I've been reading Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati recently. It's a great read, and like I said about another book recently, a shame I haven't read it sooner.

Some short thoughts, however...on page 26, Wilson cites "Clarke's Law," which is one of Arthur C. Clarke's most cited quips (if not his only one, as he's usually a pretty dry type). To wit:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

I think it's important to note that this is in fact the third of Clarke's three laws, the first two of which never seem to make the cut. From The Lost Worlds of 2001, page 189, footnote:

[In response to questions of what the other two laws were]Oh, very well. The First: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he says it is impossible, he is very probably wrong. (Profiles of the Future)
The Second: "The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible."
I decided that if three laws were good enough for Newton, they were good enough for me.

What's kind of important to note is that, as often as Clarke's cited on the third Law here, not only does Clarke not belong to the sort of postmodern "transcendentalist" literature category to which R. A. Wilson, later W. S. Burroughs, et al, belong to. Not only that, but Clarke seems rigidly opposed to both interpreitative subjects and the possibility of the supernatural, which might come as a surprise to anyone who's seen the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke continually goes out of the way to avoid the subject of religious or metaphysical issues, if not have a somewhat-rigid interest in defeating them with entirely rational, empyrical and (unfortunately) disappointing reasons. An obvious example of this is Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey, in which he seems to be wholly interested in answering the biggest questions of that series in the most mundane way possible. The giant fetus thing? That was, like, some big computer, man...

All that being said, his book Tales From the White Hart is still a damn fine read, and will probably only be rediscovered in time. It's probably the closest to fitting in the strange category of literature to which Swift, C. S. Lewis, and others belong.

As H. P. Lovecraft proved with his work, you don't have to have a magnum opus in which all questions are both established and, like children's gifts under a Christmas tree, thoroughly revealed, dissected, and destroyed. Lovecraft could've written a multi-thousand-page Cthulu opus, but instead he gave readers short impressionistic visits to his world. The constant confusion and misbelief in the existance of the Necronomicon being a powerful representation of the vitality of Lovecraft's writing.

Just a few thoughts on a sunny Sunday afternoon.