When I read the article on Yahoo the first thing I did was come here to BCTS. I wasn't surprised to find
the memorial well under way. It's funny, I was just thinking about him yesterday when we were commenting about Lem. Wondering how he was getting along down there in Sri Lanka .......... I liked Arthur C. Clarke as a kid, and was amazed by him all over again when he started doing those real nuts-and-bolts stories like Rendezvous With Rama (that amazingly constructed alien technology and hints of the civ that created it), and Meeting With Medusa (oceanography gone wild)- these books really put the SCIENCE in science fiction. Or that one about the space elevator (Fountains of Paradise?) where the whole dramatic climax came down to being able to saw through a bolt with a piece of monomolecular line? This sort of thing is about as far from Star Wars (which I am not dissing, it's fun flashy junk) as you can get. Yeah, he'll be missed...

About SF authors and movies: I don't know who had the most, but some of these movies are so far from the originals they hardly count as adaptations. Here Phil Dick comes to mind. To me Blade Runner was brilliant, but he didn't care for the pre-release version he saw before he died, and I can kind of see why. And Ahnold Goes to Mars? Fuggedaboudit! To me Dick was never about bigtime special effects but about the ordinary, sometimes pretty messed up people in these strange situations. The subtlety of his work has never been captured on film. The closest---oddly enough---was that cartoon thing of A Scanner Darkly.
PDK doesn't need a Ridley Scott to make his novels into films but someone like Gus van Sant
circa Drugstore Cowboy. But try pitching THAT to the studios. Oh well...

Farewell Arthur, maybe now you can tell us what those big black door-things were
(I don't buy the 3001 version---far too prosaic---but sense a cover-up there.)
~~hugs, LAIKA

I discovered Science Fiction in the late 50s and mined every library I could find for books and then when I had my own money magazines and paperbacks. I honestly was not aware of which authors were British and which American and sometimes was surprised when I found out. Clarke, in fact, I thought was American and deCamp, British. Ray Bradbury could have been either and not surprised me. There was a distinct sub-current in SF which respected British tradition and literature.

There were 4 or 5 times as many Americans as British at the time, so it's not surprising that there were more American authors. For the period of the fifties and sixties, America boomed economically and Britain did not, another driver? Not as many British authors went into writing SF for whatever reason, but those few had an impact greater than their numbers. Compare other genres of writing. How many British writers of Westerns were there? :) (A few, yes, there were.)

Clarke proves the British influence in SF. Through that whole mid-century era three names were synonymous with great SF, and one of those was Clarke.

What made the American dominance what it was though, was the American pulp magazines of the 20s to 50s. Britain had no comparable market that would gobble up everything you could write. And British writers were handicapped in submissions to publishers in New York. For that proof, look at the dominance of New York area writers in all kinds of American publishing; even today they are disproportionately represented.

Clarke did not write the volume of stuff of some other writers but much of his stuff was very influential. Like Bradbury and Sturgeon, you couldn't get his ideas out of your head. Heinlein and Asimov had ideas, too, and told great stories but face it, neither of them was much of a stylist. :) Clarke had mood and a sense of poetry and if he disappointed me at all it was that I couldn't find more of his stuff.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.