Arthur C. Clarke was probably the last prominent SF author alive from the Golden Age era (the 40’s), not including Ray Bradbury, which was more or less on his own league even then. He was said to be one of The Big Three, the other two being Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein.
Now put into perspective by the force of nature, neither The Big Three nor the Golden Age were nothing too much remarkable from a literary point of view. Clarke himself, who during his life was active in several fields and not a trully “literary animal” never created any canonical work, being his style empty of very remarkable traits, and his stories between a washed out romanticist exotism and a mild pulp romance. 2001: A Space Odyssey was surely «his» best work, though it is a collaboration with the weird genious of Kubrick to which it owes most of its alienating effect. Even though, Clarke deserved the outstanding place he earned within the «science fiction century», as his anticipation skill was a virtue strong enough for any anticipation reader. He managed always to mix credible science, feelings and a somewhat buddhist view of life, in a way that made his stories more a serious reading than those of many of his contemporaries.
Now with that Age almost closed, I cannot help but think it’s becoming the time to start a critic analysis of that literature, see what it really contributed and check if anything or anybody was unjustly forgotten. Many authors of those years became a «common place» beyond their literary work and they received always the biggest share of credit and attention. Maybe we’ll see during this XXI century a critic revision of the speculative literature in the fancy of that the characters of El Quixote did with the popular knighthood romances.
