[BITList] Out of this world

[John Feltham]

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2012-03-19



Clarke, Sir  Arthur Charles  (1917-2008), science and science fiction writer, was born on 16 December 1917 at 4 Blenheim Terrace, Minehead, Somerset, the eldest of the four children of Charles Wright Clarke (1888-1931) and his wife, (Mary) Nora Jessie, nee Willis (1892-1980). His father was a Post Office telegraphist then serving as a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers; his mother also worked as a telegraphist. Following the war, after a first unsuccessful attempt at farming, a career decided upon because of lung injuries Clarke's father had received, the family took up a smallholding at Ballifants, near Bishop's Lydeard, Somerset, in 1924. There Clarke and his younger siblings, Fred (b. 1921), Mary (b. 1923), and Michael (b. 1928), grew up.

Education, early writings, and move to Ceylon

As a schoolboy, Clarke developed a passionate interest in science, which his family and school (Huish Grammar School, Taunton) encouraged. His brother Fred recalled, in an article published in the journal Foundation to celebrate Clarke's seventieth birthday, experiments with rockets, wireless, and photography. In a collection of contributions from the Huish Magazine published in 1996 Clarke's own contributions included spoofs and skits written under the spell of the science fiction magazines he was already reading at the time, while he was teased as 'Professor Larke' and 'Clericus' (one of his pseudonyms) in essays by others. His later contributions were clearly influenced by the effect upon him of Olaf Stapledon's epic future-history Last and First Men (1930), which he was several times to remark had changed his life, and the discovery of the British Interplanetary Society, which Clarke joined in 1934 shortly after its formation. He was later to serve the society, established to argue the case for space exploration by a young Wallasey engineer, P. E. Cleator, as chairman in 1946-7 and again in 1950-53.

On leaving school to join the civil service Clarke's early life was dominated by these interests. He attended the first science fiction convention in Leeds in January 1937, and his first work of fiction, 'Travel by Wire', was published in Amateur Science Stories, a fanzine published in that year by the newly founded Science Fiction Association. Much of his early writing appeared in similar organs produced by the small but active group of science fiction devotees of the time, such as Novae Terrae, or as part of the overlapping activity of the British Interplanetary Society. His enthusiasm for both was satirized by his friend and fellow writer William Temple, with whom he shared a London flat at 88 Gray's Inn Road (the title of Temple's later book of reminiscences) until 1939. His affectionate nickname 'Ego' reflected the focus and ambition that he brought to his scientific and literary projects (his regular newsletters to friends and fans in later life were 'Egograms'). Clarke was already working on a novel, which appeared as 'Against the Fall of Night' in Startling Stories in 1948, was published in book form in 1953, and extensively revised as The City and the Stars in 1956. His first professional fiction sales, 'Loophole' and 'Rescue Party', appeared in Astounding in April and May 1946.

Volunteering for RAF service in 1941, Clarke became a technical officer working on radar systems until his demobilization in 1946, when he began a degree course at King's College, London, graduating with first-class honours in mathematics and physics. Before then, however, he had published what was perhaps his most prophetic work: the essay 'Extra-terrestrial relays' in the technical journal Wireless World (1945). Here he suggested using rocket technology to place a system of satellites in geosynchronous orbit around the earth, from which signals could be bounced to blanket the earth with a communications network. Apart from the fact that Clarke envisaged manned satellites, this is essentially the system used today. While this was by no means the first suggestion of the idea-and Clarke was himself at pains later to point out that others were thinking similar thoughts at the time-Clarke's essay was the first in print at a crucial time. Rocket missiles had been used in war against Britain, designed by the space enthusiast Werner von Braun, and many of Clarke's engineer friends in the British Interplanetary Society were developing new technologies. Suddenly the 'oddball' ideas of the pre-war rocket societies were ripe with promise. Clarke's first book, Interplanetary Flight (1950), its successor, The Exploration of Space (1951), and a novel he had written in 1947, Prelude to Space (1951), were visionary propaganda for the forthcoming space age.

The 'bright renaissance' following the achievement of lunar travel in Prelude to Space and the ambiguous ending of the influential short story 'Sentinel of Eternity' (better known as 'The Sentinel'), published in the same year, expressed a feeling that somewhere in the universe was the end to a sense of loneliness, and that space travel was a means to that end. 'Sentinel' ended with the triggering of a kind of signal device left on the moon by an alien race. The narrator contemplates the result: will it be a welcome or a threat? Clarke's most influential novel, Childhood's End (1953), along with stories like 'The Nine Billion Names of God' (1953) or 'The Star' (1955), explored some of the more transcendental versions of these anxieties. Although Clarke's reputation was built upon his exercises in futurology, enthusiasm for technology, and an interpretation of his fiction as 'hard science fiction', these stories undermined the comfort that the gadgets of hard science fiction tended to offer readers, and accepted the possibility of unease. The utopia of Childhood's End which humanity has to accept under the rule of alien Overlords is a false paradise. It is merely a step towards the end of humanity as we know it and sublimation into a new trans-species identity, a step that the Overlords themselves are poignantly eternally barred from making.

These books and others brought Clarke success, with his reputation among the British science fiction readership assured. (At this point he was a regular attendee at meetings of the London science fiction circle at the White Horse pub, later The Globe.) His gifts for clear and visionary explanation of factual science gave him a wider audience among the general public, dramatically increasing sales in the USA thanks to the choice of The Exploration of Space as a Book of the Month Club selection. In 1953 he married Marilyn Mayfield in New York and they returned to Britain just before the publication of his breakthrough novel, Childhood's End. The marriage was not a success, and the couple separated after a matter of months, although the formal divorce was not until 1964. Following another of his interests, diving, in 1954 Clarke joined a friend, Mike Wilson, on an expedition to the Australian Great Barrier Reef. On the way they stopped at Ceylon, where they returned in 1956, eventually to establish a diving business with a Ceylonese partner, Hector Ekanayake. Clarke was to make Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka in 1972) his home for the rest of his life. His companion Leslie Ekanayake, Hector's brother, died in a motorcycle accident in 1977.

Doyen of science fiction

His growing reputation, and the space race that had erupted with the successful launch of the Russian sputnik satellite in 1957, made Clarke increasingly in demand for lectures, fiction, and non-fiction. He was awarded the UNESCO Kalinga prize for science writing in 1961. His collection of speculative essays, Profiles of the Future, was published in 1962, to be reissued and revised (with wry comments about what he had got 'wrong') several times thereafter. In the same year he contracted polio, which was to result in the post-polio syndrome with which he was diagnosed in 1988. He was to spend his last years wheelchair-bound.

In 1964 Clarke was contacted by Stanley Kubrick, who had expressed an interest in making a science fiction film. The result was 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968), partly based upon 'The Sentinel' but also echoing the transcendental elements of Childhood's End. The film showed Kubrick's obsessive detail and Clarke's visionary realism at work in sometimes uneasy partnership. Clarke's own novelization differed in significant respects from the film. In the end he wrote several sequels, 2010: Odyssey Two (1982), 2061: Odyssey Three (1987), and 3001: the Final Odyssey (1997). Various sequences in Kubrick's film-a bone used as a weapon hurled into the air in triumph and seguing into a spaceship, the spacecraft docking to the tune of Strauss's 'Blue Danube' waltz, and especially the chilly rebellion of the sentient computer HAL 9000 which jeopardizes the mission, were especially striking. It was almost inevitable that Clarke was among the science fiction writers asked to commentate on the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969, and asked to speak at the UNESCO space communications conference later that year. The Lost Worlds of 2001 (1970) added more background to the film.

By this time Clarke was perhaps the best-known science fiction writer in the world and one of the few with genuine best-seller status. Subsequent novels received the science fiction field's highest awards. Rendezvous with Rama (1972) brought its author British Science Fiction Association, Nebula, Hugo, Campbell and Locus magazine awards. Also winning the Hugo and Nebula awards, The Fountains of Paradise (1979) was set in a version of his adopted home, Sri Lanka, and featured yet another mammoth technological idea, the 'space elevator', based upon ideas suggested by the Russian scientist Yuri Artsutanov. The 'elevator' consisted of a cable lowered from a satellite in geostationary orbit which when secured at a fixed point on the earth's surface could transport material from the earth's surface to orbit.

With these awards for Clarke's fiction came a growing reputation as a commentator upon science and technology which resulted in numerous accolades and appointments, among them the Bradford Washburn award from the Boston Museum of Science (1977). In 1979 he was appointed chancellor of Moratuwa University in Sri Lanka, where he served until 2002. In 1982 he received the Marconi fellowship award, which was used to fund an Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Modern Technologies in Sri Lanka. In the same year he addressed the UN committee on disarmament. In 1987 he received the Charles A. Lindbergh award for many years of significant contributions towards balancing technology and nature, and in 1989 he became the first chancellor of the International Space University in France, which offered advanced courses in space studies. In 1995 his pioneering visions of space exploration resulted in his being awarded the NASA distinguished public service medal. He was kept in public view with the television series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (1980), in which he looked at unexplained phenomena. The combination of scepticism and fascination with which current enthusiasm for the 'unexplained' was treated attracted a large audience and it was followed by two other similar series in 1985 and 1994.

In addition Clarke was a patron of the Science Fiction Foundation and president of the British Science Fiction Association, to whose publications he would respond with encouraging comments and anecdotes. In 1986 he funded the Arthur C. Clarke award for the best science fiction novel of the year published in the UK. He received honorary DLitt degrees from Bath (1988), Liverpool (1995), conferred, appropriately, by satellite link, and Baptist University, Hong Kong (1996). He was awarded Sri Lanka's highest civil honour, Sri Lankabhimanya ('pride of Sri Lanka'), in 2005.

Many of Clarke's later novels were collaborations with other writers in, for example, inferior sequels to Rendezvous with Rama, although the solo The Ghost From the Grand Banks (1990) was well received. With The Light of Other Days (2000) and the Time Odyssey trilogy (2003-7) he teamed up with Stephen Baxter. In Baxter, a writer strongly influenced by Clarke but whose own cosmological speculations and sense of time and history made him very much his own man, Clarke seemed to have a collaborator who understood his fiction and shared his sense of vision.

Clarke 'retired' several times, and several novels were proclaimed as his 'last' book, but he kept on writing to the end, although 3001: the Final Odyssey was probably his last unaided work. Perhaps his last true novel, and certainly one of his finest, was The Songs of Distant Earth (1986), in which Thalassa, an idyllic, utopian colony is visited by a ship from a destroyed earth en route to its destination to terraform a new world. The starship's crew have to decide whether to stay, and possibly disrupt the Thalassan idyll, or continue, shattering the bonds of contact that have developed. In this book Clarke revisited the tension between transcendence and the physical, and the ambiguous utopianism, found in earlier fiction. The melancholy in Songs may be in part an echo of the numinous in previous works, in which Clarke, a lifelong atheist, nevertheless imagined godlike parental aliens. He was widely reported to have quipped, 'I don't believe in God, but I'm very interested in her'.

Final years and reputation

Having been appointed CBE in 1989, Clarke was awarded a knighthood for services to literature in 1998, although he was not formally knighted until 26 May 2000, as previous plans had been postponed following unfounded allegations of sexual impropriety in a tabloid newspaper. While Clarke was as reticent about his private sexuality as he was about including sex in his novels (it was perhaps after the introduction of a gay character in Imperial Earth (1975) that reporters would ask Clarke if he was gay, invariably to be told, 'merely mildly cheerful'), his orientation was no secret to his friends and admirers.

Clarke's ninetieth birthday was marked by an address in which he noted the rapid change in space and communications technologies and presented as his 'three wishes' evidence of extraterrestrial life, the replacement of coal and oil with clean energy sources, and a lasting peace in his adopted country, Sri Lanka. His final novel, The Last Theorem (2008), was written in collaboration with the American author Frederik Pohl, one of his few surviving peers. Clarke died in Colombo, following breathing difficulties, on 19 March 2008. He was buried in the General Cemetery, Colombo, on 22 March, in accordance with his wishes that 'no religious rites of any kind ... should be associated with my funeral'.

Arthur C. Clarke was the poet of a particular vision which saw space travel as a challenge willingly to be met. It is a dream itself, of course, with its own contradictions. The 1950s fantasy that Britain would play a major role in the forthcoming age of space was a simple fantasy, but this was not quite so clear-cut at the time as it became with hindsight: for many it offered a possible shape for a new post-empire Britain. British science fiction writers of local disaster and catastrophe such as John Wyndham and John Christopher showed more clearly the social anxiety of the 1950s, and later writers such as J. G. Ballard dismissed altogether stories of 'outer space' as irrelevant to the exploration of a psychological 'inner space' in which science fiction was a literary tool rather than a means of propaganda or reuse of stale cliches. Clarke's early novels and stories, though, showed the dream of mid-century science fiction: that history does not have to be the way it is, and that humanity can take control of its destiny. His non-fiction and science writing, harnessed to a visionary internationalism, emphasized this mould. What became noted as his 'three laws' (expounded in the revised version of his Profiles of the Future, 1973) expressed the often playful working of his imagination as applied to all aspects of his writing: (1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. (2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. (3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Clarke's reputation will remain attached to a vision of the future that assumed, years before it happened, that space travel was both possible and desirable. Much of his fiction can be seen as speculations of the space age by someone who was trying both to make it happen, and to explain to a wide audience why it was so important that it should indeed happen. While firmly committed to the project of knowing and understanding the universe, Clarke's writing did not unquestioningly assume the project's success. He was occasionally seduced by the visionary rather than the practical implications of science, as with his enthusiasm for cold fusion, and a rather too easy assumption that global communications and space exploration would link nations and promote peace and understanding. He was, however, much more than a propagandist. His science writing was both informative and genuinely inspirational: he was, simply, a great communicator curious about the world and passionate in sharing that curiosity. His best fiction (which includes much of his early work) echoed a sense of personal and cosmic loneliness which evoked a sense of awe at the thought of the immensity and potential of the universe. As the critic John Clute wrote in an obituary of Clarke, 'He spoke for the highest hopes of the 20th century'  (The Independent, 20 March 2008).

Andy Sawyer 

Sources  F. Clarke, 'Arthur C. Clarke, the early days', Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, 41 (1987), 9-15 + E. James, 'The future viewed from mid-century Britain: Clarke, Hampson and the Festival of Britain', Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, 41 (1987), 42-51 + A. C. Clarke, Astounding days (1989) + N. McAleer, Odyssey: the authorised biography of Arthur C. Clarke (1992) + F. Clarke, Four heads in the air (1995) + D. Aronowitz, ed., Childhood ends (1996) + A. C. Clarke, Greetings, carbon-based bipeds! collected essays, 1934-1998 (1999) + W. Temple, 88 Grays Inn Road (20000) + A. C. Clarke, The collected stories (2001) + E. James, 'Arthur C. Clarke', A companion to science fiction, ed. D. Seed (2005), 431-40 + P. Weston, ed., Relapse, 16 (Feb 2010) + The Times (20 March 2008) + Daily Telegraph (20 March 2008) + The Guardian (20 March 2008) + The Independent (20 March 2008) + clarkefoundation.org,  accessed on 18 July 2011 + WW (2008) + personal knowledge (2012) + private information (2012) + b. cert.
Archives 25 Barnes Place, Colombo, Sri Lanka, H. Ekanayake, 'Leslie's House' + Boston University Library, corresp. and papers | Bodl. Oxf., C. S. Lewis MSS, corresp., 1943-53 FILM BFINA, 'This is your life', B. Klein (director), BBC1, 11 Jan 1995 + BL NSA, current affairs, documentary, and performance recordings SOUND BL NSA, current affairs, documentary, and performance recordings
Likenesses  photographs, c.1918-2003, Getty Images, London · photographs, 1952-2008, PA Photos, London · photograph, 1968, Rex Features, London [see illus.] · photographs, 1968-2003, Rex Features, London · C. Adams, colour print, 1976, NPG · photographs, 1980-89, Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library, London · A. George, crayon, 1995, NPG · N. Sjoman, portrait, priv. coll. · caricature, Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library, London · obituary photographs · photographs, Camera Press, London · photographs, repro. in McAleer, Odyssey



========================================================================
©    Oxford     University    Press,    2004.    See     legal    notice:
http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/legal/

We hope you have enjoyed this Life of The Day, but if you do wish to stop
receiving   these   messages,   please   EITHER   send   a   message   to
LISTSERV at WEBBER.UK.HUB.OUP.COM with

signoff ODNBLIFEOFTHEDAY-L

in the body (not the subject line) of the message

OR

send an  email to  epm-oxforddnb at oup.com, asking us  to stop  sending you
these messages.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20120319/dc9fdf9a/attachment-0001.shtml