Sir Arthur and I
I first met Arthur C. Clarke in the 1950s, on the occasion of his first cross-Atlantic visit to New York City. By then Arthur had established himself as a first-rate science fiction writer and he did what SF writers do in a strange city: he looked for other SF writers to talk to. He found them in the rather amorphously shaped group that called itself the Hydra Club, where I was one of the nine heads that had been its founders. We became friends. We stayed that way for all of the half century that remained of Arthur’s life. We met when chance arranged it – at a film festival in Rio de Janeiro, at an occasional scientific meeting, at assorted ‘‘cons’’ – SF-speak for science fiction gatherings – in many places at many times. In the early days Arthur spent a lot of time visiting New York, usually staying at the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, and when possible I would join him for dinner or a drink – that was all expense-account money and happily paid for by my publisher because I was an editor in those days and eager to publish as much Clarke as I could get my hands on. But by the turn of the millennium our friendship had reduced itself to a desultory correspondence and the odd phone conversation. I had given up editing to concentrate on my own writing. What Arthur had given up was ever leaving his island home in Sri Lanka, where I had never been. (Although I visited a number of Frederik Pohl (2005) other countries, Sri Lanka wasn’t one of them.) one of my daughters, and the behind-the-scenes Arthur wasn’t a religious man in any usual sense levitator was my son, so I was going to find out – in the instructions he left for his own funeral he his secrets anyway. was emphatic that there be no religious aspects to But back to Sir Arthur.... the services. He thought – as is described in The Then, in one of his letters in the early part of Last Theorem – that the most valuable function 2006, Arthur rather offhandedly mentioned that, of a church was to provide a Sunday school to send a couple of years earlier, in a fit of exuberance, he your children to, on the principal that exposing had signed publishing contracts for several books them to religion in childhood, like inoculating that, he was now convinced, he would never be them against polio, would prevent serious religi- able to write himself. Most of them he had arosity later on. ranged to work on with another writer, but there He wasn’t much of a believer in psionics or any was one, called The Last Theorem, for which he of the other New Age fads of the 20th century needed a collaborator. either; he was a hard-headed skeptic who didn’t That sounded like a hint, and I took it. I wrote who didn’t believe in anything that didn’t provide back, ‘‘If you really need a collaborator for that good evidence of its reality. But bear in mind his unfinished novel Barkis is probably willin’. I like famous declaration that any sufficiently advanced collaborating and sadly seem to be running out technology is indistinguishable from magic. of collaborators.’’ The obvious corollary to that is that some kinds I am sorry to say that this was no more than the of magic could perhaps represent a previously truth. Of my several score published books nearly unknown technology. You can see traces of that a third had been written with collaborators, usuthought in some of the best Clarkes, like Child- ally a long-term friend – Isaac Asimov, Lester del hood’s End or ‘‘The Nine Billion Names of God’’. Rey, Cyril Kornbluth, and Jack Williamson among And he did confess to me once, over a meal at the them – and each of them has since passed away. old Chelsea Hotel, that he was kind of wondering It occurred to me that urging him to join a group if it was possible that Uri Geller, the notorious with such a high mortality rate might not be the psychic spoon-bender of the 1960s, might really best inducement to offer a proposed partner, and have some new kind of power. indeed as weeks passed and I heard no response I’m proud to say that I was the one who rescued from Arthur I began to wonder if I had frightened Arthur C. Clarke from that particular flimflam. him out of the notion. But then a letter arrived, Then and there, in the restaurant that evening, not from Arthur himself but from his New York I did the Geller spoonbending trick before his agent, which said that Arthur had passed my offer very eyes. on to him, and added: I hadn’t been smart enough to figure it out for Since receiving that from Arthur, I’ve been myself, but I was lucky in my choice of neighbors. discussing it with his editor, Chris Schluep, One of them was my good friend, the former stage and he has been discussing it with his magician The Amazing Randi, who had taught colleagues and bosses at Ballantine/Del me how to do it. Rey. I’m happy to say that they have called Unfortunately I can’t teach it to any of you, me today to say that they would love to because I am bound by the stage magician’s creed proceed... We sold the material to Ballannot to blow any other magician’s secret tricks. Ah, tine on the basis of some bits and pieces but you say, how can that be, Fred, since you aren’t supplied by Arthur, and a brief outline. I a stage magician yourself? Simple, I say. Randi assume you would like to see these before gave me honorary magician status. He couldn’t you commit to this project. really avoid that, since one of his best effects was There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to levitating a beautiful girl. The girl was usually
by Frederik Pohl
42 / LOCUS October 2008
do the book, but I looked forward to Arthur’s notes. When they arrived they amounted to around a hundred pages of notes and drafts, some sketchy, some quite completely fleshed out. The novel was to be called The Last Theorem, as a reference to a celebrated scribble by the 18th-century French mathematician, Pierre Fermat. Fermat had been thinking about a well-known mathematical problem. The Pythagorean Theorem holds that, if you square the sides of a right triangle and add them together, their sum equals the square of the triangle’s hypotenuse. (Or a-squared plus b-squared equals c-squared.) Using whole numbers, the smallest triangle that this works for has sides of three and four units and a hypotenuse of five. Three squared (or 9) plus four squared (or 16) equals 25, which is the square of the five units that the hypotenuse measures. That of course is not really much of a problem so far. Everybody who cares at all knows that. Everybody always has, at least since the times of the ancient Greeks. The question that was troubling Fermat had to do with equations with larger exponents. Could there ever be a triangle such that a-cubed plus b-cubed equaled c-cubed? There could not, Fermat declared, and added that he himself had recently discovered an elegant proof of that statement – ‘‘which,’’ he wrote, ‘‘this margin is too small to contain.’’ And for all the years since then other mathematicians have been trying to discover that proof which Fermat claimed to have. None have succeeded, and the smart money now places its bets on the assumption that Fermat was simply mistaken and never did have that proof. As I read all this in Arthur’s sketchy notes a small sense of foreboding began to knock at my mind. I had gone through my own period of infatuation with the arcane art of number theory and so all this was both familiar and interesting to me. But what about your average book-buyer? It is axiomatic in the publishing biz that American book buyers hate, fear, and despise math in any form. Were they going to buy a book whose very title was an obscure kind of mathematical statement? Well, I told myself, sure they were. The book isn’t really about the theorem. It is about a boy who is determined to rediscover that lost proof and about what happens to him, to his world, and even to his galaxy after he does. Besides, there was a lot of great stuff there including a wonderful war-winning weapon that triumphed in battles without ever killing anyone; a moving scene between Ranjit Subramanian, the story’s central figure, and his father, the head priest at a Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka; a couple of exciting races in space; the death of a major character; thumbnail sketches – no, not that big, make that pinky-nail sketches – of the major characters. There was much more to draw from, including, I was sure, that great resource that would fill in all the missing bits and pieces: Arthur himself. So I got off a quick note to Arthur to say that I accepted the quite generous terms of his offer and began doing some research, sublimely confident that this would be a relatively easy book to write. As it happened, I had a novel of my own half written at the time but it was no problem to set it aside to do Arthur’s; I had long since informed Jim Frenkel, my Tor editor, that he would definitely get the book but that I wasn’t going to sign a contract with him until I had it nearly finished since I didn’t want any contractual deadlines nagging at me.