Photo: Amy Marash, (in public domain)
'His collaboration with Stanley Kubrick – the film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey – defined cinematic SF.'

Science fiction author Philip Purser-Hallard pays tribute to Arthur C Clarke, who died on March 19

‘…George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)

‘Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.’

[Arthur C Clarke, ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’]

Sir Arthur C Clarke, who died on 19 March, had many claims to greatness.

His novels and short stories made his name synonymous, for generations of readers, with science fiction (SF) in book form.

His collaboration with Stanley Kubrick – the film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey – defined cinematic SF, while his television series, Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World, made him a household face as well as name.

As a futurologist, he predicted many of the scientific advances which came about during his 90 years of life – including, most famously, communications satellites.

Items named after him include two separate awards (the Arthur C Clarke Award for SF novelists and the Sir Arthur Clarke Award for contributions to the British space programme), the asteroid 4923 Clarke and a dinosaur, Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei.

Though others have undoubtedly been better writers, only the pre-eminence of HG Wells prevents Clarke from being the greatest British SF author of all time.

Names of God

Like many literate children of my (and indeed my parents’) generation, I nourished my adolescent brain with a constant diet of Clarke.

My thinking on many topics – technology, space exploration, human evolution – owes more to him than I can calculate. He also helped to shape my view of God.

Clarke was an engineer, and his science fiction always emphasises science. He gives short shrift to organised religion, especially western monotheism. In Childhood’s End and The Fountains of Paradise, it’s first contact with aliens which deals the killing blow to humanity’s obsession with regulating the divine.

Nonetheless, his work is suffused with openly spiritual awe at the wonder of the universe, and continually invokes a creator – an ever-present artist working on disparate scales, the swirling of cream in coffee mirroring the arms of a spiral galaxy.

Clarke’s final solo novel, 3001: the Final Odyssey, attempts to resolve this tension by suggesting that humanity’s search for the divine (called by the neutral name ‘Deus’) is real and valid, but has become corrupted.

In the Odyssey quartet and elsewhere, this deity uses a hierarchy of sub-creators, aliens with the technology to remake themselves, and others (usually us) in their image. Humanity’s duty is to fulfil our potential in turn, by taking our place amongst this pantheon.

This worldview found little sympathy from CS Lewis, when Clarke – then chairman of the British Interplanetary Society – met and argued with him in the 1950s.

Lewis, whose SF cautioned against spreading humanity’s sinful nature to other worlds, apparently concluded: ‘I’m sure you’re all very wicked people – but how dull it would be if everyone was good.’

Against the Fall of Night

From one point of view, Clarke’s death is sad, but hardly untimely. His professional writing career spanned a staggering 62 years, from the publication of his short story ‘Loophole’ in the April 1946 edition of Astounding Science Fiction, to the appearance late in 2007 of Firstborn, a novel co-authored with Stephen Baxter. He was elderly when he presented Mysterious World in 1980, and was reliant on a wheelchair during his final two decades.

In another sense, though, the nonagenarian Clarke died too early. He should have lived to see more of this future which he helped to midwife. His very longevity convinced many of his readers that he’d be around forever – after living to see 2001, might he not survive until 2010, 2061 even?

No-one would have been altogether surprised if he’d lived long enough to upload his mind into a computer, as a character does in 2061: Odyssey Three, and continued to produce new and radical ideas well into the fourth millennium.

After that, who knows?

‘The robot body, like the flesh-and-blood one, would be no more than a stepping-stone to something which, long ago, men had called “spirit”.

‘And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God.’

[Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey]