According to Muslim legend, Adam, after he was forced to leave the Garden of Eden, made his way south through India and onto the island of Ceylon, where, later joined by Eve, he settled down to propagate the human race. Another version of the legend has it that Adam, for his disobedience, was hurled from Heaven and, as penance, stood for a thousand years on one foot on top of Adam’s Peak, a remarkable 7,360-foot mountain that rises in a precipitous rock pyramid from the jungles and tea estates of central Ceylon. Indeed, at the summit of the mountain there is a shrine built around a rock that bears a curious footprint-like indentation, which Muslims take to be the footprint of Adam, and which Buddhists—who constitute about seventy per cent of the present population of the island—take to be the footprint of Gautama Buddha. Adam’s Peak, which is visible for miles out to sea, was the landmark that guided the first Europeans, the Portuguese, to the island in 1505. They were looking for cinnamon, and they found, in addition, the decaying fragments of a great civilization created by the Sinhalese—the “lion race,” of Indian descent, who had flourished on Ceylon for nearly two thousand years. The Sinhalese had constructed fantastic cities like Anuradhapura, which is said to have had, by the first century A.D., a population of several million, but by the time the Portuguese arrived the ancient cities had been largely reclaimed by the jungle, and the kingdom of the Sinhalese was weak and divided. The government of Ceylon had retreated to Kandy, in the highlands near Adam’s Peak. (Kandy served as Mountbatten’s headquarters during the Second World War and was one of the three principal locales of the film “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” which was made entirely in Ceylon.) The Portuguese were never able to subjugate the island, although they claimed it in the name of their king. But their influence still manifests itself through the presence of the Catholic Church and in the many Portuguese family names, like de Silva. It was the Portuguese who named Colombo (after Christopher Columbus). However, their tenure was short-lived; beginning in the early seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company, in alliance with the Kandy kings, drove the Portuguese out. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Dutch, in turn, gave way to the British East India Company; the British captured Colombo in 1795, and in 1802 Ceylon became a Crown Colony—a status it retained until 1948, when it became fully independent.
Ceylon, which is shaped like a teardrop and hangs just off the southeastern coast of India, is about half the size of Great Britain, and what traces of European influence are left in Ceylon are very largely British. The country’s second language is English. (Its first language is Sinhalese, and its third is Tamil.) It was the British who built the modern port of Colombo. (Colombo is not a natural harbor, and the British literally created one.) And it was the British who introduced the cultivation of tea and rubber—currently the two principal exports—to Ceylon. The island’s population is now about twelve million, of whom some seven thousand are Europeans, but most of these are British—mainly retired planters who fell in love with the jungles, the magnificent seacoast, and the highland country, and could not face going back to the rigors of the English climate after their tea and rubber estates were taken over by the Ceylonese. However, the most singular of the British expatriates now living in Ceylon is not a planter at all but one of the truly prophetic figures of the space age, Arthur C. Clarke.
Clarke, a remarkably youthful-looking fifty-one (when he is wearing his glasses, which he needs because of myopia, he presents the vaguely mischievous appearance of a benign and stupendously energetic blue-eyed owl), has the rugged physique and constitution of a farm boy, which he once was. He has been well known as a science-fiction writer and a scientific prophet for over a quarter of a century. (Ten years ago, he made a bet that the first man to land on the moon would do so by June, 1969.) However, it is only in the last few years—especially since he and Stanley Kubrick wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey”—that he has become widely known to the general public. He became even more widely known, of course, during the recent flight to the moon, when he served as one of the commentators assisting Walter Cronkite in his coverage of the event for the Columbia Broadcasting System. Cronkite has been a Clarke fan for many years, and Clarke has done a number of television broadcasts with him, beginning as far back as 1953. In following the Apollo 11 flight, Clarke made some dozen appearances. During an early one, Cronkite asked him if he would mind explaining the ending of “2001,” and Clarke answered that he didn’t think there was enough time—then or later. He went to Cape Kennedy with the C.B.S. team, and at the moment of the launch, as he told a friend on his return, he, like everyone around him, burst into tears. “I hadn’t cried for twenty years,” he said. “Right afterward, I happened to run into Eric Sevareid, and he was crying, too.” After the launch, Clarke returned with the rest of the C.B.S. crew to New York and spent most of the next several days in and out of the C.B.S. studios, watching the flight and, from time to time, going on camera. The actual landing on the moon was, in many ways, the fulfillment of a life’s dreaming and prophesying. “For me, it was as if time had stopped,” he said later.
Clarke’s œuvre appears to have a special appeal for young people, and he spends a good deal of his time, when he is in the United States, lecturing to university audiences, who seem to have been familiar since childhood with his science-fiction classics, such as “The City and the Stars,” “A Fall of Moondust,” “The Sands of Mars,” and “Childhood’s End,” as well as with his superb popular-science books, such as “The Promise of Space” and “Profiles of the Future.” Recently, Clarke received a letter from a sixteen-year-old amateur filmmaker that began, “You are the best sci-fi writer no doubt in the world (or at least in the North American Continent),” and went on, “Could you please do me a great favor (which I’ll repay you when I become famous), and that is to think of an idea for a suspenseful sci-fi short movie (about 1/2 hr.), and let me have your permission to use it as a theme.”
Anyone who talks with Clarke for very long discovers several characteristics of his conversation that make it both delightful and sometimes difficult to follow. He is afflicted with what he refers to as a “butterfly mind.” His conversation flits in and out of subjects, passing from one to the other with the speed of an agitated lepidopteron. He will sometimes provide a transitional “Exactly, exactly” while at the same time conveying the impression that he has not been paying much attention to any interjections the listener has been making in the vain hope of slowing him down. When he writes, however, his style is a singular amalgam of scientific erudition, speculative imagination, and a profoundly poetic feeling for the strange and only partly understood objects—stars, moons, planets, asteroids—that populate our universe. Many—indeed, most—science-fiction writers do not have any special scientific training. Clarke (like Isaac Asimov, who is a biochemist) is a notable exception. He served as an electronics engineer with the R.A.F. (in 1945, while still in the service, he originated the idea of a communications satellite); he has a bachelor’s degree (with First Class Honours) in physics and mathematics, and has done advanced study in astronomy; and for a spell he worked as an abstracter for a major scientific journal. There is little doubt that Clarke could, if he felt like it, earn his living by doing science. One of the reasons he doesn’t is that it might get in the way of speculation, which, while consistent with generally accepted scientific principles, often pushes them a step or two farther than most scientists would be willing to go. In this connection, Clarke once remarked, “Since I don’t have any scientific reputation to lose, I can say what I please without giving a damn about what the professionals think of it.” However, the really distinguishing feature of Clarke’s style is the sense of sadness and loneliness that man must feel over living for so brief a time in such a vast universe of which he can have so limited a glimpse. Kubrick once remarked, “Arthur somehow manages to capture the hopeless but admirable human desire to know things that can really never be known.”
Since Clarke is himself an unswerving optimist, with an all but Buddhist reverence for life, the worlds that he creates, however strange, are usually basically benign. It is very rare in a Clarke story to find an “alien”—i.e., an extraterrestrial being—or an animal, or even a plant, that one feels one could not get on with, given a little practice. Moreover, the inanimate objects also acquire personalities. Here is Clarke describing the prehistoric earth in “The Sentinel,” the short story that was transformed into “2001”: “Such was our own Earth, the smoke of the great volcanoes still staining the skies, when that first ship of the peoples of the dawn came sliding in from the abyss beyond Pluto. It passed the frozen outer worlds, knowing that life could play no part in their destinies. It came to rest among the inner planets, warming themselves around the fire of the sun and waiting for their stories to begin.” And here is Clarke describing Alvin, the hero of “The City and the Stars,” in his first encounter with a strange robot: “None of the conventional control thoughts produced any effect. The machine remained contemptuously inactive. That suggested two possibilities. It was either too unintelligent to understand him or it was very intelligent indeed, with its own powers of choice and volition. In that case, he must treat it as an equal. Even then he might underestimate it, but it would bear him no resentment, for conceit was not a vice from which robots often suffered.” Stanley Kubrick once summarized Clarke’s gift by saying, “He can take an inanimate object like a star or a world, or even a galaxy, and somehow make it into a very poignant thing that almost seems alive.”
Clarke has made his home in Ceylon more or less permanently since 1956. What drew him there, and keeps him there, is the sea. Ceylon is surrounded by some of the most magnificent coral reefs in the world—reefs that abound in tropical marine life. Since 1951, Clarke—despite the fact that he has never learned to swim properly—has been an ardent deep-sea diver and photographer in such diverse places as the English Channel; Clearwater, Florida; the Great Barrier Reef of Australia; and along the coast of Ceylon. Of the more than five hundred articles, books, and short stories that he has written to date (Clarke has catalogued his output in four neatly handwritten looseleaf notebooks, with entries indicating when the work was done, who bought it, and how much was paid; the next entry will be No. 510), about a quarter have to do with the sea. The rest include technical electronics articles (most notably his classic paper on the communications satellite, which appeared in the October, 1945, issue of Wireless World, and in which he proposed extraterrestrial relay stations, plotted the orbits required, and set forth in great detail the fundamental principles of the satellite’s design); other scientific papers dating back to his R.A.F. days; short stories like “The Sentinel” and “Before Eden;” novels like “Earthlight” and “Against the Fall of Night;” popular scientific books like “The Exploration of Space” and “Interplanetary Flight;” and, of course, the enigmatic screenplay for “2001.” Despite all this activity, which has taken Clarke to most of the centers of space technology in the Western world as a consultant, a lecturer, or an observer, the spell of the sea has always drawn him back to Ceylon. He has summarized his feeling about Ceylon in “The Treasure of the Great Reef,” his most recent book on deep-sea diving. In it he describes the discovery and salvage of a seventeenth-century treasure ship that was sunk on the Great Basses Reef, off the south coast of Ceylon—an enterprise he undertook with Mike Wilson, a former British paratrooper, frogman, film producer, and professional diver, who introduced Clarke to diving and has been his partner in underwater explorations ever since. Of Ceylon, Clarke writes, “Though I never left England until I was thirty-three years old (or travelled more than a score of miles from my birthplace until I was twenty), it is Ceylon, not England, that now seems home. I do not pretend to account for this, or for the fact that no other place is now wholly real to me. Though London, Washington, New York, Los Angeles are exciting, amusing, invigorating, and hold all the things that interest my mind, they are no longer quite convincing. Their images are blurred around the edges; like a mirage, they will not stand up to detailed inspection. When I am in the Strand, or 42nd Street, or NASA Headquarters, or the Beverly Hills Hotel . . . my surroundings are liable to give a sudden tremor, and I see through the insubstantial fabric to the reality beneath.” He concludes, “And always it is the same: the slender palm trees leaning over the white sand, the warm sun sparkling on the waves as they break on the inshore reef, the outrigger fishing boats drawn up high on the beach. This alone is real; the rest is but a dream from which I shall presently awake.”
Clarke was born on December 16, 1917, in the small seaside town of Minehead, in Somerset, on the Bristol Channel. (His speech still carries the lilting accent characteristic of Somerset; “moon,” for example, becomes “moo-un,” with a melodic emphasis on the “moo.”) Clarke’s father was then a soldier at the front, and, to make ends meet, his mother, grandmother, and an aunt were running a boarding house, which still stands. After the war, Clarke’s father invested in a farm nearby, and when Clarke was about five the family moved from the boarding house to the farm. The first years there were a financial disaster, and this was compounded by the death of Mr. Clarke when Arthur was still in his early teens. By this time, there were three other children in the family—two brothers, Fred and Michael, and a sister, Mary. (Fred was until very recently a heating engineer, and is now the full-time director of the Rocket Publishing Company, a family enterprise that invests Clarke’s European royalties in various underwater and film operations. Michael has settled on the family farm and is running it, and Mary, a former Royal Navy Nursing Officer, is now married and at home.) Mrs. Clarke had to take over the farm herself to make a living for her four children. On a recent visit to Clarke in Colombo, I met Mrs. Clarke, who was making her first trip to Ceylon. She turned out to be a delightful ruddy, gray-haired woman somewhere in her seventies (Clarke says she simply will not tell her children how old she is, and none of them have been able to find out), who shares with the other Clarkes I have encountered a general lucidity of mind and fluidity of speech.
Even a casual reader of Clarke’s fiction cannot fail to be struck by the fact that its animals, robots, and aliens often appear to be more human than the human beings. Squeak, the first Martian discovered by the Earthlings in “The Sands of Mars,” and the lion that forms a charming friendship with a young boy in “The Lion of Comarre”—and even the squids in one of Clarke’s more recent stories, “The Shining Ones,” to say nothing of the wonderful aliens in “Childhood’s End” and the benign and melancholic ultimate intelligence, Vanamonde, in “The City and the Stars”—all have the appealing characteristics of domestic animals on a bizarre cosmic farm. Clarke is well aware of this and attributes it, in part, to the fact that he has always been more interested in things and ideas than in people. He also feels that it is attributable in part to his early life on the farm. In addition to the usual farm animals, the Clarkes were surrounded by dogs, which his mother raised professionally. Clarke recalls that at one point they had fourteen puppies in the house, which surged back and forth in waves between the rooms. “We were drowning in a sea of them,” he remembers. Clarke keeps two dogs—large German shepherds—in his house in Colombo, as well as a number of wild birds, which lodge in the interior nests that the Ceylonese put in their dining and living rooms to bring good luck. Clarke will not kill any animal that is not actively venomous, and during my visit with him I aided in gently depositing out-of-doors a considerable assortment of tropical spiders of impressive size and girth, which, Clarke insisted, wouldn’t hurt anything, and whose presence was necessary on the front lawn to preserve the delicate ecological balance. Indeed, Clarke’s first interest in science came through animals—prehistoric animals. He recalls driving in a pony trap with his father, and his father’s giving him a cigarette picture card showing a prehistoric reptile. Clarke was immediately fascinated, and began collecting the other cards in the series. Then, when he was about twelve, after a brief spell of fossil collecting, he suddenly discovered astronomy and, as he puts it, “that was it.” The next several years became a feast of reading astronomy books, copying down astronomical tables, and constructing telescopes. Clarke is a firm believer in the Freudian dictum that adult happiness lies in the fulfillment of unfulfilled childhood aspirations. As a child, he could not afford any scientific instrument that he did not make with his own hands. By way of compensation, he has now purchased a first-rate Questar telescope, which he sets up on his lawn in the evenings in order to watch the moon and planets and any satellites that happen to pass over Colombo. In addition, he owns a very advanced Zeiss microscope. He and I spent a few afternoons peering at various objects through the Zeiss—a butterfly wing, a plant stem, and a slide of a cross-section of tissue from a human brain, which had been lent to Clarke by a local surgeon. Clarke told me that while he was writing the novel “2001” he used to devote a good deal of time to contemplating the brain tissue, and that this is what had inspired him to write of astronaut David Bowman’s final transformation, “He seemed to be floating in free space, while around him stretched, in all directions, an infinite geometrical grid of dark lines or threads, along which moved tiny nodes of light—some slowly, some at dazzling speed. Once he had peered through a microscope at a cross-section of a human brain, and in its network of nerve fibers had glimpsed the same labyrinthine complexity. But that had been dead and static, whereas this transcended life itself. He knew—or believed he knew—that he was watching the operation of some gigantic mind, contemplating the universe of which he was so tiny a part.” The one childhood ambition that Clarke has never realized is to own the most elaborate possible Meccano set—the British equivalent of an Erector set. But the ambition is still with him. “In my declining years, when I am too feeble to totter out to the telescope, I could build almost anything I wanted with a set like that,” he says. [#unhandled_cartoon]
It was during Clarke’s high-school days that he encountered the idea of space travel. He came across a second-hand book called “The Conquest of Space,” by David Lasser, and persuaded his aunt to buy it for him. (A few years ago, Clarke met Lasser in the United States and had the pleasure of thanking him for starting him off on the subject.) At about the same time—in 1935—he joined the British Interplanetary Society, a group of scientific amateurs who had got together in Liverpool two years earlier to study space travel. (Admitting a teen-age boy to membership was not as remarkable then as it would be today, for, as Clarke observed recently, “no respectable scientist would touch the subject with a barge pole.” However, many of the early members of the B.I.S. have gone on to become key figures in the British rocket program and in British postwar technology in general.) Clarke had always been outstanding at mathematics in school, and when he graduated—there being no money for a college education—he took the civil-service examination for a post as a government auditor. He passed (twenty-sixth among fifteen hundred candidates), was given a job with the Board of Education in London, and hated it. For some time, he had been writing science-fiction stories, and now, in 1937, he began to publish them in a science-fiction journal called Novae Terrae, which he and a number of like-minded amateurs printed on a mimeograph machine. “Almost all British science-fiction writers of that period got started the same way,” he told me. “Home-operated mimeographs, homegrown articles and stories.” In the somewhat carefree atmosphere that appears to have prevailed in the prewar British civil service, Clarke found that he was able to get a good deal of writing done during his working day. But then the war cut short his career as an auditor. Deciding that he wanted to remain as close to astronomy as possible, he joined the R.A.F. (Actually, he did not have to enlist, since as a civil servant he was in a reserved occupation.) Largely because of his poor eyesight, he was not allowed to fly; instead, he was sent into a new and top-secret project called R.D.F., which was concerned with what later became known as radar.
Clarke’s going into radar was in many ways a turning point in his life. In the first place, it was his introductory encounter with the actual instruments of advanced technology; in the second place, it was his introductory encounter with professional scientists, as opposed to science-fiction enthusiasts and amateur rocket buffs. He was sent to Yatesbury, a bleak place on the moors near Stonehenge, where he went through a broad course in electronics and then a specialized course in radar itself. After taking this course, he was made an instructor—a job that he found immensely pleasant, since he enjoys teaching. Clarke spent a year or so at No. 9 Radio School, the radar school, and, having a good deal of spare time, he taught himself advanced mathematics and electronics. Out of this experience, he wrote his first technical paper, on the theory of Fourier analysis as applied to television wave forms, and it was published in Electronic Engineering. After working for a while on early-warning radar systems—so crucial in the air war over England—he was put to work on the installation of the first Ground Controlled Approach landing system, a radar device developed by Luis Alvarez, who is now at the University of California at Berkeley and is the most recent Nobel Prize winner in physics. Alvarez showed how radar beams, which had been used to locate planes, could also be employed to guide them down a glide path to safe landings in any weather. It is a basic system still in use at many airports. Clarke has always believed strongly that no part of a writer’s experience should go to waste, so he used this experience to write “Glide Path,” his only non-science-fiction novel, and certainly the only novel ever written about radar. It is dedicated to Alvarez.
By 1945, Clarke was a flight lieutenant stationed a few miles from Stratford-Upon-Avon and teaching airmen to maintain the new G.C.A. system. He was also writing and selling science-fiction stories in his spare time. It was during this period that he got his idea for a communications satellite. He outlined his conception of what has become one of the most important—and perhaps the most commercially profitable—inventions of the space age in a paper called “Extraterrestrial Relays,” for which he was paid forty dollars by the British technical journal Wireless World. Clarke has summed up this episode in an essay called, somewhat plaintively, “A Short Pre-History of Comsats; or, How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time.”
Clarke has been in the business of scientific and technological prophecy for over thirty years now, and from this experience he has evolved a set of laws and principles. There are three basic Clarke Laws. (He once remarked that if three laws were enough for Newton they were enough for him.) The First Clarke Law states, “If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.” Clarke has confirmed this law by counting up the elderly but distinguished prewar astronomers who “proved,” by portentous calculations, that space flight was technologically impossible. The Second Clarke Law was originally a simple sentence in his book “Profiles of the Future” but was promoted to a law by the translator of the French edition. It states, “The only way to find the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.” The Third, and most recently formulated, Clarke Law, which he made use of in writing the enigmatic ending of “2001,” states, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In addition to the laws, there are several empirical principles, one of which Clarke feels is fully applicable to his 1945 Wireless World article on the communications satellite; namely, that in making scientific prophecies the tendency is to be optimistic in the short range and pessimistic in the long. At the time that Clarke wrote his Wireless World article, the V-2s had already fallen on London, so it was well known that high-altitude rockets were a practical possibility. Clarke felt that they would be used as high-altitude research probes, and in 1944 he predicted that this would take place within a decade, which was somewhat optimistic. However, the communications satellite, he felt, would not come into existence for half a century or more, which was pessimistic, since Syncom 3, the first synchronous TV satellite, was launched on August 19, 1964. In his “Pre-History,” Clarke has an interesting aside concerning that launching. He writes:
In 1963, Clarke received the Stuart Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute for his conception of the communications satellite. He keeps a picture of the medal, which is awarded for advances in communications, on the wall of his study in Colombo. The original, a rather valuable chunk of gold, is stored in his bank.
Clarke’s wartime experience convinced him that, whatever else, he was not going back into civil service. For one thing, he was just beginning to sell science-fiction stories to American magazines—in particular, to Astounding Stories. For another, he wanted to go to college and follow up his scientific training. He managed to get a financial grant and, early in 1946, entered King’s College, London, from which he took, with First Class Honours, a B.Sc. degree in pure and applied mathematics and physics. (In at least one case, the educational process was reciprocal. Clarke introduced one of his professors, George C. McVittie, now of the University of Illinois and a well-known cosmologist, to the theory of rocketry.) While in college, Clarke completed his first published novel, “The Prelude to Space,” which he wrote during a summer vacation. His other extracurricular activities included the revitalization of the British Interplanetary Society, which had more or less dwindled away during the war. In 1946, he became its chairman, and soon thereafter managed to recruit one of its more remarkable members—George Bernard Shaw. This came about soon after Shaw read a paper of Clarke’s entitled “The Challenge of the Spaceship,” which Clarke had sent him just after—as it happened—Shaw’s neighbor, Geoffrey de Havilland, had been killed during a test flight in which he was trying to fly faster than the speed of sound for the first time. On January 25, 1947, on one of his famous pink postcards, Shaw wrote to Clarke, “Many thanks for the very interesting lecture to the B.I.S. How does one become a member, or at least subscribe to the Journal? When de Havilland perished here the other day it seemed clear to me that he must have reached the speed at which the air resistance balanced the engine power and brought him to a standstill. Then he accelerated, and found out what happens when an irresistible force encounters an immovable obstacle. Nobody has as yet dealt with this obvious limit to aeronautic speed as far as I have read. G.B.S.” Fortunately, Shaw was a better playwright than a physicist, and in his reply Clarke pointed out, as tactfully as possible, some of the Shavian misconceptions of the dynamics of flight, adding that, in any case, his lecture had been concerned with space flight, which takes place above the atmosphere. Shaw responded with a detailed two-page letter and then became a member of the B.I.S., remaining one for the rest of his life.
Clarke took his undergraduate degree in two years—his R.A.F. training having given him a considerable head start—and graduated in 1948. Having done very well as a student, he was offered an additional year in which to study advanced mathematics and astronomy. Within a few months, he had become thoroughly disenchanted with the interminable minutiae of the latter. “Luckily, before I perished of boredom, the dean of the college wrote to me to say there was a job opening for me,” Clarke said recently. This turned out to be the assistant-editorship of Science Abstracts, a journal put out by the Institution of Electrical Engineers, which performed the useful function of abstracting technical papers on physics from every scientific journal in the world. By 1948, there was a tremendous accumulation of papers, based on wartime work, which was just being published in the open literature. “I tore into this huge mountain of arrears,” Clarke told me. “We had about a hundred abstracters, some of them multilinguists who would tackle anything, in any language, on any subject, whether they knew anything about it or not. We were rather at their mercy.” Clarke did a good deal of abstracting himself, and even managed to get astronautics into the journal as a legitimate scientific subject. One of the most difficult jobs was indexing new subjects in physics, because, as often as not, as soon as these appeared they would also disappear, because some underlying experiment or theory was wrong. “Sometimes my objectivity as an abstracter was severely strained,” Clarke recently recalled. “I can remember a paper from an Indian physics journal proving that no rocket could ever travel faster than the velocity of sound in the metal of which it was composed—complete nonsense, of course, which would put an end to any thought of space travel. I wonder what I indexed it under. And it would be interesting to know what that particular scientist is doing now. In any case, the job was ideal training for a budding science-fiction writer.” During the nearly two years that Clarke remained on the staff of the journal, he was writing in his spare time, and when his income as a writer got to be larger than his income as an editor he decided to quit and become a full-time free lance. His first nonfiction book, “Interplanetary Flight,” was followed, in 1951, by “The Exploration of Space,” which was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club.
It was at about this time that Clarke discovered skin diving. Just after the war, British science-fiction writers and editors used to gather in a London pub off Fleet Street called the White Horse. (The White Horse has become the White Hart in Clarke’s collection of fantasy stories called “Tales from the ‘White Hart.’ ”) The meetings came to be regular Thursday-night affairs, and on one rainy Thursday night in 1950 Mike Wilson, who was then in his late teens—too young to be in a pub—wandered in by accident, looking for shelter from the weather. Wilson had been at sea in the Merchant Marine and was at the time working as a wine waiter in a London hotel. He was a keen science-fiction fan, and it was soon evident that he had come to the right place. He had done some skin diving in the Orient, and he told Clarke about it. Clarke was immediately seized by the idea, and he was soon taking skin-diving lessons in various London swimming pools, and diving with a rented aqualung in the English Channel. Shortly thereafter, on the bounty from the Book-of-the-Month Club, Clarke made his first trip to New York, and, at Abercrombie & Fitch, bought his first aqualung, which he put to use in the Weeki Wachee Springs, near Clearwater, Florida. (While in Florida, he also got married to a local girl after a courtship of a few days. The marriage was not a very happy one and ended in divorce some years later.) By 1954, Clarke’s skin diving had become his major interest. “It was a hobby that got out of hand,” he has said. In support of his obsession, he arranged with Harper & Row to do a book on the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral formation, which lies off the northeast coast of Australia. Mike Wilson was sent ahead to reconnoitre the terrain. (He filled in his time by working as a professional pearl diver, out of Darwin.) Clarke followed on the S.S. Himalaya, an elderly P. & O. liner, which sailed from London through the Suez Canal to Aden, and then made a stop in Colombo. Clarke had an afternoon in Colombo and—again by one of those coincidences that seem to have characterized his life (he once remarked that “nothing bad can ever happen to a writer”)—met the leading diver and underwater naturalist on the island, Rodney Jonklaas, a descendant of one of the original Dutch colonial settlers. It was Jonklaas who told Clarke about the potentialities for underwater exploration around Ceylon, and, as Clarke has said, “I decided that if I survived the Great Barrier Reef I would come back and do a book on Ceylon.” Just before Christmas of 1954, the Himalaya arrived in Sydney, and Clarke spent the next year on the Great Barrier Reef, diving and photographing underwater life. This resulted in his first book on the sea, “The Coast of Coral.”
Wilson had also stopped off in Ceylon on his way to Australia, and, like Clarke, had been attracted to the place. So, in 1956, they decided to move there. At first, they lived in a small place in a Colombo suburb near the water—just the two of them and a cook named Carolis. (“Carolis” is presumably a Latinized version of “Charles.” Such Latinized names among the Ceylonese are a legacy from the Portuguese occupation.) In time, Wilson married one of the most beautiful Ceylonese girls on the island, Elizabeth Perera, and they—and Clarke—moved into a house in the fashionable quarter of Colombo which was owned by Elizabeth’s parents. The Wilsons now have three children and have moved into a house nearby; Clarke still rents the Perera house. Carolis is still part of the Clarke retinue. Though dour of countenance, he is a kindly man, the father of somewhere between nine and thirteen children—Clarke has lost count—and an expert in making Ceylonese curry, which is likely to incinerate the palate of any unsuspecting Westerner. In addition to Carolis, Clarke maintains a staff of two houseboys, a secretary with an impenetrable Tamil name that has been shortened to Thambi, and a Ceylonese boatman named Martin, who has been with Clarke and Wilson since the beginning, and who spends his time taking care of a garageful of aqualungs, flippers, air compressors, spears, masks, snorkels, and other such gear. Two more current residents are Hector Ekanayake, a Sinhalese diver and the former welterweight boxing champion of Ceylon, and Hector’s fiancée. Clarke does not speak Sinhalese, so the house reverberates with a constant buzz of multilingual conversations that are all but unintelligible over the din of aqualung compressors and the general hammering that goes with the maintenance of the diving equipment.
Clarke’s only listing in the Colombo telephone directory is under “Clarke-Wilson Associates,” the outfit that he and Wilson founded to engage in underwater exploration. Although Clarke and Wilson are still close friends, Clarke-Wilson Associates is not currently functioning as such. Indeed, Wilson has entered what Clarke refers to as “his guru, or prophet, phase.” He has taken to retreating to the hills near Kandy and meditating. The first time I met him at Clarke’s, he was dressed in a sort of white prophet’s outfit, and his close-cropped hair and long, thin face gave him a Svengali appearance. He was wearing a golden necklace with a rectangular slab attached to it, which Clarke later identified as a promotional ornament that M-G-M was offering to the hippie crowd in connection with “2001.”
In the late nineteen-fifties and the early sixties, Clarke’s life settled down to a pleasant routine of underwater exploration around Ceylon, writing (he produced, among other things, the novel “The Deep Range,” about the farming and ranching of the plants and animals in the sea in the future), and making three-month lecture tours in the West. In March, 1961, a discovery that Wi1son made while diving off the Great Basses Reef changed their lives for the next few years. Wilson and two young boys had gone to the reef to make a film about the boys’ discovery of diving and underwater swimming. Clarke, who had remained in Colombo, was surprised to see the three of them come back furtively carrying a tin trunk. Wilson, carefully closing the door to Clarke’s office, opened the trunk, revealing two perfectly preserved miniature brass cannons, along with a heavy, stonelike lump that, on careful inspection, turned out to be a solid mass of silver coins, fused together by long immersion in seawater. The three swimmers had discovered a sunken treasure ship. Most of the coins were in prime condition and bore a Muslim date whose Christian equivalent was 1702. So far, Clarke and Wilson have not been able to establish the exact circumstances of their wreck’s final voyage—or, indeed, to determine whether she was a private merchant ship or perhaps a treasury ship of the Dutch East India Company. Because of weather conditions, it is possible to dive in the Great Basses Reef only in the early spring, so they had to wait at least until the next season before resuming the salvage. By February, 1962, they had bought a sizable boat and a large quantity of salvage equipment. Then, at the end of February, while Clarke was in downtown Colombo buying equipment for the boat, he hit his head a sickening blow against one of the low doorway arches that are common in the Colombo shops. It was not until a few days later, when he was carried, paralyzed and semi-conscious, to a private nursing home, that he learned he had severely injured his spine. At the end of six weeks in the nursing home, Clarke was taken home, where, after some months, he was able to be propped up on the front lawn and begin to write again. During this period, at the rate of a couple of pages a day, he wrote “Dolphin Island,” a novel about the sea. It was also at this time that he received the news that he had been awarded the 1961 Kalinga Prize, given by UNESCO for excellence in science writing. (It had previously been awarded to such men as Bertrand Russell and Julian Huxley.) This was an immense lift to Clarke’s morale and, since the prize carried a cash award of a thousand pounds, a lift to his finances as well. In fact, by 1963 he felt both well enough and rich enough to make a full-scale attempt to salvage the treasure ship. His optimism almost cost him his life. He was so weak from his accident that he had to have his aqualung strapped on for him and then had to be pushed into the sea. Underwater, he was caught up by a tidal current that he lacked the strength to swim against, and he was very nearly dead when he made it back to safety. Despite the near loss of its leader, the expedition was successful in salvaging a good deal more silver coin; one of the lumps—a small fraction of the find—was given to the Smithsonian Institution, which has valued it at twenty-five hundred dollars. Clarke is sure that a great deal more silver is still buried with the wreck, but he has not taken the trouble to find out. After his 1963 expedition, he was too exhausted emotionally and physically to organize another one, and furthermore, early in 1964, shortly after writing “The Treasure of the Great Reef,” which describes the expedition, he received, out of the blue, a letter from Stanley Kubrick that was the genesis of “2001.”
Clarke is especially fond of Robert Bridges’ assertion in “The Testament of Beauty” that life consists of the “masterful administration of the unforeseen.” Thus, when he received Kubrick’s letter saying that Kubrick intended to do a film on space and inquiring whether Clarke had any ideas along those lines, he responded immediately and enthusiastically. Clarke had seen Kubrick’s “Lolita” and admired it greatly, but had never met him. Kubrick, for his part, having started to soak up space lore, found that Clarke’s name was at the end of every avenue of inquiry. As it happened, Clarke at about this time was scheduled to go to New York to work on a Time-Life book called “Man and Space,” so he made arrangements to see Kubrick, who was then living in the city. In New York, Clarke installed himself in the Hotel Chelsea, which is his headquarters whenever he is here. He and Kubrick first met for lunch at Trader Vic’s, where they talked for several hours. In the days that followed, Clarke recalls, “I was working at Time-Life during the day and moonlighting with Stanley in the evenings, and as the Time-Life job phased out Stanley phased in. We talked for weeks and weeks—sometimes for ten hours at a time—and wandered all over New York. We went to the Guggenheim and to Central Park, and even to the World’s Fair. We considered and discarded literally hundreds of ideas, which I shall be mining for short stories for years to come. When you read them, you won’t have the slightest suspicion that they were connected with ‘2001.’ ” In time, the two men settled on a documentary-like depiction of planetary exploration, to which Kubrick gave the half-serious title “How the Solar System Was Won.” Kubrick then suggested that they write a novel on which they could base the eventual screenplay. “That way, Stanley thought, we would generate more ideas, and give the project more body and depth,” Clarke explains. Clarke retired to the Hotel Chelsea with an electric typewriter, and for the next several months he and Kubrick produced a couple of thousand words a day. He found this period an extremely happy one, and he memorialized it in a little parody of “Kubla Khan”:
By 1965, “How the Solar System Was Won” had transformed itself into the enormously ambitious theme of a space odyssey. Almost from the beginning of his study of space literature, Clarke has been struck by the similarities, aesthetic and philosophical, between space voyages and the ancient voyages of the Greeks. He is very much concerned about the fact that there are no geographical frontiers left on the earth to drain off our exploratory energy. He feels that manned space flight, apart from whatever scientific and technological results it will have, provides the necessary new frontier. Five years before Clarke began working on “2001,” he published a collection of essays entitled “The Challenge of the Spaceship,” in which, at the end, he pays a tribute to Homer:
While they were working on the film, Clarke once remarked to Kubrick, “If this film can be completely understood, then we will have failed.” What he meant was that he and Kubrick were trying to evoke an awareness of an intelligence infinitely old and infinitely different from anything that we can now know or imagine. By definition, such an intelligence could not be understood by us, and its workings, by Clarke’s Third Law, would be to us indistinguishable from magic. Whether or not “2001” has been completely understood, Clarke is delighted with it, and he is fond of quoting a critic who remarked that visually it was so beautiful that “one could take any frame, blow it up, and hang it on the wall.”
When in residence in Colombo, Clarke begins his day promptly at seven o’clock with the serving of the morning tea—needless to say, Ceylonese tea. His at-home attire consists of a sarong—the local costume—and sandals. (At the time of my visit, he was favoring a snappy blue number that bore a family resemblance to his living-room curtains.) Thus attired, Clarke transits from his bedroom through Thambi’s office and into what he calls his “ego chamber.” This is where he works, and it is also a sort of living museum of Clarke memorabilia. It contains the Zeiss microscope; a very elaborate German shortwave radio; two tape recorders, which Clarke uses for dictation; an electric typewriter; a wall of bookshelves filled entirely with Clarke’s own works, in all editions (about three hundred of them) and all languages. On the other walls are assorted documents and pictures, including the picture of the Stuart Ballantine Medal; a copy of Clarke’s 1945 paper on communications satellites, which Mike Wilson had framed and gave to him; several pictures of Clarke with various figures of the space age, including Wernher von Braun and the Russian cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov; a picture of Clarke wearing, for some reason, an American Indian war bonnet, and another of him shaking hands with U Thant; a framed letter from then Senator Lyndon B. Johnson thanking Clarke for a book, and a similar one from Lady Bird Johnson inviting him to dinner at the White House with the Apollo 8 astronauts. (The astronauts are all Clarke fans, and some of them have told him that their interest in space was originally kindled by his books. Recently, Clarke learned that William Anders, on the Apollo 8 flight, had for a fleeting moment been tempted to report back to earth that he had seen a black rectangular slab on the moon’s surface.) Clarke told me that when the ego chamber is fully decorated the walls will reflect a luminous white ray of pure and undiluted ego—a ray of such intensity that any transient droplet of self-doubt that happens by will be consumed as if by a laser beam.
At seven-twenty, Clarke tunes in to the B.B.C. shortwave reading of editorials from the British dailies, and at seven-thirty he gets the B.B.C. news. He also keeps in touch with people in New York and London by telephone, but, having overheard several of these conversations, which are carried out with great shouts of “Yes, I hear you perfectly!” followed by “What did you say?,” I should imagine that they leave something to be desired. At about eight o’clock, Carolis announces breakfast, which is served on a long table in the dining room, and at which Clarke is joined by Hector, Hector’s fiancée, and any houseguests who may be around. Clarke then retires into the ego chamber, where he dictates letters or writes until ten, when the postman arrives on his bicycle, to the accompaniment of a great cacophony of Clarkean and neighborhood dogs. The mail is then sorted out and read, and Clarke dictates any urgent replies into a tape recorder, to be transcribed later by Thambi. (Clarke is bombarded with fan letters from all over the world, and he has composed a printed form letter for use when he is out of Ceylon and cannot reply personally.) Clarke’s afternoons are frequently devoted to reading. In the main, he reads science fiction or books on science. He subscribes to a vast array of popular and technical journals, including the National Geographic; Scientific American; the journals of the British Interplanetary Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, the British Astronomical Association, and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics; Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which he has just joined; the New Scientist; Sky & Telescope; Sea Frontiers, which is an underwater journal; Time; Newsweek; and assorted British Sunday papers. The first science fiction that Clarke ever read—in 1929—appeared in an early edition of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. In fact, Gernsback, a Luxembourg-born prophetic genius who spent most of his life in the United States, and died here a year or so ago, coined the term “science fiction.” In 1911, he wrote an all but unreadable novel called “Ralph 124C 41+,” in which he forecast almost everything that has happened in modern technology, including radar. The science-fiction writer’s equivalent of the Oscar is called the Hugo, and Clarke won it in 1956 for a short story called “The Star.” Clarke, who greatly admired Gernsback, dedicated his book “Profiles of the Future” to “Hugo Gernsback, who thought of everything.” After Amazing Stories, Clarke discovered H. G. Wells, especially “The Time Machine,” which he regards as Wells’ masterpiece. Then, at about fourteen, he read Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Men,” an extraordinary document that covers the next two billion years of human evolution, dealing with all the races of man and with all the planets of the solar system. “The book transformed my life,” Clarke says.
Science fiction, like science, runs in fads. The first fad was for moon voyages. (“Somnium”—“The Dream”—by the great seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler, was perhaps the first science-fiction story in the modern sense, and it concerned a moon voyage.) In the early days, these stories dealt largely with elderly professors and their beautiful daughters, who made rockets in their back yards and went off to visit our ancient satellite. “They had plots that we would find laughable today,” Clarke has remarked. “Many of the things that excited us then are now reality, and I often wonder if youngsters now discovering science fiction for the first time get the same charge out of it that we did then.” I once asked Clarke if modern science had not caught up with, and even surpassed, the imagination of science-fiction writers. He said that this was a common fallacy. “You can’t have science fiction until you have some science,” he went on. “It wasn’t until the astronomical discoveries of the seventeenth century, for example, that one could write at all about travel to the planets. The more the frontier of science expands, the more scope there is for scientific speculation. Certain themes just drop out—like the conquest of the air, which so concerned the science-fiction writers early in this century. We simply move on to more mature and more advanced themes. As long as there is science, there will be science fiction.”
Before visiting Ceylon, I did a certain amount of reading about the island—especially in a wonderful, crusty book called “Ceylon: Pearl of the East,” by a retired tea planter, Harry Williams. Mr. Williams gives a particularly enticing description of Adam’s Peak and the pleasures of climbing it. However, other writers have noted that there is a good season and a bad season for the climb; during the bad season, apparently, the upper part of the mountain is largely inhabited by leopards and monkeys. As it happened, I was in Ceylon during the good season (the thought kept occurring to me that although I knew that it was the good season, how could I be sure that the leopards knew?), and I asked Clarke if he wanted to climb Adam’s Peak with me. He said that he thought it a splendid idea, and that while his old spinal injury might prevent him from getting all the way to the top, he wanted to go as far as he could; indeed, Hector would want to come along, too. We made some inquiries and discovered that the approved method for doing the climb is to leave Colombo at about eight in the evening, drive about four hours to the base of the mountain, and then begin climbing about midnight, when it is cool, arriving at the summit just before sunrise. Clarke made arrangements with a local taxi company for a driver and a car and changed from his sarong into a pair of relatively heavy long pants, a couple of sweaters, and a windbreaker, which made him look vaguely like Robert Morley. The taxi was late, and when it arrived, Hector, knowing the condition of the upcountry roads, insisted on examining its tires, which he pronounced unfit. Clarke then commandeered a second taxi—a shiny new Peugeot with impeccable tires—into which we bundled ourselves, along with an elaborate picnic that had been prepared by Hector’s fiancée. The entire Clarkean staff stood by to wish us well, and we drove off into the warm, clear night. We passed through the lowland paddy fields and rubber plantations and moved up into the highland foothills, where the countryside changes from rubber to tea. After about four hours of driving, we caught our first glimpse of the mountains, and while I have seen a good many mountains, the sight of Adam’s Peak at night is one of the most extraordinary I have ever encountered. The trail that hundreds of pilgrims take from the tiny town of Maskeliya to the summit is a four-mile illuminated flight of steps reaching three thousand feet into the air. At night, it gives the impression of some sort of fairyland staircase that has disappeared into the sky, leaving a trail of lights behind. Our driver stopped in Maskeliya, and we proceeded on foot through the dimly illuminated shrublands. I have a reasonably flammable imagination and began to see leopards emerging from every tree. Clarke said that, considering the hundreds of pilgrims the leopards had to choose from, we would feel pretty foolish at being the meal selected. This point of view carried a certain weight with me until I began to be aware that we were more or less alone on the trail. Later, we learned that most people climb halfway up the mountain on one day, sleep most of the night in one of the rest houses along the way, and then start the final climb just before dawn. After what seemed like a year of climbing stone steps—literally thousands of them—I found that I had pulled ahead of Clarke and Hector. A gong sounded from the Buddhist temple at the summit, and I forged ahead. At the top, I found myself in a large crowd of pilgrims standing in line to see the imprint of the foot of Buddha (or Adam) on the stone in the small shrine at the very summit. It was now about five in the morning, and bitterly cold. I was huddling in a corner of the temple with a large group of freezing pilgrims when Clarke and Hector hove into sight. Clarke had suffered a few bad muscle cramps on the way up, but had made it to the top not too much the worse for wear. Just before sunrise, the Buddhist priests who serve the temple began chanting mantras and playing drums and trumpets, as if to bring the sun into the world by an act of will. It came up over a distant mountain range and illuminated in rosy pastels the whole of the island, which lay spread out beneath us. Sometime soon after sunrise, an almost incredible optical phenomenon took place—one for which the mountain is celebrated. Suddenly, a black triangular shadow appeared in the sky as if by magic—the mountain casts a shadow on the haze, and since the haze is all but transparent, one has the impression that the shadow has emerged from nowhere. At the appearance of the shadow, the priests chanted, the trumpets sounded, and the drums rolled, after which we and the pilgrims started the long trip down. On the way, we met people coming up, and when they saw us they would sing a song, which Hector said was a blessing on all those descending, while the pilgrims with us responded with a song of blessing on those who were climbing to worship at the shrine. Though Ceylon does not have the misery and starvation of its neighbor India, it is a poor country by Western standards. For the pilgrims, climbing Adam’s Peak is a religious experience that eases the burden of their daily lives, and a sense of their exhilaration was in their song.
Toward the end of my visit to Ceylon, Clarke suggested that I come with him to inspect the future headquarters of the Far Eastern branch of the Rocket Publishing Company, the Clarke family enterprise that invests Clarke’s European royalties. To get to the future branch office required a drive of several hours along the south coast of the island, past the ancient port of Galle, which some scholars think may be the Tarshish of the Bible, and into a tiny seaside fishing village well off the main road. (On the way, Clarke had lapsed into an uncharacteristic total silence, and just before we got to the village he announced that he had worked out the details of a short story involving a man who goes to a fortune teller and is told that he is going to get killed by a prehistoric reptile—a prophecy that comes true a few days later when he visits the American Museum of Natural History and a dinosaur skeleton falls on him.) The future headquarters turned out to be a rather ancient and neglected barn, built by a Dutch settler some two hundred years ago. Clarke hopes to renovate it and use it as a weekend house or as a base for underwater exploration. At present, it is largely inhabited by local fauna, including several village cows. Indeed, as Clarke made his way across the future front lawn he flushed a sizable water monitor, which, from stem to stern, was about four feet long. Hitching up his sarong, he lit out after it, and was giving it a reasonably strong chase until he stepped into a nettle patch. Limping slightly, he then led me to the beach, which turned out to be as beautiful a tropical beach as it is possible to imagine. The sand was as fine as sugar, and palm trees fringed the shore. Just beyond a coral reef, several catamarans were lazily sliding out to sea, while a Ceylonese fisherman, perched on a post, was casting his line into the surf. Clarke suggested a walk to the top of a nearby hill, from which we could see the Indian Ocean on almost every side. He said that there was no land between that part of the island and Antarctica, five thousand miles due south. He then revealed that it was here that he planned to build a house and retire someday. As we were walking back down the hill, Clarke said, “You know, the celestial equator is almost directly overhead. This means that all the communications satellites, in their twenty-four-hour orbits, will be right up there, twenty-two thousand miles above my head. I found out quite recently that when a synchronous satellite runs out of its propellant—which keeps it over the right spot on earth—it drifts along this equatorial orbit to two low spots in the earth’s gravitational field. One of those low spots is over the Galapagos, and the other one, which is slightly lower, is over Ceylon. So in my old age, if I have a powerful enough telescope, I will be able to look straight up and see some other retired products of the space age—the old and decrepit synchronous satellites sitting almost vertically above me.” He added, as we reached the car, “I think there is a kind of piquant symbolism about this. Don’t you?” ♦
