Richter 10 (Mass Market Paperback)

Clarke's true genius in fiction is as a short-story writer, and it seems to me that the great Childhood's End was the only real full-length novel he had in him. Even it hardly runs to 200 pages. The City and the Stars is slightly longer, but it is a reworking of an earlier 'novella' and gets a bit too big for its boots; and such productions as The Fountains of Paradise and Rendezvous with Rama itself are stretched to the limits of what he is comfortable with. Subcontracting was one answer, and this story is based on an outline plot by Clarke (provided at the back) fleshed out to full standard novel length by Mike McQuay. The opening chapters are bloodsome - stilted dialogue, cardboard cutouts of characters and the event that triggered the environmental disaster which forms the basis of the plot given to one of the characters to 'tell', in a plonking and ludicrous way, to other characters who must have known all about it in the first place. Matters then improve as the scientific issues take centre stage. This was really Clarke's secret. He deserves no less an accolade than as one of the major educators of our age, bringing physics and astronomy to the masses. Even in his fiction he is always didactic, always explaining this or that scientific issue or correcting popular misapprehensions. Once the science takes control of the narrative, the characterisation here becomes less important, more like the routine way Clarke himself handles it. The basic scenarios may seem fantastic and contrived, but the story is about what they would be like in real life (and real death on a large scale) supposing they did happen. One would not assess Stapledon on some basis of 'realism' and I for one am not inclined to assess his admirer Clarke on any such basis either. There is a real vision behind it all, an imaginative world. The disasters here are small beer indeed by comparison with Stapledon, and of course Clarke starts from a sound scientific grasp, something Stapledon never pretended to, and pushes the envelope to a certain extreme. How extreme he is really being I wouldn't like to judge, and not just because of recent events. This planet is a dynamic and unquiet thing.

Even the political background, which seems to border on farcical in the opening chapters, begins to fit in a little more as the book proceeds and as McQuay begins to take some recognisable stance of his own regarding it. I have no idea whether earthquakes can really be predicted let alone stopped, but if that gave us the opportunity to do something useful with the nukes at long last there would be two major benefits not one. The Richter 10 event is scheduled to take place shortly before my own 119th birthday, so I am unlikely to be a victim of it. Even my children are likely to be too old to care by then, whether or not southern California is by that time as familiar a stamping-ground of theirs as it already is of mine. I must say the thought of earthquakes is always somewhere at the back of my mind during my visits to Los Angeles. How this book will affect my thinking on any future visit I don't know, but I now have some elementary do's and don'ts to bear in mind from an informed source, much good may they do me.

OK there are some serious doubts about the use of the Nation of Islam - but look beyond that and it is undeniably entertaining.

I would like to have seen a closer adoption of ACC's film idea - but hey I enjoyed it.