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Magazine
End of an era
DR. SANJIVA WIJESINHA
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Remembering Sir Arthur C. Clarke, his legendary predictions and his love affair with Sri Lanka.
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Sir Arthur C. Clarke had been ailing for a while. Yet, when death finally came, it was as if an era had ended. This was the man who was described by Collier’s Encyclopaedia as “the most famous science fiction writer in
the world”!
He first became known in scientific circles for predicting, back in 1945, some 20 years before they became a reality, that orbiting satellites could be used to relay radio transmissions around the earth. Today, such satellites that carry TV programmes and thousands of phone calls are an essential part of worldwide communications. As a tribute to him, their orbit around the earth is known as the Clarke Belt.
The way ahead
Years before they were invented, he confidently predicted many of the innovations which today we take for granted — facsimile services, mobile phones that allow communications between moving individuals anywhere on earth, and immediate access to all the world’s great libraries and information centres via computer-type keyboards and TV displays.
Sir Arthur’s love affair with Sri Lanka began in December 1954. En route from England to Australia to visit the Great Barrier Reef, a half-day visit while his ship docked in Colombo gave him the opportunity to meet a man who mutual friends suggested he look up. That serendipitous meeting with Rodney Jonklaas, Assistant Director of the Colombo Zoo, was to have far reaching effects on his life. Jonklaas suggested that once Clarke finished his trip to the Great Barrier Reef, he return to explore the waters surrounding Sri Lanka. Making no promises, he sailed away to Australia, where with his friend Mike Wilson he shared several adventures both above and below the seas; but perhaps the memory of that December afternoon in Colombo made him decide, once they had completed their work off the Australian coast, that their next underwater adventure should be in the Indian Ocean.
Clarke finally returned to Colombo in January 1956 — and shortly after headed south with Jonklaas and Wilson to commence diving. Within a few years, they had located and explored several shipwrecks, many of historical significance. The highlight of these explorations was their discovery of a wreck on the Great Basses reef containing thousands of silver Mughal coins and several cannon — which resulted in a TV documentary and a book, Treasure of the Great Reef.
Sir Arthur, whose first novel, Against the Fall of Night, was published in England in 1948, continued writing in his new home. Over the years he produced a host of novels, including Childhood’s End (1953), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Rendezvous with Rama (1973) and 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997), that made him famous.
Though he originally intended to stay for a couple of years, Sri Lanka’s imagination-enhancing environment gradually wove its spell, enticing him to stay permanently. In 1956 he wrote “The contrast between here and England is fantastic, and it’s strange to feel free after all these years. I have made up my mind — I’m settling in Ceylon.”
Later he acknowledged “Many of the elements of Sri Lanka, including its mystical and religious elements, even if I do not necessarily agree with them, I respect them and have worked them into my books.”
Buddhist influence
His 1957 novel Deep Range, a story about whale breeding and undersea farming, showed how Buddhism was beginning to influence his thinking. “With the weakening of its three great rivals,” he predicted, “Buddhism was now the only religion that still possessed any real power over the minds of men.”
Whether it was his generous contribution of the Arthur Clarke Centre of Modern Technologies to Moratuwa University or his occasional letters on everyday subjects to Sri Lanka’s newspapers, Sir Arthur consistently demonstrated a genuine concern for the past glories, the present problems and the future prosperity of his adopted country.
Some idea of his love for the island is evident in these words from The Treasure of the Great Reef: “It is Ceylon not England that now seems home. I do not pretend to account for this, or for the fact that no other place is now wholly real to me.
“And it is always the same: the slender palm trees leaning over the white sand, the warm sun sparkling on the waves as they break on the inshore reef, the outrigger fishing boats drawn up high on the beach. This alone is real; the rest is but a dream from which I shall presently awake.”
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