2077 On this date the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke imagined an asteroid striking Italy, causing huge devastation – arrivederci Padua, Verona, Venice – leading to the launch of Spaceguard, a NASA early-warning programme to watch for threats from space. In June 2130 Spaceguard detects a strange space vehicle in the shape of a sausage 20 kilometres round by 54 long. This is the scenario for Rendezvous with Rama (1972), which scooped all the sci-fi prizes for that year.
Told of the ‘real’ 9/11, Tom Clancy commented: ‘Four planes? That many people willing to die for the same cause at the same time? If any writer turned in a story like this, the publisher would have just handed it back and said, “No way. Not believable.”’ His own final scene in Debt of Honor (1994) has an embittered Japanese pilot of the ‘lone nut’ persuasion, following a not awfully believable war with the United States in which his son and brother have been killed, crash his 747 into the US Capitol building in Washington, killing the president, most of the Congress and cabinet, the joint chiefs of staff and all nine justices of the Supreme Court – all convened for a celebratory joint session of Congress.
Clancy claims he foretold the attack on the Twin Towers, and that NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, should have been in the air over New York to shoot the hijacked planes out of the sky on that sunny September morning. More up-market authors thought fiction might never rise to the occasion, now that it had actually happened. Within a fortnight the New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ department had got together a symposium of first (non-fictional) impressions, including John Updike’s on the abstract fury of the perpetrators, Amitrav Ghosh’s on how hard it was for a victim’s children to take in the enormity of his sudden death, and Susan Sontag’s that this was not another Pearl Harbor, but revenge for America throwing its weight around in the Middle East.
But the end of fiction? Not a bit of it. By mid-decade the fictions were positively gushing out: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), Jess Walter’s The Zero (2006). Martin Amis’s short story ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’ (2006) imagined the interior mental framework of a fanatical personality. So did Updike’s Terrorist (2006), only now the fanatic was an American-born Muslim high school senior in New Jersey, both attracted to and repulsed by the girls who ‘sway and sneer and expose their soft bodies and alluring hair’. Then Don DeLillo explored modes of union and isolation in Falling Man (2007). Reviews were mixed.
No one departed from Clancy’s paranoid vision of an embattled America. Clarke’s very different projection remained unshared. When the Americans finally gain entrance to the spaceship Rama, the aliens are too busy preparing their ship for a crucial manoeuvre to pay them any attention. They have no interest in earth, let alone the United States. They are just passing through the solar system – not visiting it (let alone assaulting it) – in order to use the sun’s gravity to sling-shot them into a faster trajectory for another destination altogether.