Arthur C Clarke

Arthur C ClarkeSir Arthur Charles Clarke known as Arthur C Clarke (born December 16, 1917 to March 19, 2008) 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.

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 Arthur C 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. 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).

While Clarke had a few stories that appeared in fanzines between 1937 and 1945, his first professional sale appeared in the May, 1946 issue of 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 1948, he wrote "The Sentinel" for a BBC competition. Though the story was rejected, it changed the course of Arthur C 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 Arthur C 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.

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. Arthur C Clarke holds citizenship of both the UK and Sri Lanka. 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.

Arthur C ClarkeHis many predictions culminated in 1958 when he began a series of essays in various magazines that eventually became Profiles of the Future, published in book form in 1962. A timetable up to the year 2100 describes inventions and ideas including such things as a "global library" for 2005.

Early in his career, Arthur C 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.

In the early 1970s he signed a three-book publishing deal, a record for a science-fiction writer at the time. 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 Arthur C Clarke's later career.

In 1975, his short story The Star was not included in a new high school English textbook in Sri Lanka because of concerns that it might offend Roman Catholics although it had already been selected. The same textbook also 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 programs 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.

Arthur C Clarke 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.

Arthur C. Clarke passed away on March 19, 2008.

Pseudonyms: Charles Willis, E. G. O'Brien

Selected Bibliography
Complete Bibliography

Series

  • 2001
    • 1 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
    • 2 2010: Odyssey Two (1982)
    • 3 2061: Odyssey Three (1987)
    • 4 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997)
  • Rama
    • Rendezvous With Rama (1973)
      • Magazine/Anthology Appearances:
      • Rendezvous With Rama (Part 1 of 2) (1973)
      • Rendezvous With Rama (Part 2 of 2) (1973)
    • Rama II (1989) with Gentry Lee
    • The Garden of Rama (1991) with Gentry Lee
    • Rama Revealed (1993) with Gentry Lee
  • Time Odyssey
    • 1 Time’s Eye (2003) with Stephen Baxter
    • 2 Sunstorm (2005) with Stephen Baxter

Novels

  • Prelude to Space (1951)
  • Sands of Mars (1951)
  • Islands in the Sky (1952)
  • Childhood’s End (1953)
  • Against the Fall of Night (1953)
  • The Deep Range (1954)
  • Earthlight (1955)
  • The City and the Stars (1956)
  • A Fall of Moondust (1961)
  • Dolphin Island (1963)
  • Imperial Earth (1975)
  • The Fountains of Paradise (1979)
  • The Songs of Distant Earth (1986)
  • Cradle (1988) with Gentry Lee
  • The Ghost From the Grand Banks (1990)
  • Beyond the Fall of Night (1990) with Gregory Benford
  • The Hammer of God (1993)
  • Richter 10 (1996) with Mike McQuay
  • The Trigger (1999) with Michael P. Kube-McDowell
  • The Light of Other Days (2000) with Stephen Baxter
  • The Reefs of Taprobane (2002)
  • The Light of Other Days  (2007) with Stephen Baxter and Dick Hill

Collections

  • Expedition to Earth (1953)
  • Reach for Tomorrow (1956)
  • Tales from the White Hart (1957)
  • The Other Side of the Sky (1958)
  • Tales of Ten Worlds (1962)
  • The Nine Billion Names of God (1967)
  • The Wind from the Sun (1972)
  • Of Time and Stars (1972)
  • The Best of Arthur C. Clarke: 1937-1971 (1973)
  • The Sentinel (1983)
  • Tales from Planet Earth (1990)
  • The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2000)

Return from Arthur C Clarke to Biographies

Image #1 from testermanscifi.org # 2 from locusmag.com

This article uses some information from wikipedia.org


footer for Arthur C Clarke page