Review

The Last Theorem

Arthur C. Clarke, Frederik Pohl

2008

HarperVoyager

Review by Peter Young in Big Sky #1 (2013).

Post-hype, no one will be hailing The Last Theorem as the great publishing event we were perhaps led to anticipate. As a ‘last hurrah’ for Clarke it’s undistilled wish fulfillment, a ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ of disjointed ideas that Clarke had already visited with far greater success elsewhere, like a grand tour of his better stories and therefore rather lacking in novelty: solar sailing, space elevators, first contact, peace through technology, transcendence, all threaded into the life of one young Sri Lankan mathematician who happens to have solved Fermat’s Last Theorem (Andrew Wiles’s proof is dismissed as inconclusive). With a little reworking it would do rather well as a young adult novel. It has one very good thing in its favour: a deft beginning, in which Clarke’s and Pohl’s introductions segue smoothly into the story itself, like stepping from the shore into the shallow waters of the start of the story with the promise of greater depth to come, however by the time half the book has gone by you realise that knee-deep is just about the depth it’s going to stay. Disappointingly, one for the completists.