Arthur C. Clarke
(born December 16, 1917,
Minehead
,
Somerset
, England?died March 19, 2008,
Colombo
, Sri Lanka) was an English writer, notable for both his
science fiction
and his nonfiction. His best known works are the
script
he wrote with American
film
director
Stanley Kubrick
for
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968) and the
novel
of that film.
Clarke was interested in
science
from childhood, but he lacked the means for
higher education
. In 1934 he joined the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), a small advanced group that advocated the development of
rocketry
and human
space exploration
. He worked as a government auditor from 1936 to 1941. From 1941 to 1946 Clarke served in the
Royal Air Force
, becoming a
radar
instructor and technician. In 1945 he wrote an article entitled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays” for
Wireless World
. The article
envisioned
a
communications satellite
system that would relay
radio
and
television
signals throughout the world; this system was in operation two decades later. He began selling short stories in 1946 to science fiction magazines in the
United States
and
Britain
. Clarke was chairman of the BIS from 1946 to 1947 and from 1951 to 1953.
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From Moby-Dick to Space Odysseys
In 1948 Clarke secured a bachelor of science degree from King’s College in London. His first nonfiction books were
Interplanetary Flight
(1950) and
The Exploration of Space
(1951). His first novels were routine stories of space exploration:
Prelude to Space
(1951), about the first flight to the
Moon
;
The Sands of Mars
(1951), about the colonization of
that planet
; and
Islands in the Sky
(1952), set on a
space station
.
Clarke’s next novel,
Childhood’s End
(1953), is regarded as one of his best and dealt with how first contact with aliens sparks an evolutionary
transformation
in humanity. As humanity is about to make its first flights into space, the alien Overlords arrive in gigantic spaceships. The Overlords have come to
Earth
to foster humanity’s union with the Overmind, a
galaxy
-wide intelligence. Decades after the Overlords’ arrival, the children of Earth begin to develop psychic powers, merge into a group intelligence, and, as humanity’s last generation, join with the Overmind. Clarke would return to the themes of first contact and evolutionary leaps throughout his career.
In the 1950s Clarke wrote two short stories that became science fiction classics. In “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953), a
Tibetan monastery
buys a
computer
to finish its centuries-long task of
compiling
the possible names of God. In the
Hugo Award
-winning “The Star” (1955), an expedition to a distant
planet
finds the ruins of a civilization that was destroyed when its
star
went
supernova
. A
Jesuit
priest on the expedition has his faith tested when he discovers that the supernova was the
Star of Bethlehem
.
Clarke developed an interest in
undersea exploration
and moved to
Sri Lanka
in 1956, where he embarked on a second career combining
skin diving
and photography. He produced a succession of books, the first of which was
The Coast of Coral
(1956). That same year, he expanded an earlier novel,
Against the Fall of Night
(1953), as
The City and the Stars
. One billion years in the future in one of Earth’s final cities, Diaspar, a young man, Alvin, rebels against the static computer-controlled status quo and escapes to find out the true history of humanity and its place in the universe.
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Beginning in 1964, Clarke worked with director Stanley Kubrick on adapting Clarke’s
short story
“The Sentinel” (1951) into a movie, which eventually became the hugely successful
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968). The film begins with prehuman apes encountering an alien monolith that sparks a technological and
intellectual
leap, the first tools. The action jumps forward to 2001, when another monolith is excavated on the Moon and sends a transmission to
Jupiter
. A spaceship, the
Discovery
, is sent to Jupiter, but the two astronauts Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) and Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) are caught in a battle for their lives against the
Discovery
’s malfunctioning computer, HAL 9000. In the film’s final section, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” Bowman journeys into a gateway in space opened by the monolith orbiting Jupiter and is reborn as the next step in
human evolution
, the “Star Child.” Clarke wrote a novel based on the script, and both he and Kubrick were nominated for an
Academy Award
for their script.
2001: A Space Odyssey
is often
cited
by film critics and historians as one of the greatest films of all time.
After
2001
Clarke became even more famous when he joined
Walter Cronkite
on
CBS
as a commentator for the
Apollo 11
lunar landing, in 1969. He was one of science fiction’s leading figures, and he and American authors
Isaac Asimov
and
Robert Heinlein
were called the “Big Three.” He won the
Nebula Award
for best
novella
for “A Meeting with Medusa” (1971), about an expedition that discovers
life
in the clouds of Jupiter.
Rendezvous with Rama
(1973) was another story about first contact. In the early 22nd century, a large
asteroid
is observed entering the
solar system
from interstellar space. Dubbed Rama, the asteroid turns out to be a cylindrical spacecraft, and an
expedition
is sent to explore its interior. Clarke’s depiction of the inscrutable mysteries of Rama made this one of his most popular novels, and
Rendezvous with Rama
won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel.
Imperial Earth
(1975) was a tale of cloning and solar system colonization set in the 23rd century.
The Fountains of Paradise
(1979) chronicled the construction of a
space elevator
on the island country of Taprobane (a fictionalized version of Clarke’s adopted home Sri Lanka) and won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel.
The Songs of Distant Earth
(1986), an expansion of a short story from 1958, was set on a distant planet whose society is disturbed by the arrival of the last survivors from a destroyed Earth. Clarke also wrote two sequels to
2001: A Space Odyssey
during this time:
2010: Odyssey Two
(1982, filmed 1984) and
2061: Odyssey Three
(1988).
Most of his later novels were written in collaboration with other authors and with varying degrees of involvement from Clarke. Among them were sequels to
Rendezvous with Rama
(
Rama II
[1989],
The Garden of Rama
[1991], and
Rama Revealed
[1993], with Gentry Lee) and
The Light of Other Days
(2000, with Stephen Baxter), about a
wormhole
-powered technology that allows the viewing of past times. He did write three solo novels in this period:
The Ghost from the Grand Banks
(1990), about attempts to raise the
Titanic
;
The Hammer of God
(1993), about an asteroid on a
collision
course with Earth; and
3001: The Final Odyssey
(1997), the final book in the Space Odyssey series. Clarke’s final novel,
The Last Theorem
(2008), which concerns an alien invasion and a new short proof of
Fermat’s last theorem
, was completed by
Frederik Pohl
.
In addition to his many collections of essays, Clarke wrote two autobiographical volumes. His scientific papers, including “Extra-Terrestrial Relays,” were collected in
Ascent to Orbit: A Scientific Autobiography
(1984). He wrote about the influence that the magazine
Astounding Stories
had on him as a young science fiction fan and later as a writer in
Astounding Days: A Science Fictional Autobiography
(1989). Clarke was knighted in 2000.