Rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke
explores the author's representations of gender and sexuality, his location within post-war science fiction, his engagement with religion and ecology, his influence on such writers as Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter and Liu Cixin, and his enduring legacy through the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. We follow his imagination and thought from the depths of the ocean to the moons of Jupiter and, indeed, beyond the infinite.
"Scholarly yet readable, this is an exciting and thorough overview of Clarke in all his facets, which does a great service in correcting the absence of serious commentary on his writings. Perhaps the best praise I can offer is that it gave me an immediate desire to dive back into his body of work, and read anew one of - if not the most - significant voices in post-war British science fiction."
Alistair Reynolds
"This is an exemplary collection that brings a fascinating group of authors and approaches to bear on Clarke's work, from the uber-canonical to the comparatively obscure and pulpy. It's one of those rare edited collections that comes together as a unified intervention in a field - it's terrific!"
Gerry Canavan, Marquette University
"This collection eloquently reminds us that there is so much more to Arthur C. Clarke than just his well-known texts
Childhood's End
and
2001: A Space Odyssey
. The contributors illuminate the whole range of Clarke's corpus - his fiction and nonfiction, his forays into television and film - in relationship to a fascinating range of topics such as religion, sexuality, empire, environmentalism, and posthumanism. I walked away from this book with a fresh appreciation for this towering figure in science fiction."
Jeremy Withers, Iowa State University