Arthur C. Clarke’s science-fiction tales of space exploration proved prescient.

By DAVE ITZKOFF

Whether Arthur C. Clarke, the celebrated science-fiction writer is measured by such enduring science-fiction novels as “2001: A Space Odyssey,’’ in which he conceived of a space-travel program before man walked on the moon, or purely scientific papers like “Extraterrestrial Relays,’’ in which he described geosynchronous communications satellites two decades before one ever orbited the earth, the author, who died March 19 at age 90, will long enjoy a legacy as a titan of speculative thought, seemingly capable of willing innovations into existence simply by imagining them.
Yet Mr. Clarke’s passing poses a challenge to the current generation of sciencefiction writers: in a world where technology evolves so rapidly that the present already feels like the future, will a modernday author ever inherit Mr. Clarke’s aura of prescience- Do any of his successors share his apparent talent for envisioning technological breakthroughs before they are realized- To be sure, Mr. Clarke’s reputation benefited from good timing: the publication of celebrated novels like “Childhood’s End’’ and “2001’’ in the 1950s and ‘60s corresponded to a steady flow of advancements in aerospace engineering, spurred by the cold war.
Yet by the 1970s that flow had diminished to a trickle - not because scientists lacked imagination, but because they lacked sufficiently powerful energy sources to drive the ambitious devices they were dreaming up.
The new class of science-fiction writers who emerged in the 1980s did not gaze upwards at the stars, but down at their PC monitors.
Cyberpunks like William Gibson, contemplating the impact a worldwide computer network might have on human interaction and personal identity, wrote fiction not, perhaps, as sexy as Mr. Clarke’s tales of interstellar exploration and alien contact, but equally perceptive.
The next time you log onto a Web-based virtual reality site like Second Life or a multiplayer online game like World of Warcraft, thank Neal Stephenson for inventing the Metaverse, his three-dimensional online world, in “Snow Crash. The present-day authors of speculative fiction must contend with a world that is more technologically complicated than even a futurist like Mr. Clarke could have envisioned.
“What we’ve discovered is the future isn’t very clear-cut, said Charles Stross, author of tech-savvy novels like “Accelerando and “Glasshouse. “Rather than new technologies replacing older ones, we have them all adding on top, so we’ve got more and more stuff to deal with. But where is it written that making predictions about future technology is the only proper function of science fiction- Today’s science-fiction authors expect “that the fictions we’re writing now will never come about, said Ian McDonald, whose novels “River of Gods and “Brasyl export familiar themes of Western science fiction to developing nations like India.
“The future will always be different, not just from what we imagine, but what we can imagine, he said.