Divided into three sections, Voices from the Sky delivers a series of enjoyable essays–some prescient, others less so–on topics ranging from spaceflight and communication satellites to the future of human culture as shaped by technological advancement.
While many of Clarke’s predictions have come to pass, others miss the mark including the elimination of business travel and the obsolescence of cities as a result of video conferencing and a global communications network. So enthusiastic was he about the U.S.A.’s burgeoning space program of the 1960s, that Clarke predicted mankind’s expansion to the moon, Mars, and beyond. He could not have known that budget cuts would curtail our space program by the 1990s.
Still, Clarke’s considerable talents as a science fiction writer and science communicator, combined with his cosmopolitan viewpoint, provide fascinating insights from a time when humanity was just entering the space age.
In October, I reviewed two of them on this blog—
In the far future, humanity has long since colonized many worlds beyond our solar system with the help of positronic robots. During those years, an expanding philosophical and cultural schism has formed between the people of Earth and the “Spacers.” Colonists regard Earth—with its enclosed and overcrowded Cities, agoraphobic citizens, and abhorrence of robots—as a backward planet rife with filth, ignorance, and disease.
Co-founder of String Field Theory, Doctor Michio Kaku discusses the scientific plausibility of a wide range of popular science fiction devices, abilities, and technologies in his book, Physics of the Impossible.
An accident at the Institute for Nuclear Research in Chicago releases a stray beam of radiation across the city, striking an innocent pedestrian by the name of Joseph Schwartz. No sooner does Schwartz step over a discarded rag doll on a busy street than he finds himself wandering for miles through dense woods.