Admitting to liking science fiction has got to be one of the most guaranteed ways of killing conversations with pretty women at dinner parties, but as I’m off the market anyway, I can publicly mourn Arthur C. Clarke, who died last week at age 90.

My hometown’s shrine-like Carnegie library was piled to the rafters with thick 19th century novels written about the same time it was built. For newer books we relied on a slowly rotating assortment of cheap paperbacks in our three drugstores and two grocery stores – an assortment of Travis McGee mysteries, Alistair MacLean spy thrillers and a free-floating mishmash of other popular fiction. Dad and I favored these drugstore books.

With clarity, I recall making an eccentric selection in 1969, a strangely lit spaceman on its cover, which also touted a forthcoming movie, Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

His death brings an end to a kind of childhood, a hopeful time when he foresaw mankind’s heroic and inevitable migration across the galaxy. Admitting to liking science fiction kills conversation with women at dinner parties.It sometimes seems now that Clarke’s version of our destiny has been stillborn, a victim of earth-bound politics and space shuttle deaths that shocked us into rude awareness of the deadly risks of space exploration.

Science fiction has long since fallen off my reading list, replaced on my bedside by heavy tomes on European archaeology and genetics. (Our Celtic ancestors were avid headhunters: Who knew?) But I strongly believe that Clarke and his generation of post-World War II sci-fi writers – Clifford Simak, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, to name a few – will be honored generations for now for their hopeful vision of our species and our potential to transcend the bonds of space and time.

Whether we actually will succeed in traveling beyond our solar system is somewhat questionable, considering the positively horrifying distances involved. Clarke wasn’t prepared to take no for an answer, envisioning vast fleets of humanity making generations-long voyages from star to star. We are a mere baby of a species and no one knows what we can achieve.

Thanks to Arthur Clarke, we can imagine a glorious future.

Bears in the garbage, deer in flower beds. They are natural signs of spring on this coast. But how long will it be before somebody tries suing to bring these outrages to stop?

I’m joking, of course, but it was widely reported last week that an exasperated beekeeper in Macedonia successfully sued a bear that persisted in raiding his hives. The court awarded $3,500, which the government has to pay since the bear is protected as endangered and presumably would have bought honey at the store if it had money of its own. (No word yet on what Boo Boo and Cindy Bear think of Yogi’s antics.)

It’s a wonder the beekeeper himself wasn’t sued by his neighbors. To scare away the bear, he played obnoxious folk songs by Ceca, the widow of late Serb war crimes suspect Arkan, over a loudspeaker for weeks.

Although the court’s decision was labeled “bizarre” in news stories, European records are full of similar cases, many recounted in Darren Oldridge’s Strange Histories.

In 1457, a 5-year-old was “killed by a sow in the presence of her six piglets. These were stained with blood at the scene of the crime, but there was no ‘positive proof that they had assisted in mangling the deceased.’ After consulting with local experts, the judge ruled that the sow should be executed.” This sentence was carried out, by hanging, but the piglets were paroled.

Besides pigs, there are cases involving horses and bulls that attacked people, along with mice, fish, caterpillars and weevils that damaged crops or otherwise harmed entire communities.

In a famous instance from 1545, French villagers sued a plague of flies for destroying a vineyard. A noted lawyer was appointed to defend the flies and argued his clients were merely obeying God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply.” The townsfolk then acknowledged the flies’ right to live and set aside a piece of land for this purpose outside the vineyards. Oldridge comments he would have loved to learn how this worked out for everybody, but insects destroyed the later court papers.

– M.S.W.

Matt Winters is editor of the Chinook Observer