Really Short Reviews: Prelude to Space, The Sands of Mars

[jeriendhal]

Both of these short novels are by Arthur C. Clarke, collected in the omnibus "Prelude to Mars" which also features his Tales of the White Hart short stories and a few minor serious shorts (none of which, thankfully, are "The Sentinel")




Prelude to Space

Science Guys: "We're going to go to the Moon!"

Historian Guy: "Cool! I'll take notes. When do we leave?"

Science Guys: "Oh, no. The book is about planning to go to the moon. Here, watch this filmstrip about all the cool exposition the author wants to insert."

Historian Guy: "Okay."

Strawman Luddite: "Hah! I'm going to sabotage the rocket the night before the launch! Watch as I cleverly sneak into atomic rocket nozzle....

"Oh, wait." Dies

Rocket: "3-2-1, Blastoff"

The End


The Sands of Mars

Authorial self-insert plays tourist on growing Mars colony. Discovers a race of Martians. Despite this the scientists go ahead with the idea of blowing up Phobos to provide a second sun. But that's okay because the Martians are too dumb to mind, and by the end the science guys are figuring out how to put their new found Wogs to work helping Terraform the place.

Headdesk

There's also a subplot about the self-insert discovering a crewman on the Mars ship who has to be his son, because of course there was only one woman attending the same engineering college as he did thirty years back. (the book is set in the far flung future of the year 2000 or so.)

Comments

[mehhayperson.livejournal.com]

That......sounds like so much crap.

Yet it seems incredibly amusing too. Like the poisoned brownie you just can't resist even though you know it'll completely melt your innards.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

That would have to be one really good brownie!

Reading them both reminded me how bloody bad science fiction authors can be about predicting the future. Admittedly both books were written in the 1940's, but you can't help but blink in surprise to read about the viewpoint character in Sands of Mars worrying about getting his typewriter out of storage on the liner heading heading to Mars.

And when ACC tries to insert a domestic drama into the narrative, such as with the writer and his son, the results are a b-grade soap opera. Oi. He may be one of the Grand Masters but the man couldn't write a three-dimensional character to save his life.

[mehhayperson.livejournal.com]

Oh, you know you'd love that brownie.

And while it was completely impossible for people to predict how computers and the like have progressed since their creation, you just have to cringe at some of the things old sci-fi authors write.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

One of my favorite oddities in that direction is Blish's Cities in Flight, in which the computers which did most of the work in New York were made from tubes. Blish was writing in the '50s; the transistor was invented in the late '40s.