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Summary
Summary
Two of science fiction's most renowned writers join forces for a storytelling sensation. The historic collaboration between Frederik Pohl and his fellow founding father of the genre, Arthur C. Clarke, is both a momentous literary event and a fittingly grand farewell from the late, great visionary author of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Last Theorem is a story of one man's mathematical obsession, and a celebration of the human spirit and the scientific method. It is also a gripping intellectual thriller in which humanity, facing extermination from all-but-omnipotent aliens, the Grand Galactics, must overcome differences of politics and religion and come together... or perish.
Summary
In 1637, the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat scrawled a note in the margin of a book about an enigmatic theorem: 'I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain'. But he neglected to record his proof elsewhere. Thus began a search for the Holy Grail of mathematics, which didn't end until 1994 when Andrew Wiles published a 150-page proof. But the proof was burdensome and utilized mathematical techniques undreamed of in Fermat's time.
Author Notes
Arthur C. Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset, England, on December 16, 1917. During World War II, he served as a radar specialist in the RAF. His first published piece of fiction was Rescue Party and appeared in Astounding Science, May 1946. He graduated from King's College in London with honors in physics and mathematics, and worked in scientific research before turning his attention to writing fiction.
His first book, Prelude to Space, was published in 1951. He is best known for his book 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was later turned into a highly successful and controversial film under the direction of Stanley Kubrick. His other works include Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama, The Garden of Rama, The Snows of Olympus, 2010: A Space Odyssey II, 2062: Odyssey III, and 3001: The Final Odyssey. During his lifetime, he received at least three Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards. He died of heart failure on March 19, 2008 at the age of 90.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Grand Masters Pohl (Gateway) and the late Clarke (1917-2008, best known for 2001) collaborated on a can't-put-down adventure that focuses on their mutual strengths: high adventure, fun characters and hard science. Sometime in the near future, teenage Sri Lankan math prodigy Ranjit Subramanian manages to reconstruct and then publish Fermat's claimed proof of his famous last theorem. As Ranjit celebrates fame and fortune, the all-powerful aliens called Grand Galactics see the flash from early nuclear explosions and decide that humanity will have to be wiped out. When Earth's superpowers deploy a new, nonlethal way of handling renegade nations and humanity begins working on global peace and large-scale engineering projects, Ranjit and his family try to broker a truce with the destructive alien force, modeling human optimism through rationality and science. Long passages of math tricks and intrusive narration mar an otherwise enjoyable tale of the struggle between reason and fear. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
Completed days before the 2008 death of coauthor Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey), this novel by two of the sf genre's founding fathers has been panned by critics and readers alike, and with good reason. It is uneven and occasionally dull, and it struggles to blend incompatible themes. But the protagonist's relentless quest to prove a centuries-old mathematical theorem offers a certain fascination, particularly within the cultural context of Sri Lanka. Mark Bramhall's (Fire in the Blood) compelling narration translates this title successfully to audio. Recommended with reservations. [Audio clip available through library.booksontape.com.-Ed.]-R. Kent Rasmussen, Thousand Oaks, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One ON SWAMI ROCK And so now, at last, we meet this Ranjit Subramanian, the one whose long and remarkable life this book is all about. At this time Ranjit was sixteen years old, a freshman at Sri Lanka's principal university, in the city of Colombo, and more full of himself than even your average sixteen- year- old. He wasn't at the university now, though. At his father's bidding he had made the long trip from Colombo slantwise across the island of Sri Lanka to the district of Trincomalee, where his father had the distinction of being chief priest at the Hindu temple called Tiru Koneswaram. Ranjit actually loved his father very much. He was almost always glad to see him. This time, however, he was a bit less so, because this time Ranjit had a pretty good idea of what the revered Ganesh Subramanian wanted to talk to him about. Ranjit was an intelligent boy, in fact one who was quite close to being as smart as he thought he was. He was a good- looking one, too. He wasn't terribly tall, but most Sri Lankans aren't. Ethnically he was a Tamil, and his skin color was the rich dark brown of a spoonful of cocoa powder, just before it went into the hot milk. The skin color wasn't because he was a Tamil, though. Sri Lankans have a rich palette of complexions from near- Scandinavian white to a black so dark it seems almost purple. Ranjit's best friend, Gamini Bandara, was pure Sinhalese for as many generations back as anyone had bothered to count, but the boys were the same in skin hue. The boys had been friends for a long time--since that scary night when Gamini's school had burned to the ground, probably put to the torch by a couple of upperclassmen smoking forbidden cigarettes in a storage room. Like every other nearby human being capable of picking up a splintered piece of plywood and throwing it on the back of a truck, Ranjit had been drafted for emergency relief work. So had all the rest of the student body of his own school. It had been a dirty job, a lot harder than a youngster's developing muscles were used to, not to mention the splinters and the scrapes and the endless cuts from the broken glass that was everywhere. Those were the bad parts, and there were plenty of them. But there were good parts, too. Like the time when Ranjit and some other boy around his own age finally got down to the source of some plaintive sounds that were coming from a debris pile, and released the headmaster's terrified, but intact, elderly Siamese cat. When a teacher had carried the cat off to its owner, the two boys had stood grinning at each other. Ranjit had stuck his hand out, English fashion. "I'm Ranjit Subramanian," he'd said. "And I'm Gamini Bandara," the other boy had said, pumping his hand gleefully, "and, hey, we did a pretty good job here, didn't we?" They agreed that they had. When at last they had been allowed to quit work for the day, they had lined up together for the sort of porridge that was their evening meal, and plopped their sleeping bags next to each other that night, and they had been best friends ever since. Helped out, to be sure, by the fact that Gamini's school had been made uninhabitable by the fire and so its students had to double up at Ranjit's. Gamini turned out to be pretty much everything a best friend could be, including the fact that the one great obsession in Ranjit's life, the one for which there was no room for another person to share, didn't interest Gamini at all. And, of course, there was one other thing that Gamini was. That Excerpted from The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke, Frederik Pohl All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.