CLARKE, Arthur C(harles)

(1917-)

   UK author, resident since 1956 in Sri Lanka. Born in Minehead, Somerset, after leaving school ACC came to London in 1936 to work as a civil-servant auditor with HM Exchequer. He was active in fan circles before WWII, in which he served (1941-6) as a radar instructor with the RAF, rising to the rank of flight-lieutenant. After WWII he entered King's College, London, in 1948 taking his BSc with first-class honours in physics and mathematics.ACC's strong interest in the frontiers of science was evident early. He was chairman of the British Interplanetary Society 1946-7, and again 1950-53. His first professionally published sf story was "Loophole" for ASF in Apr 1946, though his first sale was "Rescue Party", which appeared in ASF in May 1946. In his early years as a writer he three times used the pseudonym Charles Willis, and wrote once as E.G. O'Brien. These four stories all appeared in UK magazines 1947-51. Four of ACC's early stories, written for FANZINES (1937-42), were reprinted in The Best of Arthur C. Clarke 1937-71 (coll 1973 UK; reissued in 2 vols, 1977, the first being inaccurately titled 1932-1955) ed Angus WELLS; a 1930s poem and essay appear in The Fantastic Muse (coll 1992 chap). ACC also worked as adviser for the comic DAN DARE - PILOT OF THE FUTURE for its first six months in 1950.ACC's early stories are very much GENRE SF, neatly constructed, usually turning on a single scientific point, often ending with a sting in the tail. Some are rather ponderously humorous. His first two novels were published in 1951: Prelude to Space (1951 US; rev 1953 UK; rev 1954 US; vt Master of Space 1961 US; vt The Space Dreamers 1969 US), being GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL \#3, and The Sands of Mars (1951). Both suffer from the rather wooden prose which ACC later fashioned into a more flexible instrument, though he was never able to escape an occasional stiffness in his writing. They are, in effect, works of optimistic propaganda for science (OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM), with human problems rather mechanically worked out against a background of scientific discovery. It was with the science that ACC's imagination flared into life. Islands in the Sky (1952 US) followed the same pattern; it is a juvenile about a boy in an orbital space station.A new note appeared in Expedition to Earth (coll 1953 US). This includes the short story "The Sentinel", which had appeared in 10 Story Fantasy in 1951 as "Sentinel of Eternity". A simple but haunting story, it tells of the discovery of an ALIEN artefact, created by an advanced race millions of years earlier, standing enigmatically on top of a mountain on the Moon. Many years later this story became the basis of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), for which ACC wrote the script with Stanley KUBRICK. The novelization, 2001: A Space Odyssey * (1968 US; with 2 related stories added, rev as coll 1990 UK), was written by ACC alone on the basis of the script after the film had been made. An account of ACC's connection with the film can be found in his The Lost Worlds of 2001 (1972 US), which also prints alternative script versions of key scenes.With "The Sentinel" came the first clear appearance of the ACC paradox: the man who of all sf writers is most closely identified with knowledgeable, technological HARD SF is strongly attracted to the metaphysical, even to the mystical; the man who in sf is often seen as standing for the boundless optimism of the soaring human spirit, and for the idea (strongly presented in John W. CAMPBELL Jr's ASF) that there is nothing humanity cannot accomplish, is best remembered for the image of mankind being as children next to the ancient, inscrutable wisdom of alien races. There is something attractive, even moving, in what can be seen in Freudian terms as an unhappy mankind crying out for a lost father; certainly it is the closest thing sf has yet produced to an analogy for RELIGION, and the longing for God.Although this theme is well seen in "The Sentinel", and even better seen in the iconography of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, at the end of which mankind is seen literally as a foetus, ACC gave it its most potent literary expression in two more books from 1953 which are still considered by many critics to be his finest, and in which he comes closest to continuing the tradition of the UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE. They are Against the Fall of Night (1948 Startling Stories; 1953 US; exp and much rev vt The City and the Stars 1956 US) - also assembled with "The Lion of Comarre" (1949 TWS) as The Lion of Comarre and Against the Fall of Night (coll 1968 US) - and CHILDHOOD'S END (1950 NW as "Guardian Angel"; exp 1953 US; rev 1990 UK).Both the original and the longer versions of Against the Fall of Night are readily available. Indeed, the shorter version was republished in Beyond the Fall of Night (omni 1990 US misleadingly credited - since it appears from the cover to be a single novel - to ACC and Gregory Benford; vt Arthur C Clarke - Against the Fall of Night/Gregory Benford - Beyond the Fall of Night UK 1991), along with a sequel, very different in tone and theme, by Gregory BENFORD. The longer version, The City and the Stars, is one of the strongest tales of CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH in genre sf. Alvin, a young man in the enclosed utopian city of Diaspar, on Earth in the FAR FUTURE, becomes impatient at the TECHNOLOGY-mediated stasis of the perfect life, and after many adventures makes his way outside the city to Lys, another UTOPIA but of a different kind, which stresses closeness to Nature. Ultimately Alvin finds an alien spaceship left behind millennia ago, visits the stars, and finally discovers the true nature of the cosmic perspective which has been hidden from both Lys and Diaspar. The final passages blend a sense of loss and of transcendence with an almost mystical intensity. ACC began working on this story as early as 1937, and it is clearly central to all his thinking and feeling; it is perhaps his most memorable work, and distinctly superior to the more awkward earlier version. It owes something to the evolutionary perspective of Olaf STAPLEDON, whose works ACC greatly admired, as does CHILDHOOD'S END, in which mankind reaches transcendence under the tutelage of satanic-seeming aliens, eventually to fuse with a cosmic overmind which is an apotheosis forever to be denied both to their parents, who are ordinary humans, and to the alien tutors.ACC continued to publish sf with some frequency over the next decade, with Earthlight (1951 TWS; exp 1955 US), Reach for Tomorrow (coll 1956 US), The Deep Range (1954 Star SF \#3; exp 1957 US), Tales from the White Hart (coll of linked stories 1957 US), The Other Side of the Sky (coll 1958 US), A Fall of Moondust (1961 US), Tales of Ten Worlds (coll 1962 US), Dolphin Island (1963 US), a juvenile, and Glide Path (1963 US), ACC's only non-sf novel, about the development of radar. The most interesting of these are The Deep Range, about NEAR FUTURE farming UNDER THE SEA, containing some of ACC's most evocative writing, and A Fall of Moondust, a realistic account - in the light of theories about the Moon's surface now known to have been mistaken - of an accident to a surface transport on a lightly colonized Moon. ACC's "The Star" (1955), a short story of great pathos describing the discovery that the star put in the sky by God to prefigure the Birth at Bethlehem was a supernova that destroyed an entire alien race, won a HUGO.By the 1960s most of ACC's creative energies had gone into writing nonfiction books and articles, many of them - not listed here - about undersea exploration; he was an enthusiastic skin-diver himself, one reason for his residence in Sri Lanka. His popularizations of science, which won him the UNESCO Kalinga Prize in 1962, are closely related to his fiction, in that the stories often fictionalize specific ideas discussed in the factual pieces. His most important nonfiction works, interesting still though some are rather out-of-date, are: Interplanetary Flight (1950; rev 1960), The Exploration of Space (1951; rev 1959; original text with new intro 1979), The Exploration of the Moon (1954), The Young Traveller in Space (1954; vt Going into Space US; vt The Scottie Book of Space Travel UK; rev with Robert SILVERBERG vt Into Space 1971 US), The Making of a Moon: The Story of the Earth Satellite Programme (1957; rev 1958 US), Voice Across the Sea (coll 1958 UK; rev 1974 UK; much rev, vt How the World was One: Beyond the Global Village 1992 UK), The Challenge of the Space Ship (coll 1959 US), Profiles of the Future (coll 1962; rev 1973; rev 1984), Man and Space (1964; with the Editors of Life), Voices From the Sky (coll 1965 US), The Promise of Space (1968), Beyond Jupiter: The Worlds of Tomorrow (1972 US; with Chesley BONESTELL), Report on Planet 3 and other Speculations (coll 1972), The View from Serendip (coll 1977 US), 1984: Spring: A Choice of Futures (coll 1984 US) and Ascent to Orbit: A Scientific Autobiography: The Technical Writings of Arthur C. Clarke (coll 1984 US). ACC's early professional experience as assistant editor of Science Abstracts 1949-50, before he became a full-time writer, has amply paid off. The Exploration of Space won a nonfiction INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARD in 1952. His science writing is lucid and interesting; his only rival as an sf writer of significance who is also of importance as a scientific journalist is Isaac ASIMOV. ACC became well known all over the world when he appeared as commentator on CBS TV for the Apollo 11, 12 and 15 Moon missions.A good retrospective collection of stories, all but one reprinted from collections listed above, is The Nine Billion Names of God (coll 1967 US). Since 1962 only a small amount of fiction by ACC has appeared in sf magazines, though two of his most interesting stories date from this period: "Sunjammer" (1965; vt "The Wind from the Sun"), which is about the SOLAR WIND, and A Meeting with Medusa (1971 Playboy; 1988 chap dos US), winner of a NEBULA in 1972 for Best Novella, the story of a CYBORG explorer meeting ALIEN life in the atmosphere of JUPITER. Both stories are reprinted in The Wind from the Sun (coll 1972 US; with 3 vignettes added rev 1987 US), his sixth and most recent collection (not counting reprint volumes). The most comprehensive, though by no means complete, selection of ACC's short fiction is the misleadingly titled More than One Universe: The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (omni 1991 US), collecting Tales of Ten Worlds, The Other Side of the Sky, The Nine Billion Names of God and The Wind from the Sun, with several stories dropped.After the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey, ACC became perhaps the best-known sf writer in the world, and in the USA by far and away the most popular foreign sf writer. A few years later he signed a contract, for a sum of money larger than anything previously paid in sf publishing, to write three further novels. These turned out to be Rendezvous with Rama (1973 UK), Imperial Earth: A Fantasy of Love and Discord (cut 1975; with 10,000 words restored 1976 US) and The Fountains of Paradise (1979 UK; with exp afterword 1989). All were bestsellers; all had a mixed critical reception, though Rendezvous with Rama scooped the awards: the Hugo, Nebula, JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD and BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD. To what extent the book deserved it, and to what extent the awards merely celebrated the return of a much loved figure to the field after many years' comparative silence is unclear. All the old ACC themes are there in the story of a huge, apparently derelict alien spaceship which enters the Solar System, and its exploration by a party of humans. As an artefact, the spaceship is a symbol of almost mythic significance, enigmatic, powerful and fascinating (BIG DUMB OBJECTS; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION), and the book derives considerable power from its description. The human characterization, on the other hand, is rather reminiscent of boys' fiction from an earlier era. Imperial Earth tells of relations between Earth and the OUTER PLANETS, and contains a rather meandering intrigue involving CLONES; there are some interesting speculations about BLACK HOLES. Fountains of Paradise, a much better book than Imperial Earth - it won the 1980 Hugo for Best Novel - tells of the construction on Earth of a space elevator 36,000km high, and combines ACC's favourite themes of technological evolution and mankind's apotheosis with moving directness; it is the most considerable work of the latter part of ACC's career.The 1980s and 1990s provided an astonishing coda to all of this. They have - in terms of the number of books appearing with ACC's name on the cover-been unexpectedly productive, unexpectedly because ACC was well into his 60s, and had previously announced that Fountains of Paradise would be his last work of fiction. However, soon there appeared 2010: Odyssey Two (1982 US), a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. This was made into a film directed by Peter Hyams, 2010 (1984). Neither book nor film is as distinguished as the original, but the book is better than the film. It was followed by 2061: Odyssey Three (1988 UK), which being open-ended suggests that the Odyssey saga of alien intervention may not yet be complete. A little earlier ACC had published The Songs of Distant Earth (1986 US), which greatly expands on the story of the same title published in If in 1958. Quietly and without much action it recounts the meeting of an isolated human colony on a remote planet with one of the last spaceships to leave a doomed Earth, and the cultural clashes that follow.In the mid-1980s ACC had developed a debilitating and continuing illness affecting the nervous system, but despite this he maintained considerable literary activity. His illness meant that much of his work was necessarily collaborative. While some of this was found disappointing by the critics, and even reviled, there is considerable gallantry in his having made the effort at all, more especially as the profit, it has been said, is intended to shore up various charitable enterprises ACC has founded, in order to render them financially secure after his death. The collaborative enterprises have included Cradle (1988 UK) with Gentry LEE and, also with Lee, three sequels to RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA: Rama II (1989 UK), The Garden of Rama (1991 US) and Rama Revealed (1993). Most of the writing seems to have been Lee's, whose style is less compact and more stereotyped than ACC's. All these books have moments of embarrassing prose reminiscent of popular romance, though they are progressively more confidently written. A more interesting partnership was that between Gregory Benford and Clarke, the former (as noted above) writing a sequel to the latter's 1948 novella Against the Fall of Night. ACC has also franchised out (SHARED WORLDS) the Venus Prime series to Paul PREUSS (whom see for titles), each novel having some basis in an ACC short story. The series begins with Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime, Volume 1: Breaking Strain (1987), based on ACC's "Breaking Strain" (TWS 1949). The fact-and-fiction anthology Project Solar Sail (anth 1990 US) has a cover which says it is ed ACC, but a reading of the title page suggests the true ed, here "Managing Editor", was David BRIN.During the period since 1988 there have been, moreover, two books by ACC alone. The first is Astounding Days: A Science Fictional Autobiography (1989), consisting of enjoyable reminiscences of his own literary life, with a good amount of material on other writers, both these topics being often seen in relation to the magazine ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION. The second, somewhat surprisingly after all the collaborations, was another solo novel, The Ghost from the Grand Banks (1990 UK), an interesting tale of an attempt to raise the Titanic in the early 21st century; it is indubitably Clarkean, though itself a little ghostlike, much of the story pared to the bone, though typically containing a technical (and neatly symbolic) diversion into the mathematics of the Mandelbrot set. The Hammer of God (1992 Time Magazine; exp 1993), which hangs a number of speculations on a thin narrative involving an asteroid bent on colliding with Earth, is also telegraphic in effect.ACC is patron of the SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION, and at the ceremony proclaiming the housing of its research collection with the University of Liverpool, he received an honorary doctorate from the University, by videolink. He has received many awards, including the Association of Space Explorers' Special Achievement Award. He has presented a number of tv programmes, including the series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World at the beginning of the 1980s. He received a Nebula Grand Master Award in 1986.For many readers ACC is the very personification of sf. Never a "literary" author, he nonetheless writes always with lucidity and candour, often with grace, sometimes with a cold, sharp evocativeness that has produced some of the most memorable images in sf. He is deservedly seen as a central figure in the development of post-WWII sf, especially in his liberal, optimistic view of the possible benefits of technology (though one that is by no means unaware of its dangers), and in his development of the Stapledonian theme of cosmic perspective, in which mankind is seen as reaching out like a child to an alien Universe which may treat us as a godlike father would, or may respond with cool indifference.

   PN

   Other works: Across the Sea of Stars (omni 1959 US of 18 short stories from previous colls and the novels CHILDHOOD'S END and Earthlight); From the Ocean, From the Stars (omni 1961 US of The Deep Range, The Other Side of the Sky and The City and the Stars); Prelude to Mars (omni 1965 US of 16 stories from previous collections plus Prelude to Space and The Sands of Mars); An Arthur C. Clarke Omnibus (omni 1965 UK of Childhood's End, Prelude to Space and Expedition to Earth); An Arthur C. Clarke Second Omnibus (omni 1968 UK of A Fall of Moondust, Earthlight and The Sands of Mars); Of Time and Stars (coll 1972 UK), a collection for children, all reprinted from previous collections; Four Great SF Novels (omni 1978 UK); The Sentinel (coll 1983 US), reprints; Tales From Planet Earth (coll 1989 UK) ed anon by Martin H. GREENBERG, the only previously uncollected story being "On Golden Seas" (1987 Omni).Nonfiction: Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (1980) and Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers (1985), both with Simon Welfare and John Fairley, both tv-series spin-offs largely written by Welfare and Fairley; The Odyssey File (1985 UK) with Peter Hyams, communications exchanged between author and director about the making of the film 2010; Arthur C. Clarke's July 20, 2019: A Day in the Life of the 21st Century (1986 US), illustrated; Arthur C. Clarke's Chronicles of the Strange and Mysterious (1987), again with Welfare and Fairley; The Fantastic Muse (coll 1992 chap), fanzine material from the 1930s; How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village (coll 1992; vt How the World Was One: The Turbulent History of Global Communications 1993), partially based on Voices Across the Sea (1958 US); By Space Possessed: Essays on the Exploration of Space (coll 1993), mostly assembled from previous books; The Snows of Olympus: A Garden on Mars (1994), which advocates the terraforming of Mars.As Editor: Time Probe (anth 1966 US); The Coming of the Space Age (anth of nonfiction pieces 1967); Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol 4 (anth 1981 as ed by ACC; vt Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol III: Nebula Winners 1965-69 US 1981 as ed by ACC with Geo W. PROCTOR - Proctor did the actual editing).

   About the author: Arthur C. Clarke (anth 1977) ed Joseph D. OLANDER and Martin Harry GREENBERG; Arthur C. Clarke: Starmont Readers' Guide No 1 (chap 1979) by Eric S. RABKIN; Arthur C. Clarke: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1984) by David N. SAMUELSON; The Odyssey of Arthur C. Clarke: An Authorized Biography (1992) by Neil McAleer.

   See also: ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD; ASTEROIDS; CHILDREN IN SF; CHILDREN'S SF; CITIES; CLUB STORY; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; COMPUTERS; DEL REY BOOKS; DIMENSIONS; END OF THE WORLD; ESCHATOLOGY; EVOLUTION; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FANTASY; FUTUROLOGY; GENERATION STARSHIPS; GODS AND DEMONS; GOLDEN AGE OF SF; GRAVITY; HISTORY OF SF; HIVE-MINDS; HUMOUR; INVASION; LEISURE; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); MAGIC; MARS; MATHEMATICS; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; METAPHYSICS; MOON; MUSIC; MYTHOLOGY; PASTORAL; PERCEPTION; PHYSICS; POWER SOURCES; PREDICTION; PSI POWERS; RADIO; ROCKETS; SCIENTISTS; SPACE FLIGHT; SPACE HABITATS; SPACESHIPS; STARS; SUN; SUPERMAN; TERRAFORMING; TIME TRAVEL; TRANSPORTATION; VIRTUAL REALITY.