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One weird side effect of the human intellect, seemingly brought on by our fear of our own mortality, is the tendency to eulogize people after they die. A recent case in point is science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Here‘s a classic example.

I can’t say I’m an Arthur C. Clarke fan. I don’t have anything against him. I liked the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey quite a bit (as with most Kubrick films) which I know he collaborated on, after writing the short story that inspired it. But I’ve never read any of his work.

In fact, I don’t like science fiction in general. I find that like most niche genres, it’s inhabited mainly by poor writers who use their domain knowledge to cater to an otherwise ignored audience, which in the case of sci-fi and fantasy, are geeks. It’s works on pretty much the same principle as XKCD. There are, of course, a few good writers in the genre (and every genre for that matter) but for the most part, the quality is pretty poor, and though I love science, my loathing of hacky writing prevents me from enjoying most of the fiction written about it.

So I don’t really have an opinion on Clarke specifically, because I haven’t read him. But upon reading the eulogy… err… article I smelled a rat. Especially when I hit the following statement:

Without him, it’s safe to say that there would be no direct TV, no satellite-routed ship-to-shore phone calls, and no global navigation systems.

I couldn’t imagine exactly how it could be “safe to say” anything so broad and sweeping. It’s later explained:

During World War II, when he was a young officer in the Royal Air Force in Britain, Clarke first thought of geostationary satellites as communications tools. Geostationary satellites are satellites whose orbital periods match the Earth’s rotation. In 1945, Clarke proposed that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays. They have since revolutionized communications and weather forecasting.

Curious, I did 5 seconds of research, something the author of this abysmal story apparently couldn’t be bothered with, and discovered that geosynchronous satellites were dreamed up 17 years before Clarke wrote about them in 1928 by Herman Potočnik.

So in the history of the satellite, you have the guy who thought it up, the guy who wrote about it in a short story almost two decades later, and the guys at NASA who made it happen almost two more decades after that. And who, out of those three people/groups, is it “safe to say that there would be no direct TV, no satellite-routed ship-to-shore phone calls, and no global navigation systems” without? The one who just died, of course.

The article then goes on, like every other written about Clarke since he died, to talk about what a great predictor of technology he was. It points out all of the wonderful ideas he predicted would come to fruition that later did. And viewed without context, it’s not an unimpressive list.

But it glosses over the fact that he was a sci-fi writer. Making tech predictions is what they do for a living. The overall number that turn out correct isn’t impressive, it’s the percentage relative to his peers. Is there a long list of predictions Clarke made that didn’t pan out? I bet there is. And if you added up both categories, was he any better of a futurist than others of his time? I don’t know, because nobody bothered. It’s certainly possible he was, but also possible that he wasn’t.

But who would ask such a question about a guy who just passed away? That seems downright rude, given that it might not be 100% positive. So instead we focus only on the things he got right, entirely out of context. The things he “invented” that someone else did in reality. The things he predicted that came true without the things that didn’t.

Which I don’t understand, because if you read Clarke’s Wikipedia entry, the life he really lived is impressive enough. Doctoring it with inaccuracies for the sake of making him look better is insulting to Clarke, who doesn’t need the help, insulting to the people who really invented satellites and put them in orbit, and insulting to the many other science fiction writers who made predictions similar to his.

This entry was posted on March 21, 2008 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Stupid Shit I Found On The Web . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.