 40 yrs ago

Nice, I hadn't seen that one before. You might appreciate these:

https://youtu.be/rpq5ZmANp0k

https://youtu.be/wC3E2qTCIY8

https://youtu.be/08dTQEReVno

Jason

Excellent Jason, thanks!  All three of these were right on.

Aside having nothing to do with the original topic but these links reminded me of it: Arthur Clarke was my favorite writer as I cheerfully squandered my tragically misspent youth.  One thing I could always count on Clarke to do is to fumble the ending.  He spun such marvelous yarns, but never seemed to know how to write a satisfactory ending for any of them.  Perhaps Songs of Distant Earth was the closest he ever came to writing a satisfactory ending.  

Clarke was so unlike Orson Scott Card, who really finished up with a flourish.  Clarke’s endings were always such a disappointment, a young person would like to co-author with him, a Pournelle and Niven arrangement.  Clarke could set up the book, then a group of talented young authors could write a cool endings, Clarke could pick his favorite and work it in.

For instance… consider Rendezvous with Rama.  One almost gets the feeling that Clarke needed a paycheck, or just got tired of writing it, then tacked on that wacky nonsense at the end, damn.

Suppose you could Clarke’s play pin the tail on the tale game.  Keep all the cool stuff Clarke wrote: Jimmy Pak, Bill Norton and the others do their thing.  Then… the boarding crew notices there is a slight net acceleration.  Instead of violating Newton’s third (oh Arthur, how could you write such goofy a thing?) the crew goes outside and discovers a high-velocity particle beam responsible for Rama’s acceleration.  They do some calculations, recognize the acceleration is gradually increasing, realize they better get back to the mothership soon or they will never see it again, they reluctantly leave, Dr. Perera still receives that cool “The Ramans do everything in threes” premonition that allows Clarke to get his paycheck while simultaneously setting us up for part 2 of the trilogy.

But I digress.

spike

On Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 8:52 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

Remarkable:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1560780183824629760

spike

_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> 
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20220820/bc338118/attachment.htm>