It's hard to gauge just how much I like Arthur C. Clarke, because his deliberative writing style encourages you to take it slow and to knit his ideas with your own parallel thoughts and speculations. I've never really considered myself a devoted admirer of sci-fi (despite enjoying plenty, including Clarke's own 2001: A Space Odyssey), so it was interesting to read a collection of Clarke's non-fiction, as popular science is much more my sort of thing.

The View from Serendip is a surprisingly varied collection of essays, speeches and other miscellanea Clarke wrote in the 1960s and 70s, with a focus on space, technology and Clarke's personal love for the island of Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka; another name for which is the archaic 'Serendip'). All are clean, lucid, engaging and intellectually stimulating; some are humorous, and many are remarkably prescient. He writes of a 'global electronic library' (pg. 90) available to all, long before the Internet was a thing – and the same goes for mobile phones, personal computers, the threat of automation to employment, and the communications revolution in general.

I think the reason I sometimes struggle with Clarke is less to do with his writing style, which is usually high-calibre, and more to do with shame at the fact that we've fallen rather short of his expectations for us. As a futurist – and one of the more accurate ones, it seems – he not only wrote about where he thought we would go, but where we should go. He wrote concurrently with the dawning of the Space Age, inspiring the Apollo astronauts as much as he was inspired by them, and he saw a future that was more advanced than the one we have delivered in reality. 2001 was supposed to see manned bases on the Moon; the actual year is now nineteen years into our past and we've not been back there since before The View from Serendip was published.

Clarke writes that by 1992, "the first child may well have been born in some lunar colony", we may have nuclear fusion to solve our energy problems, and we would be preparing to go to Mars, if not already there (pg. 94). We can dismiss these now as the optimistic dreams of a science-fiction writer (though Clarke never says that they will happen), but the point I'm trying to make is that they're all feasible. All of Clarke's speculations are rooted in hard science, which is part of his great appeal as a writer. We just don't seem to have committed to the vision of Clarke and others like him. In Serendip, he even mentions the Higgs boson at one point… It seems that our development as a species has been on pause since the 1960s.

Absent moon bases, missions to Mars and fusion energy, it seems at times like the only predictions Clarke has been resoundingly confirmed in, as of 2020, have been the negative ones; the space programs hamstrung by budget cuts, the lack of public appreciation for the benefits they bring, the information-saturated society with its horizons skewed by the ubiquity of small screens. Clarke is an optimistic writer, but if he had been inclined, he could have written a dystopia that would give Orwell a run for his money.

The writing in The View from Serendip reminds us that it's important to hold on to Clarke's optimistic vision, which was shared by many of the 'can-do' Space Age. There's a tendency nowadays to see our present situation as inevitable: the Moon a pointless rock, Mars an expensive folly, 'interstellar' a word for nerds in basements writing fanfic. To realize how wrong this is, note how on page 217 Clarke predicts smartphones, a "multipurpose home communications device" that people value so highly they invest in it even ahead of an automobile. Only Clarke points out that such devices, properly-constructed, could last a very long time, and passed down from generation to generation like "a good watch". Just think of that – when nowadays you're meant to be hyped about the new iPhone before you've even finished paying off the last one. And that's nothing to do with the technological limitations of an iPhone, but everything to do with a bloated, consumerist culture that is geared towards disposability and money-spinning. The fault is not in the stars, which are achievable, but in ourselves. For all our successes, we must surely be something of a disappointment to the great men of the past. ( )

This is an anthology of Clarke's non-fiction writing - mostly things related (at least tangentially) to his choice to live in Sri Lanka (or Ceylon) (or Taprobane) (or Serendip). There are some marginally interesting pieces about life on the island or musing about his work or his trials.

For me, the most interesting piece in this collection was the last one - a transcript of his keynote at a speech at the Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC talking about Technology and Intelligence and what Clarke saw in his Technology-crystal ball as new tech that would change the world. This speech was given in 1976, and he completely nails the internet, cell phones, video chat, apathy to information, the work from home movement and others. Maybe 1976 was too close to 2006 and for someone like Clarke, these advances were obvious. To me, I didn't see smart phones coming even in 2002... Oh well... ( )

This story is a charming tale of our far future. One brave soul finds the courage to be curious and question the status quo of our dying society. What he finds changes the path of humankind. ( )