Science fiction stories: A short review (ARTHUR C. CLARKE and TED CHIANG)

(1) ARTHUR C. CLARKE

A very beautiful nature of Arthur C. Clarke’s stories is that, they are driven by an amusing idea. They feel like the obvious results of some kind of reverse engineering for structuring. Like, why Lemmings are suicidal; (although that is misconception) and after pondering on that question, he would use his wild imagination and write ‘The Possessed’. OR, how a powerful and advanced side could be defeated in the war against the side which is inferior in many ways, and answering his own question he would write ‘Superiority.’ OR, what if that Star of Bethlehem was an actual supernova that destroyed a civilization of some distance solar system, and he would write one of his excellent stories, ‘The Star’.

He had a thing for unfamiliar and non-organic micro life forms which appear in his many stories. Either they are conscious being made of Ions from the Sun or an intelligent condensed matter life form living deep down in the Earth.

The basic material for ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ came from Clarke’s various excellent stories, such as ‘The Sentinel’ (ends on very haunting note), ‘Encounter in the Dawn’ (entertaining the idea of some alien involvement in human evolution), ‘Second Down’ (set in another planate focused on the importance of physical adaptability to surpass other mentally stronger species) and ‘Breaking Strain’ (a survival story of two not-getting-along men with a nice character study.)

(2) TED CHIANG

STORY OF YOUR LIFE (Adapted as Arrival in 2016): From the 'Fermat's Principle' which says that light knows its destination and the path before even reaching there, to the Semasiography technique of language (like the one nowadays we use with emojis), to the fundamental question of free will and derminisim, to the ability of language to change the perception of time as a complete whole instead of a sequences of events by altering the state of consciousness; this 60 page novella/story covers so much for an inquisitive reader to ponder on.

Movie adaptation was awesome but the story is (allow me to say) awesom-est ! Writer goes into details to explain how it's probably for protagonist to see time as a complete whole.
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Tower of Babylon: In the mythological setting, a gigantic tower reaching to the vault of heaven is climbed by several humans and the protagonist, after facing a flood like catastrophe, experiences one of the many concepts postulated by modern cosmologists about the shape of universe i.e. hypertorus model of the universe!
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Understand: Published in 1991, this employs the same idea that ‘Lucy’ uses, and obviously it has more scope to deal with the subject subtly than the action packed movie. Here, the conflict is between two subjects with super human powers, having different views on how to use their abilities.
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Division by Zero: The coolest one! Renee, a mathematician discovers something absurd about the fundamental truth, on which the very basis of Mathematics stands, which leads her to mental breakdown. It’s not that she proves it theoretically and still hopes for it to be untrue somehow, but she really fears by that absurd truth because she genuinely KNOWS that and there in no denying.