Futurist writer Arthur C. Clarke, 90, dies
Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend
of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the
space age, died Wednesday in his adopted home of Colombo, Sri
Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.
The author of almost 100 books, Clarke was an ardent promoter of
the idea that humanity's destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth.
It was a vision served most vividly by "2001: A Space Odyssey," the
classic 1968 science-fiction film he created with the director
Stanley Kubrick and the novel of the same title that he wrote as
part of the project.
His work was also prophetic: His detailed forecast of
telecommunications satellites in 1945 came more than a decade
before the first orbital rocket flight.
Clarke's influence on public attitudes toward space was
acknowledged by American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, by
scientists like Carl Sagan and by movie and television producers.
Gene Roddenberry credited Clarke's writings with encouraging him to
pursue his "Star Trek" project in the face of indifference from
television executives.
In his later years, after settling in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka),
Clarke continued to bask in worldwide acclaim as both a scientific
sage and the pre-eminent science fiction writer of the 20th
century. In 1998, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
Clarke played down his success in foretelling a globe-spanning
network of communication satellites. "No one can predict the
future," he always maintained.
But as a science fiction writer, he couldn't resist drawing up
timelines for what he called "possible futures." Far from
displaying uncanny prescience, these conjectures mainly
demonstrated his lifelong, and often disappointed, optimism about
the peaceful uses of technology - from his calculation in 1945 that
atomic-fueled rockets could be no more than 20 years away to his
conviction in 1999 that "clean, safe power" from "cold fusion"
would be commercially available in the first years of the new
millennium.
Arthur Charles Clarke was born on Dec. 16, 1917, in Minehead,
England. While still in school, he joined the newly formed British
Interplanetary Society, a small band of sci-fi enthusiasts who held
the controversial view that space travel was not only possible but
could be achieved in the not-so-distant future. In 1937, he began
writing his first science-fiction novel, a story of the distant
future that was later published as "Against the Fall of Night"
(1953).
Clarke spent World War II as an officer in the Royal Air Force.
In 1943 he was assigned to work with a team of American
scientist-engineers who had developed the first radar-controlled
system for landing airplanes in bad weather. That experience led to
Clarke's only non-science-fiction novel, "Glide Path" (1963). More
important, it led in 1945 to a technical paper, published in the
British journal Wireless World, establishing the feasibility of
artificial satellites as relay stations for Earth-based
communications.
Decades later, Clarke called his Wireless World paper "the most
important thing I ever wrote." In a wry piece titled, "A Short
Pre-History of Comsats, Or: How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My
Spare Time," he said a lawyer had dissuaded him from applying for a
patent.
For the next two years Clarke attended King's College, London,
graduating in 1948 with first-class honors in physics and
mathematics. But he continued to write and sell stories, and after
a stint as assistant editor at the scientific journal Physics
Abstracts, he decided he could support himself as a freelance
writer.
Over the next two decades, he wrote a series of nonfiction
bestsellers as well as his best-known novels, including
"Childhood's End" (1953) and "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968).
In "Childhood's End," a race of aliens who happen to look like
devils imposes peace on an Earth torn by Cold War tensions.
The Cold War also forms the backdrop for "2001." Its genesis was
a short story titled "The Sentinel," first published in a
science-fiction magazine in 1951. It tells of an alien artifact
found on the moon, a little crystalline pyramid that explorers from
Earth destroy while trying to open. One explorer realizes that the
artifact was a kind of fail-safe beacon; in silencing it, human
beings have signaled their existence to its far-off creators.
In 1964, Kubrick and Clarke agreed to make the "proverbial
really good science-fiction movie," based on "The Sentinel." This
led to a four-year collaboration; Clarke wrote the novel, and
Kubrick produced and directed the film; they are jointly credited
with the screenplay.
All told, he wrote or collaborated on close to 100 books. His
works have been translated into about 40 languages, and worldwide
sales have been estimated at more than $25 million.
A statement from Clarke's office said that he had recently
reviewed the final manuscript of his latest novel. "The Last
Theorem," co-written with Frederik Pohl, will be published later
this year, the statement said.
Clarke was briefly married in 1953 to an American diving
enthusiast named Marilyn Mayfield; they separated after a few
months and were divorced in 1964, having had no children.
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