Rendezvous with karma

Yup, the Barisan Nasional has just had its meeting with destiny, or call it rendezvous with karma.

On March 8, the many sins of the ruling coalition caught up with it, creating a sea change in the electoral map – picture this geographical chart of peninsular Malaysia: PAS green for Kelantan and Kedah, DAP red for Penang and Perak, PKR light blue for Selangor, BN dark blue for Umno stronghold Johor, smaller satellites Perlis, Negri Sembilan and the rest.

So now we have many colours on the map and a Barisan Rakyat corridor of a round half dozen states. Please allow me to emphasise that the DAP-PKR-PAS coalition controls six states, not five as the local newspapers grudgingly concede. The Federal Territory, although it has no state seats, comprises 11 Parliamentary constituencies, out of which 10 went to BR.

To veer from the election fare currently inundating Malaysiakini, I’m eschewing further political commentary here and instead intend to do a bit of stargazing. Nope, I’ve nothing to add about the Star’s election coverage but I do encourage you to sign The People’s Parliament ‘Boycott the newspapers!’ online petition.

The stargazing I’m alluding to is about writings that reach for the stars, and remembering Arthur C. Clarke, who passed away yesterday at age 90. In fact, the title of this essay is really a nod in tribute to ‘Rendezvous with Rama’, my favourite book from the oeuvre of Clarke, science fiction’s indisputable grandmaster.

Dare to dream

Arthur, middle name Charles Clarke is my favourite sci-fi author and ‘Rendezvous’ is "widely regarded as one of the cornerstones in his bibliography" – or in simpler words, it’s won lots of prizes and liked by lots of people.

‘Rendezvous’ snagged the Nebula for Best Novel in 1973, the award winner preceding Clarke being Isaac Asimov and succeeding Clarke, Ursula K Le Guin, both major writers.

Asimov, famous for his ‘Robot’ and ‘Foundation’ series of books, collected the 1972 Nebula for ‘The Gods Themselves’. Le Guin, who created the fantasy world of Earthsea, won Best Novel for ‘The Dispossessed’ in 1974. The Nebula prize is a sort of Pulitzer for the sci-fi genre and the first Nebula for best novel in 1965 had gone to Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’.

An older sci-fi award is the Hugo, which incidentally has more categories than Nebula. There’s often a convergence in their winners (analogous to the movies’ Oscar and Golden Globe); the same novels by Asimov, Clarke and Le Guin were awarded the Hugo between the years 1973 and 1975 respectively too.

To use a description that’s been abused as an advertising and PR cliché in Malaysia, sci-fi is indeed a ‘celebration of diversity’. It would have to be as the writers paint such technicolour dreamcoats of their imagined extra-terrestrial civilisations. People who have the capacity to see in their mind’s eye little green men, alien critters and superior beings are generally very broadminded, I should think.

Sadly, Malaysia has too few, if any, sci-fi writers to speak of. Instead it has too many reporters in mainstream newspapers whose propaganda only serve to poison race relations. And the Malaysian reading public is similarly constrained by the long-conditioned race and religion parameters; if only we could think of ourselves all as Earthlings or the ‘carbon-based bipeds’ mischievously dubbed by Clarke, we’d not be so blinkered in our worldview.

The most humanist one of all

Among the sci-fi authors I’m fond of is Isaac Asimov. His stories on ‘psychohistory’ – a word he coined for his fictional discipline studying the psychological motivation of historical and current events combined with projections of statistical probability – are mental fodder for real life socio-politics. But Asimov has also an impish sense of humour which alleviates the sombreness of his fiction.

Newer favourites are Orson Scott Card and C J Cherryh, and needless to say supplemented by the early authors such as Bradbury, Aldiss and Heinlein belonging to sci-fi’s golden era when flights of imagination were just beginning to knock on the threshold of reality.

Not too long ago, I turned to DVD box sets like the cable series ‘Battlestar Galactica’ – a funky remake, not its namesake the 1970s TV show – and ‘Firefly’, an unusual space Western (sci-fi in cowboy setting) which morphed from small screen to debut as ‘Serenity’ the movie. But for sci-fi that leaves you thinking, nothing beats Arthur C Clarke for the deep humanity of his writing.

Those who don’t read Clarke may still be aware of the groundbreaking ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. Its screenplay was co-written by Clarke and the movie’s director Stanley Kubrick. Clarke also wrote his novel of the same name concurrently.

Among Clarke’s most moving work include short story ‘The Star’ and nautical tale ‘The Deep Range’. Other good reads are ‘Imperial Earth’, ‘The Songs of a Distant Earth’, and ‘Fountains of Paradise’ which locale evokes Sri Lanka, the country Clarke adopted as his home.

‘Rendezvous with Rama’ will be crossing over to the celluloid world and is currently in pre-production. It’s a project conceived by actor Morgan Freeman who brought on board director David Fincher, and the movie expected to be released sometime next year.

Many of the sci-fi ideas floated by Clarke are grounded in hard science. One crossover into the real world was Clarke’s academic paper suggesting that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays. The International Astronomical Union credited his contribution by officially recognising a geostationary orbit as a ‘Clarke orbit’.

Although Clarke was British and held dual Sri Lankan citizenship, the characters in his books come in many colours – Indians, Japanese, Asians, Russians, and if they’re not human, who knows.

To return to Earth and specifically to that ‘special’ country north of Singapore, we have Perak whose Part 1, Article 12 (2) of its state constitution reads: "No person shall be appointed to be Menteri Besar unless he is of the Malay race and professes the Muslim Religion".

How small-minded and limiting when the rest of the world are soaring for the skies.