Neil Peart

[Jamie123]

On 7/10/2020 at 1:49 PM, Carborendum said:

One thing I remember that frustrates me to this day was the explanation for why the overseers looked like demons.

Clarke wrote many of his stories incrementally. He'd sometimes start by writing a short story, then expand it into a novella, then flesh it out into a full-length novel - adding new concepts at each step.

For example, the original The Songs of Distant Earth has the Earth-people visiting Thalassa on their new home, but there is no indication of the Earth having been destroyed. That aspect of the story only came in the novel - in which it was linked to the solar neutrino anomaly.

2001: A Space Odyssey began as a short story The Sentinel. When Stanley Kubrick commissioned him to provide him a plot for hes new sci-fi movie, Clarke considered several of his works (including, interestingly, Childhood's End) but eventually decided to expand on The Sentinel.

The City and the Stars was based on Clarke's earlier novella Against the Fall of Night, which has almost exactly the same plot - only simpler. Interestingly, in this case it's the earlier version that people tend to remember.)

I've never read the novella version of Childhood's End, but I have read about it. Here the "devil" thing is explained by the Overlords having visited Earth long before, when they made rather an unfortunate impression on primitive humanity - dim memories of which are retained in mankind's myths and legends. Their second visit is them "trying again".

This idea does appear in the novel version as a theory which people adopt, but which is eventually disproved - though I agree the "truth" (some vague notion of "nonlinear time") is not very convincing. Clarke can be lame at times: I particularly thought the later Rama books he co-wrote with Gentry Lee were rather poor.

Edited July 12, 2020 by Jamie123

[Jamie123]

On 7/10/2020 at 7:47 PM, Vort said:

I classify myself as a Rush admirer but not exactly a fan. I suspect there are many of my type.

I couldn't really call myself a "die hard" fan either - though I certainly was one up until about 1983. I saw them in concert twice - once in Leicester in 1980 (I was only 15 - it was the first concert I ever went to) and again at the Nottingham NEC in 1983.

I couldn't get into Grace Under Pressure and the album that followed it - though it could be because I didn't try hard enough (I was getting into Marillion around about that time). I did like the next album though - Hold Your Fire. After that I rather lost track of the new stuff the band were doing, though I continued to listen avidly to the old classics like 2112 and Caress of Steel.

I need to set aside some time for a serious "Rush catch-up"!

Edited July 12, 2020 by Jamie123