Word: serendipity
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...hour away at Tangalla also on the southern coast. Apart from introducing beach elephant polo, Dobbs is now planning to open a boutique yacht club because there isn't a single one between the Suez Canal and Phuket. "I now term this part of southern Sri Lanka as the Serendip Riviera. The stretch from Galle to Tangalla will in time become the best address in the Indian Ocean." Amanresorts, the ultra-chic chain run by Adrian Zecha, is moving in too. Zecha is restoring Galle's New Oriental Hotel, a 300-year-old Dutch barracks that was converted into...
Aliens didn't swoop down on Clarke's Sri Lanka home, so instead of Overmind the reader gets The View from Serendip, a hodgepodge of autobiographical trivia, tepid sea stories and futuristic speculation. The essays on space and technology go several light-years towards redeeming Serendip, but they don't go far enough...
...first home, the sea...[As] it drew the tides across the barren continents of primeval earth, their daily rhythm exposed to sun and air the creatures of the shallows...Now, the moon calls again and this time life responds with a roar that shakes earth and sky." In Serendip, unfortunately, Clarke's prose--burdened by the inappropriate subject matter--plods more often than it soars...
...Serendip does not go behind-the-scenes on 2001, despite advertising promises to the contrary. The Clarke-Kubrick collaboration was fully described in Lost Worlds of 2001. As a result, the only attention paid to the landmark film comes in the form of Clarke's slightly defensive explanation of how astronaut David Bowman managed to survive in a vacuum for several seconds while re-entering his space ship. Clarke cites experiments on animals in vacuum chambers in an effort to disprove the old sci-fi truism that an astronaut would explode instantly in the vacuum of space. The book scintillates...
While focusing down on individual cells in the course of their investigations into the grand scheme of the brain, neuroscientists-like the Persian fairy tale's three princes of Serendip-have been making fortuitous discoveries that have already resulted in improved clinical treatment of several serious illnesses...