I love his work. He's by leaps and bounds my favorite sci-fi author ever. His optimism remains unparalleled.

It's a measure of how much darker the world has turned recently that I've started in the last few years to think of ACC as perhaps a bit naive. Or maybe he was just too far ahead of the times? That's an optimist thought - albeit a long-term one.

ironically, the first author i have been inclined to call "the new clarke" is liu cixin, based on the anything-but-optimistic "death's end" trilogy. still has a very clarke-like feel, but dark.

> a very clarke-like feel, but dark

I've no idea how that is even possible :) so I'll have to read something by that author to figure out what you mean.

check out "the three body problem"; it has a very clarke-like sense of wonder tinged with both optimism and melancholy, and the same blend of science and "magic science", but it also adds a dark feel that is nothing like clarke.

I've only read a few of his novels. I'd say that in 2061, the stowaway suicidal hijacker aboard Galaxy, and her employers, certainly qualify as villains. In 3001, I think it's legitimate to think of the monoliths and whoever built them as villains of a sort.

I don't count the later "co-authored" publications.

If you've never read any of the Rama sequels written by Gentry Lee, now is a really good time not to.

The first one has a few nice bits (but so, so few), but they're so bad, and so badly written, and so undermine the magic and majesty of the first book, and the final revelation when we discover who actually built the Rama spacecraft is so hackneyed and underwhelming[1], that they're some of the only books I have genuinely regretted reading.

And I've read some Piers Anthony and late era L. Ron Hubbard!

I really have no idea what Clarke was thinking.

[1] Spoiler rot13'd: Vg gheaf bhg gurl jrer ohvyg ol Tbq.

Yup, there's only one real Rama book.

The "sequels" are something else entirely - boring and a waste of time.

Sounds like the Dune novels written after Frank Herbert's death, especially the very last one.

Well, in that case, there's certainly HAL 9000...

Which was a machine coping as best it could with contradictory objectives.

Well, that describes every thinking thing, good or evil, that ever lived.

It just occurred to me, though, that 2061 (and its villains) do not have a coauthor, although I don't know why that's important to you. Sorry, but your claim that he didn't write villains is just a little silly, and his view of humanity was a little more complicated than "positive."

We haven't even got to the short stories. If you've got a few minutes, read Hate and reconsider your thesis: https://books.google.com/books?id=hbAqAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PT13&dq=h...

Bicker, bicker, bicker. My original point is that Clarke wrote his own novels with an optimistic view of people.

But you win!