A Profile of Sir Arthur C. Clarke
A Biography of The SFWA's 7th Damon Knight Grand Master 1917 - 2008
The creator of Childhood's End, Rendezvous With Rama, and 2001: A Space Odyssey is almost as well-known for his non-fiction and popularizations of science as for his SF.
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, author of Rendezvous with Rama, was born in Somerset (UK) in December 1917.
From detailed forecasts of telecommunications satellites in 1945, over than a decade before the first successful space flight, to his collaboration with director Stanley Kubrick over the classic sf film "2001: A Space Odyssey," Clarke was a tireless promoter of his belief that humanity's destiny lay beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.
He recollected incidents in childhood that awakened his interest in science: a cigarette card from his father with a picture of a dinosaur; rambles along the North Somerset coast, with its "wonderland of rock pools;" a Meccano set, a British construction toy. "Mapping the Moon" through a telescope he made himself from "a cardboard tube and a couple of lenses." But the formative event was his discovery at 13 — the year his father died — of "Astounding Stories," the leading American SF magazine.
Childhood’s End
Clarke spent WW2 in the Royal Air Force. He worked with a team of American scientist-engineers who had developed the first radar-controlled system for landing aeroplanes in poor visibility. It led to a technical paper in 1945, published in the journal "Wireless World," outlining the feasibility of artificial satellites to relay Earth-based communications. Years later, Clarke would wryly outline how a lawyer had dissuaded him from applying for a patent, claiming that the idea of relaying signals from space was too farfetched to be taken seriously.
That same year Clarke sold a short story to the same Astounding Science Fiction as had captured his imagination years earlier. After studying at Kings College, London, Clarke decided to write full-time, and over the next two decades, he wrote a string of bestsellers –both nonfiction and science-fiction.
2001: A Space Odyssey
These included "Childhood's End" (1953), in which aliens who look like devils impose peace on an cold-war gripped Earth. But the aliens' real mission is to prepare humanity for the next stage of evolution. While in "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), one member of humanity is again transformed into something more than human.
The Deep Range
After Clarke became interested in diving in the 1950s -- when he realized that he could find "something very close to weightlessness" of outer space underwater, he settled permanently in Colombo, capital of Ceylon. He wrote about diving in a number of books, beginning with "The Coast of Coral" (1956), and “The Deep Range.”
Altogether, he wrote or collaborated on nearly 100 books. His works have been translated into some 40 languages, and worldwide sales have been estimated at more than $25 million.
In 1962 he suffered a severe attack of poliomyelitis, from which he apparently completely recovered, but in 1984 he developed post-polio syndrome, a progressive condition which meant that he spent the last years in a wheelchair.
While sharing his passions for space and the sea with a worldwide readership, Clarke kept his emotional life private. He was briefly married in 1953 to an American, divorcing in 1964.
One of his closest relationships was with a fellow diver in Sri Lanka, who died in an accident in 1977. Clarke shared his Colombo home with many members of the other man’s extended family.
Clarke died in the early hours of March 19, 2008 in Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956.
