Arthur C. Clarke at 100: "He Never Grew Up, But He Never Stopped Growing"

Happy Birthday, Clarke!

On December 21, 1968, NASA's Apollo program flew its second crewed mission. The spacecraft traveled through space for three days and circled the Moon for 20 hours. From lunar orbit, the three astronauts made a live television broadcast to Earth. In it, one crew member said they very much hoped to find a black "monolith" here — the key object in the science fiction novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.

That April, Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name had just opened. Carried by the reach of popular culture, Arthur Charles Clarke, who wrote the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, became an idol to hundreds of millions of viewers. A year later, when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, CBS invited him to commentate on the whole mission as a guest. The astronauts who walked on the Moon said it was Clarke who had made everyone want to explore space, and who had set millions of people on the path to science.

Torrence Johnson, a scientist on the unmanned Jupiter and Saturn probe programs, once recalled a scene at an aerospace conference: "The rocket engineers sat around a table, and every one of them said they had read Clarke's novels ... that is why we became rocket engineers."

The boy born in Somerset, England, had finally got his wish.

December 16, 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of Arthur Clarke's birth. The golden age he stands for is over now — not only a golden age of science fiction, but a golden age of human technology. Those were energetic, optimistic people, sure of the future and sure that technology and their era were moving forward. The optimism did not last long, but it shaped a century of technical invention and change.

Arthur Clarke Was a Moon Enthusiast

Arthur Clarke was born in England on December 16, 1917. As a boy he devoured old science fiction magazines and built a telescope out of cardboard and lenses to watch the Moon. At 17 he joined the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), founded only ten years before. Every member dreamed of riding a rocket into space, and they had already drawn up a workable plan to send three pilots to the Moon and bring them back.

The war cut the plan short. The "Moon boy" enlisted, served as a radar technician in the Royal Air Force, worked on an early-warning radar defense system, and was promoted to flight lieutenant in 1943.

In 1945 he published a paper called "Extra-Terrestrial Relays" in the tenth issue of the British magazine Wireless World, subtitled "Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?" It set out in detail how satellite communication could work: such a satellite would use transponders to relay and amplify radio signals, opening a relay channel between transmitting and receiving stations on the ground. The idea became real in 1960. On August 21 that year, NASA launched the first communications satellite, Echo 1.

Three or four communications satellites in a network are usually enough for real-time global communication. Such satellites sit in geostationary orbit, and that orbit — 35,786 kilometers above the equator — was later named the "Clarke Orbit."

When the war ended, Clarke went back to his interplanetary dreams. After his discharge he enrolled at King's College London to read mathematics and physics, and in 1947 he became president of the British Interplanetary Society.

In 1948 Clarke was 31. It was Christmas, and the BBC was running a short-story competition. Clarke wrote a 4,000-word story and mailed it to the organizers. It was a story about the Moon and aliens: humans land on the Moon and find a small pyramid left there a million years earlier by an alien civilization, put in place to watch life on Earth develop and rise. The Moon, in other words, was an "outpost" for a higher civilization.

The story, "The Sentinel," did not interest the BBC, and of course it did not win. It later appeared in a periodical called 10 Story Fantasy, and its author became an assistant editor at Science Abstracts. That indexing journal, published by Britain's Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE), carried mostly physics and electrical engineering — a rough match for Clarke's own field.

Three years later the assistant editor became a full-time writer and published the science fiction novel Prelude to Space.

2001: A Space Odyssey, and How Far One Book Reached

In the spring of 1964, Stanley Kubrick, just finished with Dr. Strangelove, went to Clarke for ideas for a science fiction film. Clarke thought of "The Sentinel," the story he had once sent to the BBC. The two saw that this tale of a watcher civilization on the Moon could be the way into something far bigger. After many rounds of talk, a space odyssey took shape. Four years later a novel and a film, both landmarks in the history of science fiction, arrived together.

In early interviews Kubrick and Clarke jokingly called the project "How the Solar System Was Won." Like the 1962 film How the West Was Won, 2001: A Space Odyssey reads as an epic of the universe and of human civilization, strung together by a black monolith from a higher civilization: in prehistory the monolith prods a band of apes on the edge of extinction into evolving; at the end of the voyage it lifts the astronaut David to a higher order of consciousness and turns him into the "Star Child" who presides over the universe.

The film also looks at what technical progress costs. On Discovery One's mission to Saturn, the astronauts David and Poole end up fighting the artificial intelligence HAL 9000, which kills the other four astronauts to protect itself and finish the job. The shot of HAL's red camera eye silently reading the astronauts' lips still chills readers today.

2001: A Space Odyssey changed the standing of science fiction completely. The film is packed with metaphor and symbol, and countless film buffs, science fiction fans, and scholars have read this classic of classics their own way, each digging out something different: God and the divine, Nietzsche, democracy, a revolt against technology. Clarke once said: "If anyone understands it on the first viewing, we've failed in our intention."

2001: A Space Odyssey was a joint creation, even though Kubrick's name is not on the novel. After the film opened in 1968, its distinctive visual language and computer-drawn effects caused a sensation and earned four Oscar nominations. Clarke's novel of the same name sold out as well. He went on to write three sequels: 2010: Odyssey Two in 1982, 2061: Odyssey Three in 1988, and 3001: The Final Odyssey in 1997.

Beside the fame of Kubrick and the film, Clarke's novel and its sequels have kept a far lower profile. Even so, some critics hold that the film wins on the force of its images, while Clarke's novel is finer-grained and more human.

Either way, 2001: A Space Odyssey opened a new kind of story — the "space epic" — for both science fiction film and science fiction writing, and it inspired Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, even Avatar. It also made and changed reality itself: a year later, when Apollo 11 reached the Moon, the astronauts played the film's music, "The Blue Danube," inside their spacecraft.

A Magazine and the Golden Age It Stood For

In 1946 Clarke finally sold his first science fiction story, "Loophole"; the buyer was John W. Campbell's Astounding Stories.

In October 1937 the science fiction writer Campbell had taken over as the magazine's editor and renamed it Astounding Science Fiction. He then went looking for the right writers, set on leading a real revolution in the field.

By then science fiction — a form that mixes myth, horror, wonder, art, and philosophy — had been growing in the West for a century, ever since Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, and had thrown off branches such as science fiction adventure and the utopian novel. When Campbell took the editor's chair at Astounding Science Fiction, the most popular stories in the field were built around rocket ray guns and time machines. In 1938 Orson Welles turned H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds into a radio play on CBS; listeners took the alien invasion for fact, and panic spread.

Campbell wanted science fiction to become a more complicated form. Good contemporary science fiction writers, he said, "have worked out some really effective techniques for weaving in a great deal of background and associated material without breaking the story continuity. That's vital; a complete new world has to be established at the same time the story is going on."

That demand — technically sound, with believable people — quickly produced a wave of new fiction. In the summer of 1939, four names appeared together in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction: Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and A. E. van Vogt.

Asimov later underlined Campbell's contribution in his introduction to Dangerous Visions: "He [Campbell] brought a real revolution to the field of science fiction ..." Astounding Science Fiction worked to put science fiction in front of readers "seriously," in content and in form: it "must come from real science, and it must also be real history," and not just one of the two. Both the human truth and the scientific truth of science fiction grew stronger for it.

That was science fiction's golden age. Through the work of Campbell and a large group of writers, science fiction became widely known from the early 1940s through the 1950s, and classic after classic came out. Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein became the golden age's undisputed "Big Three."

The Backdrop: What Made Science Fiction Flourish

At the end of 1944 a science fiction story that described exactly how an atomic bomb worked appeared in the United States. The U.S. military was badly shaken and opened an investigation at once. It found no leak from the secret Manhattan Project: the description was simply the author's "speculation." A few months later the world's first atomic bomb went off.

Scholars of the genre treat that episode as a marker of the link between scientific imagination and scientific fact. America's golden age of science fiction was also a golden age of American technology. Each fed the other; across the twenty years from the 1940s to the 1960s, scenes from real life and scenes from science fiction kept turning up side by side.

Science caught up with imagination, and all of it followed directly from how fast technology was moving. After the Great Depression of 1929, Roosevelt's New Deal began, from 1935, to rescue science and technology. Scientific research, Roosevelt argued at the time, was one of the nation's greatest resources. Government and industry funding for science began to climb again, and more scientists and engineers were hired.

Before World War II, the American scientific community had already begun registering scientists and engineers for wartime mobilization. Twenty-eight days before the war broke out, Roosevelt took Einstein's advice and ordered work on an atomic bomb. At the same time Vannevar Bush and others, drawing on the lessons of World War I, set about building a national body to direct science and technology. On June 27, 1940, Roosevelt ordered the National Defense Research Committee into existence to organize military science, and the armed forces' research capacity grew. Between 1940 and 1945, federal research and development funding rose more than twentyfold, to $1.59 billion. The Cold War technology and arms race pushed American aerospace and other sciences forward again; the Apollo program, which ran 11 years, cost $25.5 billion in all.

Spending without limits paid well. From the first atomic bomb to the first electronic computer, the world novelists had imagined arrived in quick succession. On the day Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in July 1969, optimism inside the United States reached its peak.

A Style: Clarke's Unbeatable Optimism

Clarke's science fiction is the perfect footnote to that golden age.

In 1951 Clarke published his first book, Prelude to Space, and invented in it a lunar spacecraft called Prometheus. It had two parts: an Alpha stage for the run from Earth orbit to the Moon, and a Beta stage, a flying wing that heated air with a nuclear reactor. A nuclear engine has never actually flown in space, but every other technical detail in Prelude to Space was workable in reality. That precision about technical detail gave his work a realism you could step into.

Because of that hard, real, technical quality, Clarke's novels became a byword for so-called "hard science fiction." Scholars of the genre see him as the heir to Jules Verne's technical tradition, good at inventing scientific and technical ideas and at building vast settings in space and time. The historian Adam Roberts has written that "'golden age' as a term mostly describes hard science fiction — plainly told stories in which a hero solves problems or fights off threats in space or in a technological setting."

Unlike the science fiction before him, Clarke also preferred the "near future" as his subject, and used it to ask where humanity sits in the universe. From "The Sentinel," the seed of 2001: A Space Odyssey, he deliberately read human history and cosmic history as an outsider looking on, and that huge scale of time and space is the most moving thing in his work. His philosophical strain came from Olaf Stapledon, in whose novel Star Maker a nameless narrator leaves his body behind, travels among the stars, and opens up a kind of parallel-universe space.

Best of all, Clarke's books carry an optimism that will not be put down. Shaped by the high spirits of his time, his technical novels read like a "rose-colored utopia." In the four Space Odyssey books or in the Rama series, the reading may weigh on you along the way, but it always ends up pointed at a hopeful future. Against the shocks of World War II and the Cold War, Clarke tried to find a "road to peace" in his fiction: he imagined that before long humanity could unite to explore the solar system together and put space exploration in place of confrontation and war. In Childhood's End he supposed that, with alien intelligence and human civilization working together, every technical and moral problem facing humanity would be settled properly.

Even inside science fiction, that optimism did not last long. The Cold War ended, and commerce and new technology brought fresh troubles. The golden age's optimism and fantasy ran out, literature and art entered a postmodern reckoning, and with the arrival of science fiction's "New Wave," philosophical argument replaced technological dreaming. Religion, unreason, dystopia, and the lives of people on the margins became mainstream subjects.

A Reading Guide: The Clarke Books Worth Your Time

Clarke started writing fiction in 1946 and wrote novels and nonfiction side by side, winning the Hugo and the Nebula several times. In 1986 he received the Nebula Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement. The Arthur C. Clarke Award was founded the same year, for the best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom.

Here are a few of his most representative books, the ones worth reading:

Childhood's End (1953) is one of the most representative works of Clarke's early period. A "near future" novel, it describes aliens arriving on Earth at the end of the 20th century and steering human civilization forward. No other book of his shows so clearly his optimism about technical progress and his longing for a kindly alien "father."

The same year Childhood's End came out, Clarke also published the novella "Against the Fall of Night," set in the "far future," later expanded into the novel The City and the Stars, which tells of the Milky Way a billion years from now. These two, together with the later 2001: A Space Odyssey, make up Clarke's trilogy on the theme of human civilization.

Besides 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the first book of that series, 2010: Odyssey Two (1982), 2061: Odyssey Three (1988), and 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997) are all worth reading too.

Rendezvous with Rama (1973) took both the Hugo and the Nebula. It is set in the 22nd century: a cylindrical alien ship fifty kilometers long enters the solar system, humanity sends an expedition to look inside, and the crew finds no intelligent beings at all, only descriptions of that intelligence everywhere. Rama later grew into a series of its own, running alongside the Space Odyssey books at the center of Clarke's late career. With the scientist Gentry Lee he wrote three sequels: Rama II (1989), The Garden of Rama (1991), and Rama Revealed (1993).

The Fountains of Paradise (1979) describes humanity joining Earth to a satellite with a material of enormous strength and almost no weight. It is the story of a tower of Babel for a new age. The main character pours himself into the project and dies on the tower at last. By the end, all of humanity's satellites are linked to one another and to Earth, forming one enormous ring.

The Songs of Distant Earth (1986) brings together what Clarke imagined about space and about the ocean, and was his own favorite among his novels. In the year 1967 AD, humanity learns that the sun will go supernova and destroy the Earth. In the last hours people split two ways: some send genetic material to another star aboard seed ships, to evolve again there; others preserve their bodies by freezing them, and watch the Earth burn to nothing in front of them with a heavy sense of duty. Now, on the planet Thalassa, these two very different peoples meet.

Clarke also wrote short fiction. "The Wind from the Sun" proposed using the "solar wind" to move a spacecraft, and not long after it appeared, NASA began studying solar-wind propulsion seriously. "The Star" describes, in an extremely sorrowful key, a civilization destroyed without mercy by nature.

And, of Course, Some Gossip

In 1963 Clarke married in a rush and separated soon after. In 1956 he had moved to Sri Lanka, where he lived with his friend Leslie Ekanayake. Many friends, Asimov among them, spoke publicly about Clarke's sexuality, but he never came out himself. After Leslie died, Clarke lived alone in Sri Lanka, and he died in 2008, a year after taking citizenship. For the last 30 years of his life, after a diagnosis of polio, he could get around only in a wheelchair.

In Sri Lanka he also met the young photographer Mike Wilson and took up diving. Clarke and Wilson went on to make six books together — among them The Challenge of the Sea and Indian Ocean Treasure — and one film. In 1957 Clarke published the novel The Deep Range. From then on, the ocean and Eastern culture held an important place in his work.

Plenty of Western critics find an Eastern mysticism in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Clarke's other books, and count it as one thing that sets them apart from other Western science fiction. To Chinese readers, who can put the Orientalist lens aside, that trait is not especially obvious. As one of the first modern science fiction works to reach China after the Cultural Revolution, Clarke's novels gave Chinese readers something wholly new. Liu Cixin has recalled reading 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time in 1981, and the enormous shock and influence it had on him: "Everything I have written since is a clumsy imitation of 2001: A Space Odyssey."

One small joke about Clarke is widely known. Riding to an event with Asimov, the two struck what they called the "Clarke-Asimov Treaty" in the back of a taxi: Asimov would grant that Clarke was the best science fiction writer in the world, and Clarke would grant that Asimov was the best science writer in the world.

Both writers now have asteroids named after them, and there is a dinosaur called Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei as well.

How Do Clarke's Predictions Look Now?

Humans would reach the Moon in 1969; they would meet alien intelligence by 2030. Clarke loved predicting. "Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation," he once said. "That is why the future is so fascinating — because try as we may, we can never solve it."

The Hindustan Times once gathered up the predictions Clarke made and noted that "what you make of Arthur Charles Clarke's views depends a great deal on who you are."

The Clarke Predictions That Came True:

1. In 1945, the 28-year-old Clarke proposed the communications satellite. In 1960 the idea became real.

2. In 1954 Clarke described the design of an igloo-shaped lunar habitat. NASA is now developing a similar lunar outpost, due to be finished by 2020.

3. In a 1964 BBC recording, Clarke imagined that in the future we would have places to play video and send and receive mail at any time, and that we could reach our friends instantly even without knowing where we actually were.

4. In 1974 he supposed that the home computer would hold "all the information you need in a complex modern society." Two years later he talked about communicating through high-definition screens attached to keyboards.

5. Clarke also foresaw the coming artificial intelligence revolution, and believed the smartest inhabitants of the future world would be machines. "Eventually they will go far beyond everything their makers designed them to be."

The Predictions Clarke Got Wrong:

1. Clarke predicted that by 2014 "a doctor in Edinburgh could operate on a patient in New Zealand," that global communication would mean people "no longer need to travel on business, only for pleasure," and that "the traditional city as a gathering place for people" would disappear.

2. Clarke hoped to live to see human hibernation — the kind where you sleep for centuries and wake to find the diseases already cured.

3. He expected bioengineering to put apes and dolphins to work for humans. "Eventually our super-chimpanzees will start forming labor unions."

4. In 1986 Clarke wrote a book called July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century. Many of its predictions have come true — smart cars, 3D films, the internet of things. Some are still a long way off: personalized robots, say, or laying your own face over a character on television.

5. The predictions he made on CNN in 1999 have not held up either: India's coal mines have not closed, human cloning has not happened, and we still cannot get energy out of cold fusion.

6. Clarke predicted that humanity would conquer Mars by 2021; that dinosaurs would be cloned successfully by 2023; that China would be the world's largest economy by 2036; and that by 2095 human explorers would reach a new solar system.

7. Clarke also hoped that early in the 21st century humanity would have dismantled every nuclear weapon, and that electronic surveillance would have wiped out all crime.

There is a famous set of rules in the sciences known as Clarke's Three Laws. The second one says that the only way to find the limits of the possible is to cross them and go a little way into the impossible.

At 90, Clarke died of illness in Sri Lanka. The epitaph he wrote for himself reads: "He never grew up, but he never stopped growing."