Un article de Silverberg sur Clarke

[jerome]

Robert Silverberg a mis en ligne un article sur Arthur C.Clarke : "REREADING CLARKE".

C'est ici

Voici le début :
"The merits of most of the science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke have largely escaped me. There is no denying the overwhelming visionary fertility of his imagination—he exceeds all others in his ability to show us the wonders of the as yet uncharted realms of space and time—and some of his short stories are superb. But the big, bland novels that repeatedly put him on the best-seller lists—the Rendezvous with Rama books, Imperial Earth, 2001 and its various sequels, et cetera, have always struck me, despite their passages of great conceptual inventiveness, as dull, slow, and passionless. That they should have enjoyed such great commercial success and gobbled up so many Hugo and Nebula awards left me baffled.

In my first few years as a science fiction reader, though, when everything was new and wondrous for me and I had not yet come to judge what I read with the eye of a fellow practitioner of the craft, Clarke’s earliest published fiction had a powerful impact on me—such stories as “Loophole” and “Rescue Party,” and the short novel Against the Fall of Night, all of which I read when I was thirteen or fourteen. So I decided, for this series of essays on rereading my early SF favorites, to see what it was that I had found so marvelous in Clarke’s first novel when I encountered it more than sixty years ago.

As it happened, the edition of Against the Fall of Night that I took down from the shelf also contained a novella, “The Lion of Comarre,” that first appeared in the pulp magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories in the summer of 1949, when I was barely into my teens. I remembered that one fondly, too; and so I began my Clarke research with it now."