Arthur Charles Clarke was born in 1917 in England’s West Country. A farmer’s son but always academic, he discovered science fiction through the works of Olaf Stapledon, and through the American pulp magazines, especially Astounding.
During the Second World War Clarke volunteered for the RAF and worked on pioneering developments in radar, a time he wrote about in his semi-autobiographical non-genre novel Glide Path (1963). The protagonist, West Country boy and whiz-kid radar engineer Alan Bishop, encounters a new level of reality: “He had become entangled in powers and instrumentalities that would surely shape the future” (chapter 30). Perhaps this wartime experience influenced Clarke’s many tales of transcendence through technology, from Childhood’s End to 2001 and beyond.
After the war, Clarke worked on a physics journal, completed a degree at King’s College, London, and began to emerge as a significant writer of short fiction, technical articles, and popular non-fiction works on spaceflight. His first novel, Prelude to Space (1951), described a Moon project organized by British space enthusiasts—just like Clarke and his friends in the British Interplanetary Society!
As his writing career took off Clarke traveled widely, particularly to America, and he developed an interest in deep sea diving that would eventually lure him away from England altogether. He would spend much of his life, and end it, in Sri Lanka, where he found personal happiness.
The fiction is what mattered most to me. Clarke became part of that wartime generation of SF authors who mapped our future in generally progressive and optimistic tones, through such classic books as The Sands of Mars and A Fall of Moondust.
But Clarke’s non-fiction was just as influential. Carl Sagan testified how Clarke’s depictions of interplanetary flight inspired him into a career in space science. And thanks to his technical foresight scientists and engineers took Clarke seriously. Clarke’s fame as the originator of the concept of geostationary communications satellites is well known. It’s no surprise that the Apollo astronauts chose to give their capsules names like Odyssey.
Clarke’s career reached its apotheosis in 1968, with the novel and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Today, four decades later, 2001 deservedly towers, Monolith-like, above the rest of the genre.
The project’s first working title, How the Solar System Was Won, suggests that Clarke thought the movie would be a portrait of the near-future human colonization of space. But Stanley Kubrick was intrigued by another, much more complex part of Clarke’s personality. As far back as the 1950s Clarke had shown himself to be drawn to metaphysical speculation. Clarke himself did not deny this, though he was dismissive of fakery and bad science, and he thought organized religion was a blight. The universe is full of wonder, he said, and no complete human being could fail to apprehend that fact. This is what Kubrick homed in on, and the movie became a portrait of human transcendence as astronaut Dave Bowman becomes the Star Child.
Clarke’s work captures a key theme of our time. For us in the west, it’s not long since Copernicus and Darwin demolished whatever certainty we might have had about our place in the universe. Clarke’s work, filled with longing for contact and hope of transcendence, belongs to a peculiarly British strand of science fiction, running from H.G. Wells through Clarke’s acknowledged key influence, Olaf Stapledon. But Stapledon was aloof and chilling; Clarke could make us cry.
After 2001, Clarke was probably the best-known SF writer on Earth. He was only just over fifty, and had a long career ahead of him yet. His next novel, Rendezvous with Rama, was another terrific success. But in later years, Clarke, afflicted by post-polio syndrome, did not always have the strength to fulfill his ideas alone. And that was how I came to work with him.
I first met Clarke in 1992, when my first novel Raft was nominated for the Clarke Award (for best SF novel published in Britain). Clarke was particularly taken by The Time Ships (1995), my sequel to Wells’s The Time Machine. After that first contact, we worked on four books together, The Light of Other Days (2000) and the Time Odyssey series (2002-2008). It was a joy and a privilege for me to work with a man who had such a profound influence on my life, and on the age we live in.
Working with Clarke, I always thought that while he was fascinated by the new, there were traces of old obsessions in his work. In our collaboration Sunstorm (2005), a disorderly sun threatens Earth. The misbehavior of the sun has featured in many of Clarke’s works, beginning with “Rescue Party” (1946), and including his novel Songs of Distant Earth (1986). I wondered if this theme was a faint echo of that West Country farm boy, dependent on the sun.
And he never forgot those pre-war American magazines. He wrote a whole memoir about them (Astounding Days, 1989). 2001’s sequel 2010 was published in 1982, and it reflected the reality of spaceflight as it had been experienced: uncomfortable, ugly, and cramped. But by 3001, old dreams revive. We have the “Inertial Drive,” and back-from-the-dead 2001 astronaut Frank Poole says (Chapter 14): “Do you know what Goliath reminds me of ? . . . When I was a boy, I came across a whole pile of old science-fiction magazines that my Uncle George had abandoned – ‘pulps,’ they were called . . . They had wonderful garish covers, showing strange planets and monsters—and of course, spaceships! As I grew older, I realized how ridiculous those spaceships were . . . Well, those old artists had the last laugh . . . Goliath looks more like their dreams than the flying fuel-tanks we used to launch from the Cape.”
To the end, Clarke remained fascinated by the future and newness, as delivered to his study by the internet. His advice was sought by presidents and business leaders, but to his friends he was a terrific email correspondent, with his liveliness, curiosity, and huge generosity of spirit. I’ll miss him very much.
