Giant among imaginative promoters 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 died aged 90, was pre-eminent because of his hard and accurate predictions of the detailed technologies of spaceflight and of the use of near-earth space for global communications. Yet, in spite of Clarke’s deep seriousness, JB Priestley described him in the 1950’s as the happiest writer he had ever known.
Tallish, bespectacled, rather big-eared and increasingly thin on top, he tended to be described by his 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. Clarke’s 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, to some extent at least, 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 single 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 the 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 Arthur C Clarke was proof enough. Sagan was one of the many teenagers whose lives, in the years immediately after the second world war, were profoundly changed by Clarke’s non-fiction book Interplanetary Flight.
This did more than spell out the technical case for spaceflight 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 which nevertheless became a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic. As a writer he was made.
Clarke’s stature and impact was probably greater than he could have imagined at that time: it has certainly been far greater than that accorded by popular acclaim, for he was highly and, sometimes, effectively critical of the limitations and military basis of the world’s major space programmes. He was bitterly critical of the 1980s concept of Star Wars and, well before this emerged as US policy, sent a personal message of appeal from his Physics and Space Institute in Sri Lanka to the US Congress.
His video statement ‘A Martian Odyssey’, which was read into the congressional record, argued that money being spent on intercontinental ballistic missiles could, to everyone’s benefit, be imaginatively channelled into an international space 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 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 that he felt that it had carried him into space again.
At 17 he joined the British Interplanetary 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 the audit branch. But, after the outbreak of the second world war, he opted to join the RAF where, via electronics training, he became an instructor at radio school. Finally he went to work on the development and proving of American ground control approach— talk-down— radar at Davidstow Moor in north Cornwall, a system which pilots never liked because it robbed them of control until the last moments.
The head of the US 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 interplanetary communications. He went on to gain a first in physics and mathematics at King’s College London, and then a postgraduate degree in astronomy. The course was so boring that he became assistant editor on Science Abstracts, so that he would have time to think and to write.
The rest is almost a legend of our time. In 1953, on a US tour and with success already evident, he had a whirlwind romance with Marilyn Mayfield, a very young and beautiful divorcee who described the then bearded and buccaneering Clarke as her own Errol Flynn. A decade later, as Clarke chose the Sri Lankan culture as his working environment, the marriage was dissolved.
Clarke’s energy and momentum was at its height, taking him to the depths of the Indian Ocean and to every forum in the world where missiles and spaceflight were an issue. Clarke unwaveringly spoke for collaboration and peace. His last years were, increasingly, limited: post-polio syndrome left him confined to his wheelchair, and much of his public contact with the wider world was by telephone and then videolink.
Certainly, Clarke’s imagination was magical, carrying him beyond the limits of possibility: his greatness was and remains that, from his almost 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 on 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.
