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ARTHUR CHARLES CLARKE (1917-2008) - pseudonyms: Charles Willis, E.G. O'Brien |
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UK writer, one of the grand masters of science fiction with Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. Apart from his literary endeavours, however, Arthur C. Clarke is remembered as the inventor of communication satellite, an idea he first expounded in a 1945 article entitled 'Extraterrestial Relays.' Clarke's professional writing career spanned over five decades. -Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Arthur C. Clarke was born at the coast town of Minehead, the
eldest
of four children. His father, Charles Wright Clarke, was a Post Office
engineer turned into a farmer; he
died in 1931. (He had been gassed in the WWI trenches.) Left with
her children, Clarke's mother, Mary Nora Clarke, continued to run the farm. To augment the
family income, she
gave riding lessons, bred Cairn terriers, and took paying guests.
"Though she must always have been short of money, I do not recall any
real hardship," Clarke recalled in Astounding Days (1989). Clarke became interested in science in early age, devouring
books by
H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Rider Haggard, and others. He was also an avid
reader
of Astounding Stories, Magnet,
Boy's Own Paper, and Meccano
Magazine. His
primary source of books was the Taunton Public Library, which he
visited almost daily. From the Minehead Public Library he borrowed W.
Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men;
"no book before or since has had such an impact on my imagination,"
Clarke once said. While at Huish's
Grammar School, Clarke started to write stories which were
published in school magazines and fan magazines. After doing homework,
he built transmitters and
chrystal radio sets. At
thirteen, Clarke constructed his first telescope. Sometimes he fantasized that he would visit the Moon. Due
to the lack of money, Clarke was not able to enter university. Thus, on
leaving school, he took the entrance examination for the
Civil
Service Executive Grade, scoring 100% in arithmetic. From the summer of
1936, he worked in the Exchequer and Audit
Department in London, where his job involved auditing teacher pensions.
Clarke's apartment became the meeting place of the British
Interplanetary Society, which he had joined when he was sixteen, and in
1949 he was appointed chairman of the BIS. In 1941, Clarke joined the Royal Air Force, specializing in radar and eventually rising to the rank of flight-lieutenant. His article 'More Television Waveforms' was publised in Electronic Engineering in 1942. During the service Clarke sold his first science-fiction story to John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction for $180. In 1945 he wrote a technical paper that was the forerunner of communication satellites, but he did not patent his idea. Clarke was paid $40,00 for the article. It was reprinted in Ascent to Orbit, a collection of his technical writings, that he brought out after receiving the Marconi Award in 1982 for his contributions to communications technology. A short paper, 'Stationary Orbits,' was published in The Journal of the British Astronomical Association in December 1947. Clarke's non-science fiction novel, Glide Path (1963) was based on a testing program for the first blind approach radar. After the war Clarke entered King's College, London, and took in 1948 his B.Sc. with honours in physics and mathematics.
His first published novel, Prelude to
Space,
was written in three weeks during the summer of 1947. Some of his early
stories Clarke wrote under the pseudonym Charles Willis, once he used
the name E.G. O'Brien. From 1949 to 1951 he was an assistant editor of Physics
Abstracts.
The drawings of R.A. Smith, who was a member of the British
Interplanetary Society, contributed greatly to Clarke's early books, The Exploration of Space (1951) and
The Exploration of the Moon
(1954). Since 1952 Clarke worked as a professional writer. His first
full-lenght novel, The Sands of Mars
(1951), contained the italicized sentence, "There are no Mountains on Mars,"
but after the Mariner and Viking missions he apologized to readers in
subsequent editions. Having a second thought about the whole thing, he
retracted the retraction in The Snows
of Olympus: A Garden on Mars
(1994), on the grounds that there are no mountains on this planet as we
know then on Earth, and moreover, Olympus Mons is too large for a
mountain. It is "more accurate, therefore, to call it a bulge or a
blister on the face of Mars." The subtitle of the book was adapted from
Pierre Boulle's novel Le jardin de Kanashima (1964),
about the first Japanese astronaut on the Moon, translated as A Garden on the Moon. In the 1950s Clarke became interested in undersea exploration. He settled in 1956 permanently in Sri Lanka, where he wrote several fiction and nonfiction books and articles about the Indian Ocean. With his friend Mike Wilson he filmed the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, from which his novel The Deep Range (1957) derives. Clarke also served as a director of Rocket Publishing, London, Underwater Safaris, Colombo, and Spaceward Corporation, New York. During his career, Clarke witnessed the development of all the major space programs, from Sputnik and Apollo to Voyager. Fortunate to see his visions turn into reality, he also appeared as commentator on CBS TV for the Apollo 11, 12 and 15 Moon missions. Due to a severe attack of polio in 1962, Clarke became completely paralyzed. As his farewell to the sea he wrote Dolphin Island. After recovering Clarke started his cooperation with the director Stanley Kubrick. Later he accompanied his friend Mike Wilson on an underwater adventure six miles off the coast of Sri Lanka, which was depicted in The Treasure of the Great Reef (1964). However, Clarke still spent over six months out of his beloved island because of tax laws. His home was was surrounded by a high wall and an electric fence. In 1975 the Indian government presented him with a satellite dish, with which he was able to receive programs broadcast from experimental satellite ATS6. The island of Ceylon is a small universe; it contains as many variations of culture, scenery, and climate as some countries a dozen times its size. What you get from it depends on what you bring; if you never stray from your hotel bar or the dusty streets of westernized Colombo, you could perish of fulminating boredom in a week, and it would serve you right. But if you are interested in people, history, nature, and art—the things that really matter—you may find, as I have, that a lifetime is not enough. (Clarke in The View from Serendip, New York: Random House, 1977, p. 118) In the 1980s Clarke was a presenter of the television series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (1980) and World of Strange Powers (1985). He lectured widely in Britain and in the United States. In 1980 he was Vikram Sarabhai Professor at Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India. Until 1982 Clarke had written his books with a typewriter, but after the arrival of his first computer – 5 MB of memory – he used only his word processor. Clarke's best known works include the short story The Sentinel (1951), about man's contact with sentient life. In the spring of 1964, Clarke retired to Hotel Chelsea in New York and began to write a novel about a space travel. His illustrious acquaintances during this period included Arhur Miller, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, and Norman Mailer. Clarke's story was the basis of the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), for which Clarke wrote the script with Stanley Kubrick. The novel was based on the original screenplay. Before the premiere of Kubrick's film, Clarke met in London
the famous Indian director and screenwriter Satyajit Ray, who told him
about his screenplay for a science fiction film. Clarke expressed his
willingness to help. At one point, the comedy actor Peter Sellers got interested in the project, named The Alien.
The film was never realized but it has been claimed that there are
resemblances between the storyline and the character of the alien in
Steven Spielberg's film E.T. (1982) with that in Ray's script. ('Discussions
and Storytelling Connecting Two Great Storytellers: Satyajit Ray from
Kolkata and Arthur C. Clarke from Colombo,' in India, Sri Lanka and the SAARC Region: History, Popular Culture and Heritage by Lopamudra Maitra Bajpai, 2021) In 2001 a mysterious monolith is found buried beneath
the
surface of the moon. It send's a signal towards Jupiter. To solve the
mystery astronauts are sent to Jupiter with the help of the
"infallible" super-computer HAL 9000, voiced in the film by the
Canadian actor Douglas Rain. With the amazing machine Clarke presents
one of the basic philosophical questions: can there be intelligence
without consciousness? After a series of accidents and HAL's
operations, one of the astronauts, David Bowman, is left alone as the
ship reaches the planet. There he embarks on the final step in
humankind's next developmental stage and at the end, as a fetus,
symbolizes the birth of the Übermensch. "If anyone understands it on
the first viewing, we've failed in our intention", Clarke said of the
film. Clarke continued the Odyssey Saga in three
sequels, 2010: Odyssey Two
(1982), dedicated to Alexei Leonov and Andrei Sakharov, 2061: Odyssey Three
(1988), and 3001: The Final Odyssey
(1996). The seven Russian crew members in 2010, which described a joint US-USSR mission to Jupiter, were
named after Soviet dissidents. When Clarke met Cosmonaut General Alexei
Leonov at Star Village (Zvezdnyy Gorodok) near Moscow, he gave Clarke a
copy of his book Life Among the Stars. In it were the sketches Leonov made during the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. Childhood's End (1953) told about the beginning of the age of Humankind after Overlods have eliminated ignorance, disease and poverty. A Fall of Moondust (1961) was a tale of marooned moon schooner, and in Rendezvous with Rama (1973) a research team is sent to investigate a cylindrical object hurtling through the solar system. Although Clarke announced that The Fountains of Paradise (1979) would be his last work of fiction, he continued his literary activity. With Gentry Lee, the chief engineer on Project Galileo, Clarke wrote Cradle (1988), originally conceived as a movie project, and Rama II (1989). Clarke's catastrophe novel The Hammer of God (1993) about an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, anticipated such films as Deep Impact (1998) and Armageddon (1998). Clarke's Venus Prime series was franchised to Paul Preuss. The Kubrick/Clarke vision from 1968 of computers and space programs at the turn of the century did not came true. In an interview Clarke acknowledged: "We science-fiction writers never attempt to predict. In fact, it's the exact opposite. As my friend Ray Bradbury said, 'We do this not to predict the future but to prevent it.'"(Newsweek, December 2000-February 2001, special edition) Clarke was fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and recipient of many awards for his science fiction. He was the guest of honour at the 1956 World Science Fiction Convention, when he won a Hugo for his story 'The Star.' Rendezvous with Rama won the Nebula and Hugo Awards, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Clarke also received the Franklin Gold Medal, and in 1962 the UNESCO-Kalinga Prize for popularizing science. Clarke was made a knight in 1998. In 1954 he married Marilyn Mayfield, a 22-year-old American, whom he had met on a trip to Florida; they separated after a few months and divorced officially in 1964. A British tabloid, the Sunday Mirror, claimed in 1998 that he had paid young boys for sex. After an investigation by the Sri Lankan police and Interpol, Clarke was cleared of accusations; he did not sue the newspaper. For the last two decades of his life, Clarke suffered from post-polio syndrome. Clarke died in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on March 19, 2008. Nevertheless, it is vital to remember that information—in the sense of raw data—is not knowledge; that knowledge is not wisdom; and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these. (from 'Is There Life After Television,' Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!: Collected Essays, 1934-1998, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, p. 531) A central theme in Clarke's fiction was the "spiritual" rebirth and the search for man's place in the universe. In Rendezvous with Rama the discussions of a research team form an allegory for the great question of the meaning of life. 2001 traces the evolution of man and humanity's quest for existential answers, symbolized by the unearthly monolith. In the sequels technological progress allows to reveal some of the secrets behind the monolith. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", Clarke once said. The technological details of his books were flawless, and often Clarke guessed right new advances in science, but not always. In an article from 1999, 'The Twentieth-First Century: A (Very) Brief History,' he predicted that the last coal mine is closed in 2006, a city in a third world country is devastated in 2009 by the accidental explosion of an A-bomb in its armory, and in 2014 starts the construction of Hilton Orbiter Hotel. A step forwaard with the idea of a space elevator, as dramatized in The Fountains of Paradise, was taken up in the early 2000s. NASA's Institute for Advaced Concepts program funded Bradley C. Edwards' and Eric A. Wrestling's study The Space Elevator (Spaego, San Francisco, 2003). Colin McInnes and Chris Davis published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (vol. 59, 2006) a study of the use of space elevators as energy-free "orbital siphons".
Selected works:
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