Under no circumstances should any Gentle Reader buy From Narnia to a Space Odyssey: The War of Letters Between Arthur C. Clarke and C.S. Lewis, and even borrowing it from a library isn’t recommended. Your Humble Blogger will rarely make such an emphatic statement, but rarely have I read such a worthless and incompetent book.
First of all, the existence of the book seems to imply a collection of letters between Mr. Clarke and Mr. Lewis. A war of letters, even. The book has a total of fifteen letters, three of which contain all of five sentences between them. The sixteen-page letters section provides a weak excuse for the book to exist; the rest is taken up with insubstantial essays on Mr. Clarke, Mr. Lewis, and Mr. Clarke and Mr. Lewis, and filled out with reprints of well-known short stories and essays by the two, sprinkled liberally with typos.
That’s pretty bad. They sell a book on the basis of a ‘War of Letters’ when there was none. Fine. But there were a few letters, and some of those are or could be interesting, if they had been transcribed competently. But they aren’t. Three of Mr. Lewis’ letters have page images included, and it’s clear from them that the transcription is awful. Even without a magnifying glass, I can tell that the word included in the text as ‘uncritically’ is actually ‘inevitably’, and that he uses ‘semitic’ for ‘sensitive’. The sentence ‘As can with us who can’t do that won’t mend matter by dragging in Croates, Cnitches, and Confucous...’ seems to me to be ‘And a writer who can’t do that won’t mend matters by dragging in crashes, crutches(?) or conspiracies...’.
Now, I could well be wrong in my own transcription, and I am really guessing on ‘crutches’, but why on earth should the editor’s incompetence have ever been published?
I could have been talking about what Mr. Clarke and Mr. Lewis valued in science fiction, and dividing my favorite specfic authors into the two camps (and wondering if Perdido Street Station, for all its annoyances, works as a combination of the two), but I am just too aggravated.
,
-Vardibidian.
Fascinating. Did you see the reviews at Amazon, and the author’s attempted rebuttal (especially his ridiculous attempt to justify the typos)? I also think it’s interesting that the author/editor of the book isn’t listed by name on the front cover or on Amazon’s page, And apparently the subtitle has now been changed to “A War of Ideas” to avoid giving the impression that the book focuses on letters.
It’s part of Simon and Schuster’s ongoing battle to destroy publishing. They were the first publisher (as they boast) to introduce the economically and environmentally ruinous practice of free returns from bookstores. Now they can’t even spell “C.S. Lewis” correctly in the title of the book. The only comfort is that with typos in the title (Amazon’s misspelling is picked up directly from Simon and Schuster) and an ever-changing title and subtitle, perhaps the book will remain difficult for unsuspecting readers to find.
I didn’t read the Amazon reviews. Actually, YHB tries to ignore Amazon as much as possible; Gentle Readers may have noticed that links are to publishers, whenever possible, or occasionally to fan sites. I find the whole anonymous-review thing slightly creepy, he says, commenting on his pseudonymous review, and I irrationally resent Amazon for being efficient enough to drive bookstores I like out of business (or drive them to a different way of doing business, anyway).
Oh, and the © page says that it’s available from ibooks, but I can’t find any reference to it on that site.
,
-Vardibidian.