In pursuing what I call the "Odyssey pattern," I seek to define a central organizing structure in Clarke's fiction, one which bears interesting and precise analogies to the writer's cultural and social situation and hence to ours. If all literature possesses such significant structures, Clarke's work is of particular interest for its angle of vision—here is a scientist writing about the quandary of modern scientific man, drawing on deep and persistent currents of Western literature. This firm grounding in the "two cultures" alone would make Clarke worthy of our attention. As we shall discover, there is much more. (p. 3)

More than characters or wise pronouncements in Clarke (the first are usually flat, the second commonplace), the reader notices the insistence with which he returns to the same ambiguous pattern over and over. Ambiguity is not some anomaly to be excused or circumvented. On the contrary, it is...