Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke was one of the architects of modern science fiction — a writer whose best novels combined rigorous scientific extrapolation with a sense of cosmic wonder that bordered on the mystical, and whose most famous creation, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, co-written with Stanley Kubrick), is the single most influential work of science fiction cinema. Clarke belonged to the “hard SF” tradition that insists on scientific plausibility, but his imagination was drawn repeatedly to the numinous — to moments when human beings encounter something so vast and so alien that rational understanding fails and only awe remains.

From Somerset to Space

Arthur Charles Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset, in 1917. He was fascinated by astronomy from childhood and could not afford university, so he worked as a civil servant while reading voraciously in science. During World War II, he served as a radar instructor in the RAF, where he worked on the early Ground Controlled Approach (GCA) radar system for aircraft landing. In 1945, he published a paper in Wireless World proposing the use of geostationary satellites for global telecommunications — a concept now known as the “Clarke orbit” — which anticipated the communications satellite revolution by two decades.

After the war, he studied mathematics and physics at King’s College London on a veteran’s grant, graduating with first-class honours in 1948. He became chairman of the British Interplanetary Society and began publishing science fiction.

The Major Novels

Childhood’s End (1953) is Clarke’s most perfect novel — the story of an alien race, the Overlords, who arrive on Earth and usher humanity into a golden age of peace and prosperity, only to reveal that their true purpose is to oversee humanity’s evolutionary transcendence into a collective cosmic intelligence. The novel’s ending — in which humanity’s children merge into an Overmind and the Earth is consumed — is one of the most haunting and most debated conclusions in science fiction.

The City and the Stars (1956), a complete rewrite of his earlier Against the Fall of Night, is set a billion years in the future in the last city on Earth and explores themes of stagnation, curiosity, and the lure of the unknown. A Fall of Moondust (1961) is a realistic thriller about a tourist vessel sinking into a sea of lunar dust — a masterpiece of hard-SF problem-solving.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was developed simultaneously as a novel and as Stanley Kubrick’s film, with Clarke writing the novel while Kubrick made the movie. The story — from the African hominids who encounter a black monolith to the astronaut Dave Bowman’s journey beyond Jupiter and his transformation into a “Star Child” — is Clarke’s most ambitious exploration of the theme of alien intelligence guiding human evolution. The novel and the film differ in significant details, and Clarke considered them complementary rather than identical.

Rendezvous with Rama (1973, Hugo and Nebula Awards) describes the exploration of an enormous alien spacecraft that enters the solar system — a cylinder fifty kilometres long, spinning to create artificial gravity, containing an entire alien ecosystem. The novel is pure hard SF: its pleasures are the pleasures of discovery, of figuring out how an alien artefact works through observation and reasoning. The Fountains of Paradise (1979, Hugo and Nebula) imagines the construction of a space elevator — a tower extending from the surface of Earth to geostationary orbit — and is Clarke’s most technically detailed novel.

Clarke’s Three Laws

Clarke formulated three “laws” that have become proverbial:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states 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.

The third law is the most famous and has become a touchstone for discussions of technology, science fiction, and the limits of human understanding.

Sri Lanka and Later Years

In 1956, Clarke moved to Sri Lanka, where he lived for the rest of his life, drawn by his love of scuba diving and the island’s natural beauty. He wrote prolifically from Colombo, producing novels, nonfiction, and television scripts. He was knighted in 2000. He died in Colombo in 2008.

Collecting Clarke

Childhood’s End (Ballantine Books, 1953) in first edition is the most desirable Clarke title. 2001: A Space Odyssey (New American Library, 1968) in first edition with dust jacket is heavily collected, partly because of the film’s cultural status. Rendezvous with Rama (Gollancz, London, 1973) in UK first edition is preferred by collectors. Clarke signed generously, and signed copies of major titles are available.