Arthur C. Clarke’s Science Fiction Started With His Poetry

… And It Then Influenced Asimov… Sort Of…

by A. J. Dalton

The essay is short at just 885 words (many of which are poetry quotations) but revealing when it comes to some of Clarke’s earliest and foundational science fiction influences. Fascinatingly, he quotes Tennyson’s 1835 poem ‘Locksley Hall’ (published 1842) at length, emphasizing how prophetic it was, given it was written early in Victoria’s reign but was becoming ‘more vivid every day’ (with the advent of WW2). Clarke asserts that, famous though the poem’s prophecy is, it ‘can well be repeated here’, and who are we to argue with the great man?

When I dipped into the future as far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be.
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nation’s navies grappling in the central blue.

Isaac Asimov, who first met Clarke in 1953, and had probably read Clarke’s early essay, described Tennyson’s work as ‘the most remarkable example of science fiction poetry that has ever been written’. Indeed, in Asimov’s own later essay on poetry, he provides us with an interpretation of the above self-same quotation from ‘Locksley Hall’: ‘Aerial commerce and aerial warfare (the “ghastly dew” might even be an unconscious foreshadowing of radioactive fallout) culminating in a world government are foreseen. Not bad for 1842!’

Clarke’s essay quotes further from Tennyson’s poem, identifying descriptions of both interplanetary space and aliens speaking unintelligible languages on distant planets:

The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans
[…]
The hum of men,
Or other things talking in unknown tongues,
And notes of busy life on distant worlds
Beat like a far wave on my anxious ear

It is clear that Tennyson’s poem gave Clarke a ‘vivid’ vision and understanding of the fantastic and science fiction, with the poet himself perhaps the very ‘Muse’ mentioned in the essay’s own title. Clarke, however, then moves on to praise and quote John Masefield’s revelatory poem ‘Lollingdon Downs’ (1917) and we appreciate that it is not just the genius or prophetic themes of the cited poets that so inspired Clarke, but also the superior ‘picture’-quality achieved by poetry when compared to more prosaic or scientific description: ‘verse is probably a better medium than prose for expressing the ideas of Fantasy and Science-Fiction […] This [poem’s] picture, I venture to say, has never been excelled by the authors who have specialised in describing such happenings. It gives a better description of astronomical space than pages of textbooks could.’

The attentive modern reader might now be frowning considerably. If poetry is a superior vehicle ‘for expressing the ideas of Fantasy and Science-Fiction’, why on Earth then have those genres been dominated by short-stories and novels for fully a century? Why did Clarke and Asimov become most famous for their prose output (and TV and movie contributions, of course) rather than their poetry? Why did they put so much more effort into their prose than their poetry? Well, the young Clarke anticipates precisely why in his essay: ‘Perhaps the dearth of such poetry is due to the great difficulty of writing verse which is even readable, let alone good, and the greater difficulty of getting it printed when produced.’

Just producing ‘readable’ speculative poetry does indeed involve ‘great difficulty’ (take Clarke’s word for it if you won’t take A J Dalton’s), meaning that writing ‘good’ speculative poetry must involve… what? Incredible difficulty? Impossible difficulty? And then getting it published is even harder still? Yet Clarke managed it just one year later, at the tender age of 22, publishing the poem ‘The Twilight of a Sun’ in the first edition of The Fantast (April 1939), the penultimate lines of that poem quoted on the magazine’s cover:

For some day our vessels will ply
To the uttermost depths of the sky

Those who have a general knowledge or overview of Clarke’s science fiction output over the course of his lifetime will appreciate that this poem is seminal, his ictus, foundational and, in important ways, defining. Just the title captures his perennial themes or poetic moods of ‘deep time’ (the ancient sun dying) and being ‘haunted’ (by a lost past or civilization). Such themes or moods were naturally expanded upon at greater length in Clarke’s novella Against the Fall of Night (1948), which was later expanded into a novel (1953) and then rewritten and expanded again as The City and the Stars (1956). It should be noted in particular that critics are still struck by the ‘poetic’ and picturesque quality of Clarke’s novel and writing style:

In utter silence, the ship drew away from the tower. It was strange, Rorden thought, that for the second time in his life he had said goodbye to Alvin. The little closed world of Diaspar knew only one farewell, and that was for eternity.

The ship was now only a dark stain against the sky, and of a sudden Rorden lost it altogether. He never saw it going, but presently there echoed down from the heavens the most awe-inspiring of all the sounds that Man had ever made—the long-drawn thunder of air falling, mile after mile, into a tunnel drilled suddenly across the sky.

[…]

The sun was now low on the horizon, and a chill wind was blowing from the desert. But still Rorden waited, conquering his fears, and presently for the first time in his life he saw the stars.

There is an echo of the poem’s vessels plying their way to the ‘uttermost depths of the sky’ to be found in the novel’s ‘utter silence’ when the ship draws away to become lost in the heavens. And the ‘lowest roll of thunder [that] moans’ in Tennyson is ‘echoed’ in Clarke’s later ‘long-drawn thunder of air falling’. Clarke deliberately draws upon poetic vision to channel it into his science fiction prose, that prose all the more visionary and vivid as a result. Indeed, it is that uniquely prophetic quality or essence of science fiction that is the very subject of Clarke’s poem, as stated by the opening lines:

A Whisper crept into my mind,
a thought that seemed borne on the wind,
Perchance ’twas a warning designed
to reveal what the future may hold.

The ‘Whisper’ that comes to Clarke’s protagonist is both a vision of the future and the secrets shared with the science fiction writer by their ‘muse’. It can be equated to the ‘unconscious foreshadowing’ Asimov ascribes to Tennyson’s poem (and probably science fiction more generally), but Asimov’s terminology speaks more of Freud, psychology, prescience, the powers of the human mind and evolution, while Clarke’s has more of a pseudo-religious or mystical nuance. The difference is telling and typical of the two men and their respective outputs (we might, for example, contrast the themes and logocentres of Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night (1948, but earlier in origin) and Asimov’s Nightfall (1941)), but both complexes have their place within science fiction, of course, and the genre is all the richer for it.

To conclude, then, like Clarke himself, I would argue that speculative poetry has a particular and distinctive value within both Clarke’s body of work and the wider science fiction genre. It is perhaps a touch curious that Clarkesworld magazine and Sci Phi Journal, unlike Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, do not currently publish speculative poetry, but that might change one day(?). Clarke himself does provide this reassurance and admonition: ‘Here and there among the classics, however, are fragments to delight the poetically-minded fan. Their very rarity gives them an added attraction, and when found they should be carefully transferred in best copper-plate to a note-book which should be kept in some secluded spot away from vulgar eyes.’ Meantime, ‘the poetically-minded fan’ may also wish to check out the website of the Science Fiction Poetry Association (www.sfpoetry.com), which offers the Star*Line journal of poetry, along with the Eye To the Telescope online magazine. Or we might sneak an original sci-fi poem in here, under the auspices of it being a part of this article…

#

The Event
by A J Dalton

06:12 UTC 19 March 2008
one instant
among an infinity

the afterglow the most intrinsically bright
object ever observed
by humans, that is

the naked eye never seeing
a farther object
apparently

its gamma-ray burst
from 7.5bn years ago
halfway to the Bang

the awful data and dynamic
of GRB 080319B
must certainly have meaning

All I know is it was for the moment
the universe had long prepared itself:
the death of dear Arthur C. Clarke

~

Bio:

A J Dalton (www.ajdalton.eu) is a UK-based writer. He’s published the Empire of the Saviours trilogy with Gollancz Orion, The Satanic in Science Fiction and Fantasy with Luna Press, the Dark Woods Rising poetry collection with Starship Sloane, and other bits and bobs. He lives with his monstrously oppressive cat named Cleopatra.