Analysis Paper

Science fiction consists of stories, often set in the future and off the planet Earth, that emphasize scientific, sociological, and especially technological innovation. While a writer might imagine what could happen to, say, an Irish Catholic politician who felt attracted to his brother's American Episcopalian wife in the 1960s, a science fiction writer might imagine what could happen to an implant formed from the mental software of a human male and the hardware body and brain of a human female. Similarly, while Henry James (1843-1916), in Daisy Miller (1878), imagines a nineteenth-century American heiress involved with a European suitor, the science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), speculates about a human male who comes to know a hermaphrodite humanoid, a Gethenian, who sometimes turns male or sometimes female, depending on its emotional circumstances (the Gethenian often remains neuter if no suitable partner is around). James concentrated his attention on Daisy Miller, her commanding father, her suitor, and so forth, while taking the social, cultural, and biological background for granted. Le Guin, in contrast, imagined a world without gender and in consequence (or she so thought) without war, examining it through the eyes of her human visitor.

Arthur C. Clarke, who died on March 19, 2008, was the luckiest of men, becoming the most famous of science fiction authors by writing of wonder when many were writing of despair. According to Bradbury (pp. 34-79) Clarke was not unique in his optimism. He stood in a tradition of English futurists who have used fiction, non-fiction, or both to paint their visions. Bradbury (pp. 34-79) held that only science makes reliable prediction possible and the prospects for human society intelligible. Clarke believed that general laws for scientific extrapolation exist in a way that they do not in politics or economics. One such law was that "when a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong" (Bradbury, pp. 34-79).

Clarke, the eldest of four children, was born on December 16, 1917 to farming parents in Minehead in the south-west English county of Somerset. Following service as a radar instructor and technician with the Royal Air Force in the Second World War, he honed his scientific acumen working as an editor for the academic journal Physics Abstracts, while earning a first-class degree ...