So there would be aliens in the works—truly Clarkeian aliens, not pallid little humanoids—and there would be shadowy characters trying to keep the rest of us in the dark (although not a cigarette addict among them). On the trail of the aliens, eluding the conspirators, I would begin Sparta’s grand tour on Venus in the inner solar system and move outward, through fits and starts, to Earth’s moon, to Mars, to Jupiter and its moons, and finally into interstellar space.
The vehicle for the journey was Arthur’s incomparable imagination, as expressed in a handful of chosen stories, each a favorite of mine for a different reason. After “Breaking Strain” came “Maelstrom II,” a thrilling adventure that uses orbital mechanics to spring a shocking surprise, while “Hide and Seek” is another neat twist on Newtonian mechanics. “A Meeting with Medusa,” on the other hand, is epic in its scope and majesty, and “Jupiter V” isn’t far behind, broaching the theme Arthur later made famous in his Rama novels. Finally, “The Shining Ones” is an alien vision of rare beauty and mystery.
In Arthur’s exemplary science fiction, the dilemma or resolution of every story depends on some physical principle, some fact of nature, but nothing he wrote ever failed to give his characters their due—even as he put them in their place, human sparks against the backdrop of an in- finite cosmos, a cosmos inhabited in unimaginable variety.
Sparta and her pyrotechnically inclined sidekick Blake are intended to embody just such striving, mostly rational, mostly optimistic Clarkeian beings. At times desperate or discouraged, at times fatally mistaken, at times fragile to the point of collapse, Sparta, who started as a bionic cipher, ended by being as human as I could write her. In Arthur’s honor, it was the least I could do.
—Paul Preuss
Sausalito, California
March 1999