Gary WestfahlArthur C. Clarke.

Abstract

203 BOOKS IN REVIEW were as dead in the water as the road-show; Star Wars was coming and saturation openings à la Jaws were the new thing. Fox’s initial interest in Lucas’s film was prompted by the success of the Planet of the Apes franchise; they hoped to start another series of programmers, budgeted at around three million dollars. Lucas’s budget eventually quadrupled, and after the rather limited profitability of Logan’s Run (1976) and King Kong (1976), Fox’s skepticism about Star Wars being able to reach the $32 million needed to become profitable was entirely reasonable. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), released just seven months later, was also initially intended as a moderately priced A movie, but the $4.1 million budget could not even cover the special effects. Costs rose to almost twenty million dollars, with another five million for marketing, but this total was more or less covered by advance bookings by theaters eager to screen Spielberg’s follow-up to Jaws. The key to the success of these films and their many imitators, Chapter Five argues, was avoiding any trace of camp in their deployment of pulp sf. Lucas and Spielberg carefully manufactured a straight-faced naïveté. Aided by persuasive special effects and overwhelming spectacle, they were earnest in their world-building, no matter how hoary or rickety it was. Later films developed other strategies of earnestness, including graphic violence and livedin rather than pristine production design, as in Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), both of which also hark back to the trends Rollerball attempted to marry together. Lucas’s and Spielberg’s return to family-friendly appeals, however, proved more influential in the 1980s, not least because of the success of E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982). Schauer’s conclusion swiftly maps the subsequent unfolding of American sf cinema, demonstrating the various ways in which it is indebted to and further develops earlier tendencies across budgetary categories (more of an outline than a comprehensive overview, it cries out for a sequel). Escape Velocity is an essential addition to the study of US sf films, adding a dimension to our understanding that more overtly critical-theoretical approaches generally overlook. Its major flaw is that it is just so damn readable—I was very conscious of repeatedly getting too caught up in the story it tells to take in aspects of its (vital) argument.—Mark Bould, University of the West of England A Monolithic Arthur C. Clarke. Gary Westfahl. Arthur C. Clarke. Chicago: U of Illinois P, MODERN MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION, 2018. 240 pp. $25 pbk. Although Arthur C. Clarke is frequently named alongside Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein as one of the three major authors of mid-century science fiction, his work seems to have fallen into scholarly neglect. Even when they do discuss Clarke, critics tend to focus on a handful of his major novels and his film collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Gary Westfahl’s Arthur C. Clarke (2018) fills the gap by offering a muchneeded survey of Clarke’s entire oeuvre, from his juvenilia to his many collaborations. This book will provide a useful starting place for future conversations about Clarke. 204 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) Westfahl contends that other critics have shown a superficial understanding of Clarke, one based on cherry-picking texts that happen to fit their agenda while ignoring the details of Clarke’s writing life that contradict their claims. Westfahl pursues this line by showing that Clarke’s approaches to his main topics of concern such as technology and religion are many and varied. In the process, Westfahl demonstrates that Clarke frequently called into question the stereotyped assumptions of pulp science fiction. We learn, for example, that unlike many of his peers, Clarke presented neither an optimistic nor a pessimistic view of technology. Clarke’s machines might malfunction or produce perverse results, but the scientists and inventors in his stories are typically flawed human beings rather than monstrous mad scientists. Westfahl succeeds in showing us a more nuanced Clarke, proving that the author was far more complex than some have realized. At times, however, Westfahl...