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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
For decades, the author of the science-fiction classics "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Childhood's End" has exhibited an uncanny ability to see the future.
Mar 7, 2000 | The main character in the classic science-fiction story "The Time Machine" is known only as the Time Traveller. He travels aboard a machine of his own construction -- made of ebony, bronze and chrome -- far ahead in time, glimpsing the harrowing changes in store for humanity, and then returns home to the Victorian England of his creator, H.G. Wells, to relate his tale. At the end of the story, the Time Traveller enters the Time Machine again, equipped with his Kodak, and literally disappears into the future.
Since he began publishing in the 1940s, writer Arthur C. Clarke has been a modern-day Time Traveller whose mission has yielded far more practical results. With more than 80 books of science, fiction and nonfiction, Clarke has displayed an uncanny ability to see the future. In 1945, a year before the death of Wells and 12 years before Sputnik, Clarke predicted a global relay system of radio and television signals using geosynchronous satellites -- a communications revolution that began taking shape 20 years later. The first draft of the article "Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?" is now in the Smithsonian.
"As far as the future is concerned, any political or sociological prediction is impossible," Clarke has said. "The only area where there is any possibility of success is the technological future." This is the future he has seen. In "2001: A Space Odyssey," his most widely recognized work (thanks to the Stanley Kubrick film), Clarke presages a space station (now under construction), videophones, laptops and e-mail. And he gives us one of the most impressive and enduring creations of his career: the HAL 9000 computer. Coming at a time when computers filled entire rooms, Clarke's prediction of a sentient computer was way ahead of its time -- and still is.
The machine that carries Clarke forward in time is his scientific imagination, fueled by clear, powerfully informed writing. Few writers in contemporary America can match Clarke's breadth, versatility and penetrating intellect. Because of his background in physics and mathematics and his dedication to "hard," fact-based science fiction, Clarke is the scientist's favorite sci-fi writer. Astronauts revere him too -- Neil Armstrong, in fact, had seen the Clarke and Kubrick depiction of a lunar base in "2001" just a year before he became the first man on the moon.
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1998) was born in Minehead, Somerset, England, in 1917 but has lived in Colombo, Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), since 1956, when he developed an interest in undersea exploration and took up scuba diving and photography. He's been afflicted with post-polio syndrome since the 1980s, and although he can no longer walk without assistance, he still plays table tennis daily, leaning against the table, and is said to be a fierce competitor who gloats shamelessly in victory. He has many times documented his fervor for diving, which first led him to Sri Lanka, where he and his friend Mike Wilson started a scuba diving business a few decades ago. He and Wilson once discovered a 250-year-old wreck off the country's Great Basses Reef. Sadly, Clarke hasn't been able to dive in several years.
His seaside refuge in Colombo is a self-contained media center, work station and observatory that racks up a monthly telecommunications bill in excess of $1,000. The details of Clarke's personal life are closely guarded. He was married once, for less than a year in the early 1950s, and now lives in the large, walled compound with a Sri Lankan-Australian family he has "adopted" as his own and a Chihuahua named Pepsi.
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As a boy, Clarke mapped the moon using a homemade telescope and became fascinated with science fiction after seeing his first sci-fi magazine, "Amazing Stories," in 1928. Lacking the funds for higher education, he worked as a British Civil Service auditor from 1936 to 1941 and joined a new group that called itself the British Interplanetary Society.
After wartime service in the Royal Air Force, Clarke got his degree from King's College in London. Already he had obtained the services of literary agent Scott Meredith and was finding that his scientific writing was providing him with what he called "occasional jam" -- Clarke just "needed a more reliable source of bread and butter," as he recalled in a 1999 nonfiction compilation "Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!" He got a job, thanks to a dean at the college, as assistant editor of Physics Abstracts, published by the Institute of Electrical Engineering. The budding author couldn't believe his luck: "All of the world's leading scientific journals passed over my desk, and I had to mark the ones that appeared important." The same year, 1948, Clarke wrote a short story called "The Sentinel," a seed that would grow into his most famous work.
Clarke made himself expert in all matters pertaining to the dawning Space Age. In a review of the 1950 film "Destination Moon," based on Robert Heinlein's story, Clarke wrote, "The exhaust velocity, mass ratio, and other technical details of the spaceship have obviously been worked out with great care." In an address to the British Interplanetary Society, "Space Travel in Fact and Fiction," Clarke discussed his literary forebears, adding the great astronomer Johannes Kepler to the list. Kepler, who discovered the laws governing the motion of the planets, also composed a story about a Moon voyage in 1643. Kepler would prove to be an ideal role model for Clarke.
