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Famed Author Sir Arthur C. Clarke: 1917-2008

The legendary futurist who first proposed orbiting satellites be used as telecommunications relays passed away earlier today in a hospital in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He was 90 years old. Sir Arthur C. Clarke will remain a legend to millions who came to know of his farsighted ideas through his many works of fiction, nonfiction, and even movies -- such as 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Sir Arthur was kind enough to grant us a long-distance interview last October as part of our coverage of the 50th anniversary of the launch of the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik I (please see "Remembering Sputnik: Sir Arthur C. Clarke").

His last in-person interview may well be the one conducted by our correspondent Saswato R. Das at his bedside in the Apollo Hospital in Colombo in January (an account of which will be published in our pages online tomorrow). An audio copy of this final interview is available now on Spectrum Radio, "Sir Arthur C. Clarke's Final Interview".

We wrote this of him in October:

To some readers, an introduction to Sir Arthur C. Clarke may be necessary. To others, no introduction will suffice.... Although he is more revered for his role as an author, Clarke has well deserved the title of futurist for his groundbreaking thinking on space exploration. In October 1945, he published a paper in the magazine Wireless World called â''Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?â'' In it, he predicted that geostationary satellites would soon become the basis of global communications. And in his 1979 novel, The Fountains of Paradise, he describes a space elevator that would ferry passengers and cargo to a docked space station, a concept that is currently undergoing its first primitive implementations.

Clarke was born in 1917 in Minehead, England, where he developed an early interest in science and science fiction, from reading pulp magazines and comics imported from America in the kit of sailors on shore leave. After secondary school, where he excelled in math, he found himself unable to afford a university education and took a position as an auditor in the pensions section of the Board of Education.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Clarke served in the Royal Air Force as a radar specialist and was involved in the early-warning system that contributed to the RAF's success in the Battle of Britain. After the war, he earned a first-class degree in mathematics and physics at King's College, London. He then got involved with the nascent British Interplanetary Society, serving as its chairman from 1947 to 1950.

In 1948, Clarke published his first book of short stories, The Sentinel, which includes a story by that name that eventually became the basis of his most well-known effort, the screenplay to the 1968 Stanley Kubrick movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which has inspired generations.

Over the years, his opus of over 100 books included some of the most influential works of speculative fiction and nonfiction. He won numerous awards for his famous novels, such as Prelude to Space (1951), Childhood's End (1953), Earthlight (1955), The Deep Range (1957), A Fall of Moondust (1961), Glide Path (1963), The Nine Billion Names of God (1967), and Rendezvous With Rama (1973). His nonfiction books and essays, meanwhile, influenced science, particularly astronautics. They include Interplanetary Flight: An Introduction to Astronautics (Temple Press, 1950), The Exploration of Space (Harper, 1951), The Making of a Moon: The Story of the Earth Satellite Program (Harper, 1957), Voices from the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age (Harper & Row, 1965), The Promise of Space (Harper & Row, 1968), and The Lost Worlds of 2001 (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972).

In 1953, Clarke married Marilyn Mayfield, a 22-year-old American with a young son, but they separated after six months, although their divorce was not finalized until 1964.

In 1956, Clarke moved to the Indian Ocean island of Ceylon, destined to become the nation of Sri Lanka. As Das informed us, he was first attracted to the locale by its beautiful offshore waters, where he could practice one of his favorite avocations, scuba diving.

The next year, he attended an October meeting of the International Astronautical Federation in Barcelona, Spain, where word of the successful launch of Sputnik was relayed to him by reporters who immediately wanted to learn the well-known author's reaction to the momentous news. He was thrilled by it.

"While manned spaceflight and Moon landings were widely speculated about, many still harbored doubts about an American lead in space," he told Das last year. "One delegate, noticing that there were 23 American and five Soviet papers at the Congress, remarked that while the Americans talked a lot about spaceflight, the Russians just went ahead and did it!"

In 1964, he met famed film director Stanley Kubrick, who was interested in working with him on a screenplay. What emerged formed the basis of a movie widely regarded as the greatest sci-fi effort ever to reach the screen, known simply since its release as 2001.

He later recounted that one of his signature touches to the film occurred in the memorable scene in which the mad computer HAL is disconnected from its memory core by the lone astronaut left from its deep-space murder spree. He suggested to Kubrick that HAL be reduced to singing a song called "Daisy Bell," as its electronic "life" ebbed slowly away. His inspiration came from the work of the man who had taken Clarke's idea of geostationary communications satellites and turned it into reality by creating the Echo and Telstar vehicles of the early 19560s, John Pierce of AT&T Bell Labs. Clarke had visited Pierce in 1962 at his lab for a demonstration of a colleague's new computer speech synthesizer, which used a vocoder to sing the very same song.

In the print version of his January interview with Clarke, Das notes that he considered his idea for communication satellites to be his "most important contribution." But in his next breath, he added, "And maybe in a generation or so the space elevator will be considered equally important." He came up with the notion of using a giant, space-tethered elevator to reach orbit for use in one of his novels. (Please see Spectrum's August 2005 cover story, "A Hoist to the Heavens" for more on the concept and its earliest prototypes under development.)

He told Das from his hospital bed: "Iâ''m often asked when do I think the space elevator will be built. My answer is about ten years after everyone stops laughing. Maybe 20 years. But I am pretty sure that the space elevator is an important element in future space travel."

While he was waiting to speak with Clarke in the hospital, Das observed that visitors and medical staff who entered his private room removed their shoes prior to entering and then put them on again after leaving. He interpreted the behavior as a sign of veneration on the part of those who were attending him. "In Sri Lanka, almost everyone knows who Clarke is," Das writes. "I took the shoe removal to be a mark of veneration -- Sri Lanka has a long Buddhist tradition, and you take off your shoes before you enter a Buddhist shrine."

When he did get his first audience with the author, Das observed that he "looked pale and in some pain, but he seemed to be in fine humor, except every so often he would have to pause for breath."

What did they talk about first? "We chatted about 'the design faults of the human body'," Das writes.

That shortness of breath, stemming from an on-and-off again battle against post-polio syndrome, which he had waged for nearly five decades, finally ebbed away at the vitality of the man and took his very human life at 1:30 am (local time in Sri Lanka) on 19 March 2008, according to a report from the Associated Press.

In our earlier interview with him from October, Clarke told Das that, if he were granted three wishes for the future of technology, they would be these: "A method to generate limitless quantities of clean energy. [An] affordable and reliable means of space transport. [And] eliminating the design faults in the human body."

To commemorate the legacy of such a noteworthy life, we should re-commit our efforts to making these farsighted ideas come true. It seems the least we can do in return.