The Last Theorem By Arthur C Clarke and Frederik Pohl Harper Voyager, 301pp. £18.99SCIENCE FICTION fans back in the 1950s and later used to refer to the Big Three: the three SF writers who had helped to shape modern science fiction and set its agenda. The eldest of the Big Three, Robert A Heinlein, died in 1988; the youngest, Isaac Asimov, in 1992.
And now Sir Arthur C Clarke is no longer with us either; he died in March this year in his beloved Sri Lanka. The Last Theorem is his last novel, written in collaboration with Frederik Pohl.
If there had been a Big Six in the 1950s, Pohl would certainly have been a member. Two years younger than Clarke, his first professional publication of science fiction was in 1940; Clarke's was in 1946. Pohl was a member of the Futurians, a New York-based group of writers that included Asimov, and as an editor, agent and writer had a considerable influence on the development of science fiction. His novel The Space Merchants (1953), which he co-wrote with CM Kornbluth, was considered by Kingsley Amis in 1960 to be the greatest achievement of modern science fiction, and by the mid-1970s he was producing such highly acclaimed novels as Gateway and Man Plus. But Pohl seems to have flourished in particular as a collaborator: he not only wrote with Kornbluth, but between 1954 and 1991 produced 10 novels with Jack Williamson (whose own solo writing career spanned 1928 to 2005). This is the first, and last, novel written by Pohl in collaboration with Clarke.
Clarke was a scientist, a populariser of science, and a futurologist. He helped develop radar in the 1940s; he had the idea of geosynchronous satellites long before the technology to launch satellites had been developed. But as a fiction writer he was known for two things in particular, which at times seemed contradictory: a fascination with the nuts-and-bolts of the exploration of space, especially within this solar system, and a visionary and even mystical view of the ultimate destiny of humanity. In the 1950s, when he was at his most productive, he could publish a detailed account of the colonisation of Mars, in The Sands of Mars, while at the same time producing Childhood's End and The City and the Stars, imaginative explorations of the idea of utopia and of the possible utopian consequences of a meeting with alien intelligences more advanced than ourselves. In his most famous collaboration, with the movie director Stanley Kubrick, he created 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), he brought these two elements together, making travel to the Moon about as exciting as a train-ride to Bray (great views but boringly predictable) while at the same time offering a mystical (and largely mystifying) vision of first contact with superior aliens. The mystery of alien life was perfectly explored in his novel Rendezvous with Rama (1972), which won science fiction's most prestigious awards, a Hugo and a Nebula; he won the same two awards for The Fountains of Paradise (1979), which looked at how a "space elevator", an immense cable joining the Earth to a geosynchronous satellite, could solve the economic and technological problems of moving mass up into orbit.
It is impossible to know what Pohl's contribution to The Last Theorem was, but in many ways it appears to be the quintessential Clarke novel, still exploring the problems which interested Clarke at the very beginning of his writing career. It brings a technological fix to the question of world peace; it describes the beginnings of space exploration with the help of a space elevator (anchored, as in The Fountains of Paradise, firmly to Sri Lankan soil); it offers a utopian vision of the possibilities of contact with friendly aliens, in a galaxy which otherwise offers multiple threats to our species.
The novel follows the life of Ranjit Subramanian, a Tamil from Trincomalee, a mathematical prodigy whose career recalls two of the 20th century's great mathematicians, Srinivasa Ramanujan and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
Ranjit achieves worldwide fame when he completes an elegant proof of Fermat's Last Theorem while still a student at the University of Colombo. After a spell working for the CIA on a mysterious project, he retreats back to his native Sri Lanka, and becomes involved in Earth's first negotiations with aliens. Aliens have brought with them the technology for uploading personalities into machine storage, so Ranjit achieves immortality the way Woody Allen wanted it: not through his work, but through not dying. The novel is plainly and clearly written, as all Clarke's work was, and it contains all that yearning for a better world that makes his work so appealing and, perhaps, immortal.
• Edward James is professor of medieval history at UCD. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, which he co-edited with Farah Mendlesohn, won a Hugo Award at the 2005 World Science Fiction Convention