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Arthur C. Clarke

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Sir Arthur C. Clarke <tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">Image:Arthur C Clarke.jpg
</td></tr>
Born: December 16, 1917
Somerset, England, United Kingdom
Occupation(s): Author, Inventor

<tr><th style="text-align: right;">Nationality:</th><td>British</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align: right;">Genre(s):</th><td>Science fiction</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align: right;">Subject(s):</th><td>Science</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align: right;">Debut work(s):</th><td>"Rescue Party", Astounding Science Fiction. 1946</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align: right;">Website:</th><td>The Arthur C. Clarke Foundation</td></tr>

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (born December 16 1917) is a British author and inventor, most famous for his science-fiction novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, and for collaborating with director Stanley Kubrick on the film of the same name. Clarke is the last surviving member of what was sometimes known as the "Big Three" of science fiction, which included Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Clarke was born in Minehead in Somerset, England, and as a boy enjoyed stargazing and enthusiastically read old American science-fiction magazines (pulp magazines, many of which made their way to England in ships with sailors who read them to pass the time). After secondary school, and studying at Richard Huish College, Taunton he was unable to afford a university education and got a job as an auditor in the pensions section of the Board of Education.

During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Air Force as a radar specialist and was involved in the early warning radar defence system which contributed to the RAF's success during the Battle of Britain. He was demobilised with the rank of Flight Lieutenant. After the war, he obtained a first class degree in mathematics and physics at King's College London.

In the postwar years Clarke became involved with the British Interplanetary Society and served for a time as its chairman. His most important contribution may be the idea that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays. He first proposed this in a paper privately circulated among the core technical members of the BIS in 1945. The concept was published in Wireless World in October of that year.<ref>[1]</ref> <ref>[2]</ref> <ref>[3]</ref> <ref>[4] </ref> Clarke has also written a number of non-fiction books describing the technical details and societal implications of rocketry and space flight. The most notable of these may be The Exploration of Space (1951) and The Promise of Space (1968).

Clarke's first professional sale was in 1946 to Astounding Science Fiction: the memorable short story "Rescue Party". Along with his writing, Clarke worked briefly as Assistant Editor of Science Abstracts (1949) before devoting himself to writing full-time from 1951. Clarke also contributed to the Dan Dare series, and his first three published novels were for a juvenile audience.

In 1951, he wrote "The Sentinel" for a BBC competition. Though the story was rejected, it changed the course of Clarke's career. Not only the basis for 2001, The Sentinel introduced a more mystical and cosmic element to Clarke's work. Many of Clarke's later works feature a technologically advanced but prejudiced mankind being confronted by a superior alien intelligence. In the cases of The City and the Stars, Childhood's End, and the 2001 series, this encounter produces a conceptual breakthrough that accelerates humanity into the next stage of its evolution.

In 1953 Clarke met and quickly married Marilyn Mayfield, a twenty-two year old American divorcee with a young son. They separated permanently after six months, although a divorce was not finalized until 1964. <ref name="McAleer">McAleer, Neil. "Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography", Contemporary Books, Chicago, 1992. ISBN 0-8092-3720-2</ref>

He has lived in Sri Lanka since 1956, immigrating when it was still called Ceylon, first in Unawatuna on the south coast, and then in Colombo. Clarke holds citizenship of both the UK and Sri Lanka [5]. He has long been an avid scuba diver and a member of the Underwater Explorers Club, and living in Sri Lanka has afforded him the opportunity to visit the ocean year-round. It also inspired the locale for his novel The Fountains of Paradise, in which he describes a space elevator. This, he figures, will ultimately be his legacy, more so than geostationary satellites, once space elevators make space shuttles obsolete.[citation needed]

His many predictions reached great heights when in 1958 he started a series of essays that became Profiles of the Future published in their entirety in 1962. A timetable <ref>Chart of the Future</ref> up to the year 2100 describes inventions and ideas including such things as a "global library" for 2005.

Early in his career, Clarke had a fascination with the paranormal, and has stated that it was part of the inspiration for his novel Childhood's End. He has also said that he was one of several who were fooled by a Uri Geller demonstration at Birkbeck College. Although he has long since dismissed and distanced himself from nearly all pseudoscience, he still advocates research into purported instances of psychokinesis and other similar phenomena.

He signed a three-book publishing deal, a record for a science fiction writer. The first of the three was Rendezvous with Rama in 1973, which won him all the main genre awards and has spawned sequels that, along with the 2001 series, formed the backbone of Clarke's later career.

In 1975, his short story The Star was not included as prose in a new high school English textbook in Sri Lanka because of concerns that it might offend Roman Catholics, although it had been selected. The textbook caused controversy because it replaced Shakespeare's work with that of Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Isaac Asimov.

In the 1980s Clarke became well known to many for his television programmes Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World and Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers.

In 1988, he was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome and has since needed to use a wheelchair most of the time.

He was the first Chancellor of the International Space University, serving from 1989 to 2004, and Chancellor of Moratuwa University, Sri Lanka, from 1979 to 2002.

[edit] Themes, style, and influences

Clarke's work is marked by an optimistic view of science empowering mankind's exploration of the solar system. His early published stories would usually feature the extrapolation of a technological innovation or scientific breakthrough into something that helps resolve a human dilemma. The first manned mission to the moon (Prelude to Space), the colonization of Mars (The Sands of Mars) and life aboard a space station (Islands in the Sky) were all genre SF mainstays. Clarke's background as a technical writer showed in the early novels as a deliberate documentary style, and his characters reflect Clarke's experience by being mostly military or civil service types.

A recurring type of character is found in The Lion of Comarre, The City and the Stars, The Road to the Sea, and other works. A young man in a superficially utopian society becomes dissatisfied and restless and seeks to expand his horizons, thereby discovering the underlying decadence of his own society.

The Sentinel (1948) introduced a religious theme to Clarke's work, a theme that he later explored more deeply in "The Star". His interest in the paranormal was influenced by Charles Fort and embraced the belief that mankind may be the property of an ancient alien civilization. Surprisingly for a writer who is often held up as an example of hard science fiction's obsession with technology, three of Clarke's novels have this as a theme[citation needed]. Another theme of The Sentinel was the notion that the evolution of a intelligent species would eventually make them something close to gods, which was also explored in his 1953 novel Childhood's End. This idea of transcendence through evolution seems to have been influenced by Olaf Stapledon, who wrote a number of books dealing with this theme. Clarke has said of Stapledon's 1930 book Last and First Men that "No other book had a greater influence on my life....[It] and its successor Star Maker (1937) are the twin summits of [Stapledon's] literary career". [6]

[edit] Adapted screenplays

[edit] 2001: A Space Odyssey

Clarke's first venture into film was the Stanley Kubrick-directed 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick and Clarke had met in 1964 to discuss the possibility of a collaborative film project. As the idea developed, it was decided that the story for the film was to be loosely based on Clarke's short story The Sentinel, written in 1948 as an entry in a BBC short story competition. Originally, Clarke was going to write the screenplay for the film, but this proved to be more tedious than he had estimated. Instead, Kubrick and Clarke decided it would be best to write a novel first and then adapt it for the film upon its completion. However, as Clarke was finishing the book, the screenplay was also being written simultaneously.

Clarke's influence on the directing of 2001: A Space Odyssey is also felt in one of the most memorable scenes in the movie when astronaut Bowman shuts down HAL by removing modules from service one by one. As this happens we witness HAL's consciousness degrading. By the time HAL's logic is completely gone, he begins singing the song Daisy Bell. This song was chosen due to a coincidence when in 1962 Clarke visited his friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility. A remarkable speech synthesis demonstration by physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr was taking place at the time. Kelly was using an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech. His voice recorder synthesizer vocoder reproduced the vocal for Daisy Bell, with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews, creating one of the most famous moments in the history of Bell Labs. Arthur C. Clarke was so impressed that he later told Kubrick to use it in this climactic scene.<ref name="bell labs hal">Bell Labs: Where "HAL" First Spoke (Bell Labs Speech Synthesis website)</ref>

Due to the hectic schedule of the film's production, Kubrick and Clarke had difficulty collaborating on the book. Clarke completed a draft of the novel at the end of 1964 with the plan to publish in 1965 in advance of the film's release in 1966. After many delays the film was released in the spring of 1968, before the book was completed. The book was credited to Clarke alone. Clarke later complained that this had the effect of making the book into a novelisation, that Kubrick had manipulated circumstances to downplay his authorship. For these and other reasons, the details of the story differ slightly from the book to the movie. The film is a bold artistic piece with little explanation for the events taking place. Clarke, on the other hand, wrote thorough explanations of "cause and effect" for the events in the novel. Despite their differences, both film and novel were well received. [7] [8] [9]

In 1972 Clarke published The Lost Worlds of 2001, which included his account of the production and alternate versions of key scenes. The "special edition" of the novel A Space Odyssey (released in 1999) contains an introduction by Clarke, documenting his account of the events leading to the release of the novel and film.

[edit] 2010

In 1982 Clarke continued the 2001 epic with a sequel, 2010: Odyssey Two. This novel was also made into a film, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, directed by Peter Hyams for release in 1984. Due to the political environment in America in the 1980s, the novel and film present a Cold War theme, with the looming tensions of nuclear war. The film was not considered to be as revolutionary or artistic as 2001, but the reviews were still positive and it has earned over 40 million dollars since its release in North America. [10]

Clarke's email correspondence with Hyams was published in 1984. Titled The Odyssey File: The Making of 2010, and co-authored with Hyams, it illustrates his fascination with the then-pioneering medium and its use for them to communicate on an almost daily basis at the time of planning and production of the film. The book also includes Clarke's list of the best science-fiction films ever made.

[edit] Essays and short stories

Most of Clarke's essays (from 1934 to 1998) can be found in the book Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! (2000). Most of his short stories can be found in the book The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001). Another collection of early essays was published in The View from Serendip (1977), which also included one short piece of fiction, "When the Twerms Came". He has also written short stories under the pseudonyms of E. G. O'Brien and Charles Willis.

[edit] Concept of the geostationary satellite

Clarke's most important contribution may be the idea that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays. He proposed this concept in a paper titled "Extra-Terrestrial Relays — Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?", published in Wireless World in October 1945. The geostationary orbit is now sometimes known as the Clarke Orbit in his honour.

However, it is not clear that this article was actually the inspiration for the modern telecommunications satellite. John R. Pierce, of Bell Labs, arrived at the idea independently in 1954, and he was actually involved in the Echo satellite and Telstar projects. Moreover, Pierce stated that the idea was "in the air" at the time and certain to be developed regardless of Clarke's publication. Nevertheless, Clarke described the idea so thoroughly that his article has been cited as prior art in judgements denying patents on the concept.[citation needed]

It is also true that Clarke was not the first to publish the basic idea. It is found in Hermann Oberth's 1923 book Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space), among other places. <ref>Basics of the Geostationary Orbit (T. S. Kelso)</ref>

[edit] Awards, honors and other recognition

  • Following the release of 2001, Clarke became much in demand as a commentator on science and technology, especially at the time of the Apollo space program. The fame of 2001 was enough to get the Command Module of the Apollo 13 craft named "Odyssey".
  • In 1986, Clarke provided a grant to fund the prize money (initially £1,000) for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel published in Britain in the previous year. In 2001 the prize was increased to £2001, and its value now matches the year (e.g., £2005 in 2005).
  • In 2005 he lent his name to the inaugural Sir Arthur Clarke Awards — dubbed "the Oscars for Space". His brother attended the awards ceremony, and presented an award specially chosen by Arthur (and not by the panel of judges who chose the other awards) to the British Interplanetary Society.
  • On 14 November 2005 Sri Lanka awarded Arthur C. Clarke its highest civilian award, the Lankabhimanaya (Pride of Lanka) award, for his contributions to science and technology and his commitment to his adopted country.

[edit] Partial bibliography

[edit] Novels

[edit] Omnibus editions

Against the Fall of Night in Startling Stories.

[edit] Short story collections

[edit] Non-fiction

  • Interplanetary Flight; an introduction to astronautics. London: Temple Press, 1950
  • The Exploration of Space. New York: Harper, 1951
  • The Coast of Coral. New York: Harper, 1957 — Volume 1 of the Blue planet trilogy
  • The Reefs of Taprobane; Underwater Adventures around Ceylon. New York: Harper, 1957 — Volume 2 of the Blue planet trilogy
  • The Making of a Moon: the Story of the Earth Satellite Program. New York: Harper, 1957
  • Boy beneath the sea, Photos by Mike Wilson. Text by Arthur C. Clarke. New York: Harper, 1958
  • The Challenge of the Space Ship: Previews of Tomorrow’s World. New York: Harper, 1959
  • The Challenge of the Sea. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960
  • Profiles of the Future; an Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. New York: Harper & Row, 1962
  • Glide Path. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963
  • The Treasure of the Great Reef. New York: Harper & Row, 1964 — Volume 3 of the Blue planet trilogy
  • Voices from the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age. New York: Harper & Row, 1965
  • The Promise of Space. New York: Harper, 1968
  • Into Space: a Young Person’s Guide to Space, by Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Silverberg. New York: Harper & Row, 1971
  • Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations. New York: Harper & Row, 1972
  • The Lost Worlds of 2001. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972
  • The Odyssey File. Email correspondence with Peter Hyams. London: Panther Books, 1984
  • 1984, Spring: a Choice of Futures. New York: BallantIne Books, 1984
  • Ascent to Orbit, a Scientific Autobiography: The Technical Writings of Arthur C. Clarke. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984
  • Astounding Days: A Science Fictional Autobiography. London: Gollancz, 1989
  • How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village. New York : Bantam Books, 1992 — A history and survey of the communications revolution
  • By Space Possessed. London: Gollancz, 1993
  • The Snows of Olympus - A Garden on Mars (1994, picture album with comments)
  • Fractals: The Colors of Infinity (1997, narrator)
  • Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! : Collected Works 1934-1988. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999
  • From Narnia to a Space Odyssey: The War of Letters Between Arthur C. Clarke and C.S. Lewis (2003) with C. S. Lewis
  • The Coming of the Space Age; famous accounts of man's probing of the universe, selected and edited by Arthur C. Clarke.

[edit] Trivia

[edit] Quotes

  • "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic."
  • "The truth, as always, will be far stranger."
  • "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. "
  • "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. "
  • "Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering."
  • "How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean."
  • Of UFOs: "They tell us absolutely nothing about intelligence elsewhere in the universe, but they do prove how rare it is on Earth."
  • "Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what's over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you'd go crazy"

[edit] See also

[edit] Cited references

<references/>

[edit] External links

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