The edifying odyssey of A.C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke was the last giant of science fiction's "greatest generation," the men and women who transformed SF from a despised pulp genre to a respected form of literature. Along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, he helped define what science fiction was and what it could do.

Clarke is known for proposing in 1945 that geosynchronous satellites could be used to relay messages around the globe, making him the godfather of the telecommunications satellite industry. He wrote many nonfiction books, chiefly science popularizations, and twice served as chairman of the British Interplanetary Society. He had a secondary career as an undersea explorer.

Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was based on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel," and written in collaboration with him. But Clarke always thought of himself primarily as a science-fiction writer. His influence upon the field is enduring.

The remarkable thing about Clarke's fiction is that he wrote in two distinct modes. The first was very dry and factual, the sort of thing you would expect from an engineer. (In fact, he was a radar instructor in the Royal Air Force during World War II.) In his short story "Take a Deep Breath," an astronaut must cross a short stretch of the vacuum between two spaceships without a space suit in order to survive. It is a lightly fictionalized account of the fact that it could be done. The prose was serviceable, the characterization nonexistent - the idea was paramount.

Similarly, his 1978 novel, The Fountains of Paradise, is in essence a description of how to build and operate a "space elevator," a structure made of super-strong cables, anchored to a site on the equator at one end and to a geosynchronous asteroid at the other. Such a device would enable cheap travel into orbital space without the use of rockets. Like all of Clarke's books written in this mode, it was rigorously scientific and just a wee bit dry. You either read such a book for its ideas or not at all.

But Arthur C. Clarke was also a visionary. In his most famous story, "The Nine Billion Names of God," two engineers are hired by a Tibetan lamasery to program a computer to write out every possible name of God. It is the monks' belief that the universe exists solely for this holy task and will end when it is accomplished. The engineers naturally believe no such thing, and leave shortly before the task is complete. The story ends with one of the most famous last lines in science fiction: "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

An early novel, The City and the Stars, is set a billion years in the future at a time when the oceans are gone, the moon is destroyed, and immortal humans have turned their backs on the stars that their ancestors reshaped to their own purposes. This sort of thing is easy to do badly and usually ages faster than a carton of outdated milk. But even decades later, Clarke's vividly imagined world still fills the contemporary reader with a sense of wonder. It has a strangeness and beauty that evoke an almost religious awe built upon an entirely secular foundation.

But Clarke's foremost contribution to science fiction was introducing it to the concept of science-based transcendence. In Clarke's best book, Childhood's End, evolution reaches its ultimate end point when human intelligence attains psychic critical mass and an entire generation of children becomes spontaneously superhuman. The brief glimpses of what an almost godlike intelligence would be like are in themselves dazzling. But the aftermath, when the children's untranscended parents have to come to terms with the fact that they've been left behind, is heartbreaking.

The themes of transcendence, of posthumanity, and of the clash between those who are recognizably human and their radically altered offspring, have come to dominate science fiction in recent years. But it was Clarke who came up with them first, more than a half-century ago.

How can these two sides of the man's writing be reconciled? Perhaps in another of his enduring contributions to our culture, the aphorism that has come to be called Clarke's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Clarke was a strong believer in science and technology, and an optimist as well. In the long run, he believed, human intelligence would prevail over all problems.

Arthur C. Clarke led a rich, full life, and ended up as a living national treasure of Sri Lanka. He moved there originally in order to spend more time scuba diving, and adopted it as his home. In later years, he was wheelchair-bound, but still managed to address gatherings of fans via large-screen television and the communications satellites he had foreseen. He was a genuinely beloved figure in science fiction, and his passing leaves a hole that cannot be filled.