Arthur C. Clarke

• 1. Introduction

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  In February 1945, a young radar officer named Arthur C. Clarke sent a letter to the editor of Wireless World. He suggested that stations placed in geostationary orbit could relay radio signals across the entire planet. He never patented the idea. Years later, asked why, he answered: "A patent is really a licence to be sued." The orbit 36000 km above the equator now carries his name, the Clarke Orbit. Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, born on the 16th of December 1917 and dead on the 19th of March 2008, was an English science fiction writer, science writer, futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television host. He earned the moniker "Prophet of the Space Age". How did a farm boy from Somerset who collected fossils and read pulp magazines become one of three writers who defined a genre? Why did he abandon England for an island in the Indian Ocean? And what did he see, decades early, in a world that did not yet have satellites, mobile phones, or the internet?

• 2. The Big Three

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  For much of the later 20th century, science fiction had a "Big Three": Clarke alongside the American writers Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Clarke and Heinlein began writing to each other after The Exploration of Space was published in 1951, and they first met the following year. They stayed cordial for years, including visits to the United States and Sri Lanka. Their friendship cracked over politics. In 1984, Clarke testified before Congress against the Strategic Defense Initiative. Later, at Larry Niven's home in California, a concerned Heinlein attacked Clarke's views on United States foreign and space policy. The two formally reconciled but remained distant until Heinlein died in 1988. Clarke first met Asimov in New York City in 1953, and they traded friendly insults for decades. They struck an oral pact, the "Clarke-Asimov Treaty": when asked who was better, each would say Clarke was the better science fiction writer and Asimov the better science writer. In 1972, Clarke committed the treaty to paper in his dedication to Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations. His standing in the field brought formal honours too. The Science Fiction Writers of America named him a Grand Master in 1986.

• 3. A Mind Built On Pulp

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  As a boy on a farm near Bishops Lydeard, Clarke enjoyed stargazing, collecting fossils, and reading American science fiction pulp magazines. Dinosaur cigarette cards sparked his fossil enthusiasm around 1925. He pinned his love of science fiction to three readings: the November 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, which he read in 1929; Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon in 1930; and The Conquest of Space by David Lasser in 1931. Of Stapledon's Last and First Men, Clarke later said: "No other book had a greater influence on my life." That book and its successor Star Maker, he wrote, were "the twin summits" of Stapledon's career. His teenage years pulled him toward both the stars and the page. He joined the Junior Astronomical Association and contributed to Urania, the society's journal edited in Glasgow by Marion Eadie. At his request, she added an "Astronautics" section, which carried his articles on spacecraft and space travel. He admired the Irish fantasy writer Lord Dunsany, corresponding with him until Dunsany's death in 1957, and calling him "one of the greatest writers of the century". He also named H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs among his influences, becoming in time a distinguished vice-president of the H. G. Wells Society.

• 4. Radar And The War

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  From 1941 to 1946, Clarke served in the Royal Air Force as a radar specialist. He worked on the early-warning radar defence system that aided the RAF during the Battle of Britain. Most of his wartime service went to ground-controlled approach radar, the subject of Glide Path, his only non-science fiction novel. That technology saw little practical use during the war. After several years of development, it proved vital to the Berlin Airlift of 1948-1949. He began in the ranks as a corporal instructor at No. 2 Radio School, RAF Yatesbury in Wiltshire. He was commissioned as a pilot officer on the 27th of May 1943 and promoted to flying officer that November. He left service as a chief training instructor at RAF Honiley in Warwickshire, demobilised with the rank of flight lieutenant. After the war, he took a first-class degree in mathematics and physics from King's College London, then worked as assistant editor at Physics Abstracts. He chaired the British Interplanetary Society from 1946 to 1947 and again from 1951 to 1953, having joined it back in 1934 as a teenager.

• 5. Kubrick And The Monolith

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  In 1948, Clarke wrote "The Sentinel" for a BBC competition. The story was rejected. It changed the course of his career anyway, introducing a cosmic element to his work and becoming the seed of his most famous film. Many of his later stories feature a technologically advanced but still-prejudiced mankind confronted by a superior alien intelligence, an encounter that pushes humanity into its next evolutionary stage. Stanley Kubrick met Clarke in New York City in 1964 to discuss a possible film. They chose to base the story loosely on "The Sentinel". Originally Clarke would write the screenplay, but Kubrick suggested they first write a novel and build the film from it. Clarke described the result: "Thus, I rewrote some sections after seeing the movie rushes - a rather expensive method of literary creation, which few other authors can have enjoyed." The schedule strained the collaboration. Clarke finished a draft at the end of 1964, but after many delays the film reached cinemas in spring 1968, before the book was done. Credited to Clarke alone, the novel struck him as reduced to a novelisation, and he felt Kubrick had played down his authorship. The magician James Randi recounted that Clarke left the premiere in tears at the intermission, after an eleven-minute scene, cut from general release, of an astronaut simply jogging inside the spaceship. Clarke and Kubrick shared a 1969 Academy Award nomination for the screenplay. Clarke later extended the story into the Space Odyssey series. He wrote 2010: Odyssey Two in 1982, filmed in 1984, then 2061: Odyssey Three in 1987 and 3001: The Final Odyssey in 1997. In 3001, astronaut Frank Poole's freeze-dried body is found beyond Neptune's orbit and revived by advanced medical science.

• 6. The Reefs Of Taprobane

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  Clarke immigrated to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in 1956 to pursue scuba diving, and he lived there until his death. With his business partner Mike Wilson he explored the coral waters with the Beachcombers Club, first settling in Unawatuna on the south coast and later in Colombo. While diving in 1956, Wilson and Clarke uncovered ruined masonry and idol images of the sunken original Koneswaram temple, including carved columns with flower insignia and stones shaped like elephant heads. They recovered Chola bronzes from the original shrine. Clarke described the find in his 1957 book The Reefs of Taprobane, his second diving book after the 1956 The Coast of Coral. He dived often at Hikkaduwa, Trincomalee, and Nilaveli, and set up a small dive school near Trincomalee. Treasure followed the temples. In 1961, while filming off Great Basses Reef, Wilson found a wreck and retrieved silver coins. Plans to dive the wreck the next year stopped when Clarke developed paralysis, later diagnosed as polio. The ship belonged to the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, and its fused bags of silver rupees, cannon, and other artefacts became the basis for The Treasure of the Great Reef. Sri Lanka also fed his fiction. Living there inspired The Fountains of Paradise, in which he described a space elevator. He believed that idea, more than the geostationary satellite, would ultimately be his scientific legacy. In 2008, he told IEEE Spectrum: "maybe in a generation or so the space elevator will be considered equally important" as the satellite.

• 7. The Prophet

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  In a 1959 essay, Clarke predicted global satellite TV crossing national boundaries indiscriminately, with hundreds of channels available anywhere on Earth. He envisioned a "personal transceiver, so small and compact that every man carries one". He wrote that the time would come when a person could call anyone on Earth by dialing a number, and that such a device would include global positioning so "no one need ever again be lost". In Profiles of the Future, he placed the device's arrival in the mid-1980s. His futurism grew from his space writing. The Exploration of Space in 1951 was used by the rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun to convince President John F. Kennedy that going to the Moon was possible. A series of magazine essays Clarke began in 1958 became Profiles of the Future, published as a book in 1962, with a timetable running to 2100 and including a "global library" for 2005. That same work held "Clarke's First Law" and the text that grew into Clarke's three laws. In a 1964 presentation for the BBC's Horizon programme, Clarke described a global computer network resembling the modern World Wide Web. He predicted that by the 21st century, even surgery could be done remotely and instantly from anywhere. In a 1974 interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, asked how the interviewer's son's life would differ, Clarke described a household console: "he can talk, through his friendly local computer and get all the information he needs, for his everyday life, like his bank statements, his theatre reservations... and he will take it as much for granted as we take the telephone." His fame as a forecaster made him a natural voice for the space age. On the 20th of July 1969, he appeared as a commentator for the CBS News broadcast of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

• 8. Belief And Burial

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  "Any path to knowledge is a path to God - or Reality, whichever word one prefers to use," Clarke once said, describing himself as "fascinated by the concept of God". His beliefs shifted across his life. When he entered the Royal Air Force, he insisted his dog tags read "pantheist" rather than Church of England. In a 1991 essay he called himself a logical positivist since the age of 10. In 2000 he told the Sri Lankan newspaper The Island, "I don't believe in God or an afterlife," and identified as an atheist. He was honoured as a Humanist Laureate and once described himself as a "crypto-Buddhist". His later view of religion turned hostile. He was widely quoted: "One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion." He left written funeral instructions: "Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral." His private life stayed largely guarded. On a 1953 trip to Florida he married Marilyn Mayfield, a 22-year-old American divorcee with a young son. They separated permanently after six months, though the divorce was not finalised until 1964. He was close to a Sri Lankan man, Leslie Ekanayake, whom he called his "only perfect friend of a lifetime" in the dedication to The Fountains of Paradise. Ekanayake died in 1977, predeceasing Clarke by three decades, and Clarke is buried with him in Kanatte Cemetery in Colombo. Honours arrived late and far from home. He received a CBE in 1989 "for services to British cultural interests in Sri Lanka", and Sri Lanka gave him its highest civilian award, the Sri Lankabhimanya, on the 14th of November 2005. His knighthood, awarded in the 1998 New Year Honours, was conferred in Colombo on the 26th of May 2000, after he chose not to travel to London. Just hours before he died in Colombo on the 19th of March 2008, at the age of 90, a major gamma-ray burst reached Earth. Known as GRB 080319B, it occurred about 7.5 billion years ago and set a record as the farthest object visible from Earth with the naked eye. A science writer proposed it be called the "Clarke Event".