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The knight of science fiction

Among the giants of the imaginative promotion of the ideas of interplanetary travel, the colonising by man of nearby planets and the urgent need for peaceful exploration of outer space, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who has died aged 90, was pre-eminent, because of his hard and accurate predictions of the detailed technologies of space flight and the use of near-Earth space for global communications. Yet, in spite of his deep seriousness, J.B. Priestley described him in the 1950s as the happiest writer he had ever known.

Tallish, bespectacled, rather big-eared and thinning on top, Clarke tended to be described by friends as a beaming and highly articulate shambles of a chap, a man to whom convention meant very little. Yet his mind was like a razor. Unlike earlier writers on space travel, his imagination and creativity sprang, not from fantasy, but from sharp scientific and technical insight, unfettered by the arbitrary limitations of the perceptions of his time. His amazing career was possible largely because he was never, in any ordinary sense, quite a part of this world. Indeed, he chose to live in Sri Lanka, partly because it helped him neutralise the influence of western culture.

As he approached 80, it seemed that he had done almost everything that was possible in a lifetime, for he had written dozens of books, plumbed the depths of the Indian Ocean, carried the imagination of mankind to the remotest parts of the galaxy, and gained honours in every corner of the globe. But he then declared that one of his many remaining ambitions was to observe the meeting of alien intelligence with intelligence on Earth, a declaration he qualified by adding with his usual smile — “if there is true intelligence on Earth.”

The great American astronomer Carl Sagan, no less interested in alien intelligence, replied rapidly, if informally, that the existence of Clarke was proof enough. Sagan was one of the many post-war teenagers whose lives were changed profoundly by Clarke’s non-fiction book, Interplanetary Flight. This did more than spell out the technical case for space flight as a close and exciting reality; it embraced aspects of a new philosophy — in many ways Clarke’s lifelong philosophy — that sprang from the perceived and enormous spiritual need for exploratory adventures of a new kind which, by their magnitude and imagination, might pull and hold mankind together.

Written in 1949 and quickly published on both sides of the Atlantic, it was unique. The text, uncluttered by equations, is aimed at the general reader, yet all the relevant mathematics are gathered in an appendix. The arguments are clear and accessible.

Sagan says he found it modest, beautifully written, and stirring. “Most striking for me was the discussion of gravitational potential wells and the use in the appendices of differential and integral calculus to calculate propulsion requirements, staging and interplanetary trajectories. The calculus, it dawned on me, could be used for important things, not just to intimidate high-school students. Interplanetary Flight was a turning point in my scientific development.”

The turning point in Clarke’s career came slightly later with the publication in 1952 of The Exploration of Space, a non-fiction work that nevertheless became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. As a writer, he was made.

Clarke’s stature and impact was probably greater than that accorded by popular acclaim, for he was highly critical, sometimes effectively, of the limitations and military basis of major space programmes. He was bitterly critical of the 1980s concept of Star Wars and, well before this emerged as U.S. policy, sent a personal appeal from his Physics and Space Institute in Sri Lanka to the U.S. Congress. His video statement, A Martian Odyssey, which was read into the congressional record, argued that money spent on intercontinental ballistic missiles could, to everyone’s benefit, be channelled into an international voyage to Mars to mark the 500th anniversary of the voyage of Columbus in search of the Americas in 1492. He did not predict an end to the cold war, but he always sought and fought for new bridges between cultures.

This underlying seriousness led him to view his creative participation in commercial, if poetic, other-worldly enterprises, such as the film in 1968 of his book 2001: A Space Odyssey as a kind of scenario writing, not to be taken as an example of his central work. In this, however, many would disagree, for 2001 (“a glorified screenplay,” according to Clarke) was in many ways so accurate and convincing that Alexei Leonov, the first spacewalking human, said he felt that it had carried him into space again.

Strangely, out of his huge corpus of non-fiction books, novels, short stories, plays, films, TV series and anthologies — the 1992 authorised biography by Neil McAleer lists 137 titles — Clarke had a special affection for his interstellar novel The Songs of Distant Earth. With its context and action entirely removed from and remote from Earth, it is the first of a new genre. Although not completed until 1985 — he had worked on it for more than 30 years — it was the novel in which he finally shook the last vestiges of earthly soil from his imagination, freeing his curiosity to probe the deepest recesses of the universe and allowing him to isolate and examine human relationships and emotions. Some might say that it was here, in the vastness and extraordinary beauty of space, that Clarke finally rediscovered his own humanity.

This was evident by his increasing belief in the use of communications to bring mankind together in what he called the “global village.” His lifetime thoughts on this were gathered in 1992 into a collection of ideas and idealistic possible futures published under the title How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, a dream that satellite communications would promote understanding and worldwide peace.

By this time, however, it was clear that, as with any other technology, the effect of communication satellites depends entirely on their use. Coverage of the wars of the late 20th century showed clearly that global TV, rather than bringing mankind together in peace, can transform the horror of war into exciting and technically interesting family entertainment.

However, this reality never appeared to sour the dreams that had driven Clarke for eight decades, for he never lost his smile or his enthusiasm.

Born in Minehead, Somerset, in the west of England, during the final battles of the first world war — in which his father suffered injuries that brought him to an early death 13 years later — Clarke went to Huish’s grammar school, Taunton, and at 19 into the civil service in London. His father was a telephone engineer who, disastrously, turned to farming after the war, and his mother Nora (Willis) was formerly a telegraphist. His was a communications family.

Like many boys at that time, Clarke became fascinated by American science-fiction magazines. But as he later wrote, the turning point of his life was the discovery, shortly before his father died, of Olaf Stapleton’s book Last and First Men. Its imagination, timescale of billions of years and grand perception of the scale of the universe provided a cosmic framework large enough to set Clarke’s imagination free. He began writing science fiction.

At 17 he joined the British Inter-planetary Society, an organisation then widely regarded as crackpot, but of which he was later to be treasurer, and eventually, chairman.

In the civil service his mathematical ability took him into auditing. But in 1941 he joined the RAF where, via electronics training, he became an instructor at radio school. Finally he went to work on the development of American ground control approach radar at Davidstow Moor in north Cornwall, in the south west of England. The head of the U.S. team was Nobel-prizewinning physicist Luis W. Alvarez — the first high-level scientist with whom Clarke had worked. As he described obliquely in his book Glide Path (1963), his only non-science fiction novel, this period shaped his decision to turn to science.

In 1945 he published his famous pioneering paper on the possibility and technical potential of geosynchronous satellite orbits in global and inter-planetary communications. On leaving the RAF in 1946, he went to King’s College London, gaining a first in physics and mathematics, and then sought a postgraduate degree in astronomy. The course was so boring that he became assistant editor of Science Abstracts (1949-50) so that he would have time to think and to write.

The rest is almost a legend of our time. In 1953, on a U.S. tour and with success already evident, he had a whirlwind romance with Marilyn Mayfield, a young and beautiful divorcee who described the then bearded and buccaneering Clarke as her own Errol Flynn. Eleven years later, after Clarke had chosen Sri Lanka as his working environment, the marriage was dissolved. His energy and momentum was at its height, taking him to the depths of the Indian Ocean and to the Great Barrier Reef as a scuba diver, and to every forum in the world where missiles and space flight were an issue. He spoke unwaveringly for collaboration and peace.

His last years were increasingly limited. Post-polio syndrome — he had an attack in 1962 — left him confined to his wheelchair, and much of his contact with the wider world was by telephone and videolink. He was often one of the celebrities exploited by NASA and other agencies to mark great moments in the exploration of space.

But he remained unsentimental, with a cheerful capacity for sending himself up. His confinement and age seemed not to trouble him, but in 1998 a British newspaper alleged that Sir Arthur — his knighthood had just been announced — had been involved in sexual predation upon the young. He refused to accept his honour until the authorities had investigated and cleared his name. His knighthood was awarded by the Prince of Wales on a visit to Sri Lanka in 2000.

Certainly, Clarke’s imagination was magical; from his near-Olympian heights, he could see more than ordinary men will ever see. Moreover, he possessed the power to carry anyone who wished to join him to these great heights of mystery and clarity. If the world believes the clarity to be deceptive, it is not the fault of Arthur C. Clarke.

(This obituary has been revised since Anthony Tucker’s death in 1998.)

Apart from his huge output of books, Clarke left us his Three Laws, touched by the kind of eternal practicality that made his science fiction so effective, while revealing his inner convictions:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist says 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.

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