Clarke: The Rocket Man Emerges

by Paul Gilster | Apr 3, 2013 | Culture and Society | 25 comments

In the 1950s, Arthur C. Clarke’s fame had begun to spread, and he sometimes referred to himself, genially enough, as an ‘unemployed prophet.’ This is a period in Clarke’s career that, from 1953 to 1956, saw the emergence of the fifteen tall tales that would be published in 1957 as Tales from the White Hart, a fictitious pub modeled after London’s White Horse. But while the stories were extravagant, the setting was the perfect amalgam of Clarke’s interest, for the White Horse was where science fiction met rocketry for his extensive network of friends.

One habitué of the White Horse was Ken Slater, whose recollection of those meetings appears in Neil McAleer’s Visionary: The Odyssey of Sir Arthur C. Clarke (2013):

“Anybody new that came to the pub was always told to ask Arthur to tell them about rockets, you see. Which they would do and then sit back for the short lecture. After Arthur broke into the short lecture, then we’d always strongly advise the newcomer to ask, ‘Look, what does the rocket push against?’ Which immediately brought forth from Arthur the long lecture, you know, the five-guinea version. That was a standard put-on at the White Horse, because if you ever got Arthur on rocketry, you could sit back and let the bar listen for up to a couple of hours.”

By now Clarke was well established in science fiction, with credits like The Sands of Mars (1951) and Childhood’s End (1953), along with short story collections like 1953’s Expedition to Earth. But as McAleer notes, it was science writing rather than science fiction that had made him realize it was time to become a full-time writer. The spur was a contract with Temple Press in 1949 for a nonfiction book called Interplanetary Flight, which drew heavily on a two-part paper he had published in separate magazines in previous years. The book presented spaceflight for the general reader, though the more technical minded could find Clarke’s equations tucked neatly away in the appendix.

The Science Writing Breakthrough

Now emerges Clarke the educator, a rocket scientist with a bent for philosophy who saw the exploration of space as both a physical and a spiritual quest. Carl Sagan would call Interplanetary Flight ‘a turning point in my scientific development,’ and technology in service of the human spirit became Clarke’s idée fixe, the principle that would hold humanity together by offering it challenges that summoned up all its reserves of intellect and courage. Soon Clarke’s American editor George Jones would encourage him to write 1952’s The Exploration of Space, which was bought by the Book of the Month Club.

Clifton Fadiman, for years one of the BOMC’s judges, met Clarke on the first of the author’s trips to the United States. McAleer quotes him on a meeting at the Plaza Hotel:

“The Oak Room is a rather worldly rendezvous. Mr. Clarke is not worldly; he is otherworldly. He spoke of space satellites, lunar voyages, interplanetary cruises, as other men would discuss the market or the weather. As he explained how within a decade three space stations whirling in an orbit about the equator will make possible (indeed one fears inevitable) simultaneous world-wide television broadcasting, our right-hand neighbor (a vice-president of CBS) went into a kind of catalepsy.

“To understand a mind like Mr. Clarke’s we must realize that during the last fifty years, more especially the last twenty-five years, virtually a new mental species has emerged among us. They are the men who in a real sense live in the future, men for whom the present is merely a convenient springboard.”

If you’ll go back to the first of these articles on Clarke (The Vision of Arthur C. Clarke), you’ll see in the second photo there that Clarke is wearing under his jacket a T-shirt that Gregory Benford gave him. The text is barely readable, but if you look closely, you’ll see that it says “I invented the communications satellite, and all I got for it was this lousy T-shirt.” Fadiman remembers Clarke’s enthusiasm for the idea in 1952, but it would indeed make him little money.

As his stint in the Royal Air Force drew to a close in 1945, Clarke developed the notion of geostationary satellites providing global communications. During the war he had worked on microwaves and radar, while his passion for rocketry provided the means of deployment. McAleer points to George O. Smith as a possible influence, the latter having published a series of stories in Astounding during the war years that became known as the Venus Equilateral series. Clarke even wrote an introduction to a 1976 reprint of these stories saying that they might well have influenced him subconsciously in his work.

The article “Extra-Terrestrial Relays,” whatever its sources, would appear in Wireless World in October of 1945. Worldwide coverage by radio and television would be implemented by a series of spacecraft with an orbital period of 24 hours at a distance of 42,000 kilometers from Earth center. Clarke went on to describe the equatorial orbits that would place space stations into ‘fixed’ spots in the sky (as seen by people on Earth). The predictions were bold, valid and, yes, visionary, but remained unheralded at the time except by the US Navy. Many believe the article was influential in the development of early space satellites.

Clarke’s $40 from Wireless World offered him plenty of opportunity later in life to joke about the real monetary value of the communications satellite concept, and McAleer notes that he never showed any regrets about what might have been. In any case, being a visionary was already becoming a habit for the writer, one that seemed to outweigh financial considerations. While still in the RAF and working as an instructor at a radio school in Wiltshire, Clarke often broke into soliloquies on rocket science, describing at one late night session how multistage rockets would get us to the Moon. When asked how big the rocket would be, he described it as the height of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which turns out to be within a few feet of the height of the Saturn V.

Image: With Walter Cronkite (L) and Wally Schirra (center), Arthur C. Clarke takes part in CBS coverage of Apollo 11’s return to Earth on July 24, 1969. Credit: CBS:Landov.

The Pleasures of Re-Reading

The twin themes of Clarke’s life — the future as depicted in science fiction and the technology that would get us there — were fully in place by 1950. For the rest, for Sri Lanka and 2001 and the space elevator, for the increasing fascination with the ocean and diving expeditions among the Pacific coral, for the Apollo coverage with Cronkite and the extraterrestrial interloper called Rama, I send you to McAleer’s book. But I also send you emphatically back to Clarke himself. I’d begin a re-read of the man with his short stories, probably starting with Expedition to Earth and moving then to Childhood’s End. I’d look anew at The City and the Stars and them make a point of picking up The Songs of Distant Earth, a few thoughts on which will close this piece.

The Songs of Distant Earth came out of Clarke’s speculations on using an interstellar rather than an interplanetary setting, and the genesis of the book was a short story written in 1957, the year of Sputnik. Thirty years later he would begin the novel of the same name, one he would always consider his best work. Clarke took his crew to a planet 50 light years away, traveling in hibernation at ten percent of the speed of light. Judy-Lynn del Rey would publish the book in 1987, a hard science fiction tale that at its kernel contained a love story. McAleer says this:

Thematically, as in much of Clarke’s fiction, the novel addressed humanity’s quest for purpose and immortality in contrast to the individual’s inevitable death. The loneliness of man is intensified against the backdrop of cosmic space and the finiteness of human time. Even if the survival of Homo sapiens is assured through interstellar travel, are not individuals doomed even as they embrace in love and light to keep the fall of night at bay? Clarke’s “songs” are not as joyous and uplifting as we might first expect. Always present in the novel is the feeling of insurmountable separation across the voids of space, time, and death.

Clarke tried to pull out all the stops here — he was sensitive to the charge of flat characterization and wanted to counter it, and The Songs of Distant Earth demonstrates he had it in his power to do that, though reading the book I can sense how hard the effort must have been. For Clarke’s characters are, for the most part, drawn to serve a plot purpose, and in the bulk of his fiction, we see character used the way the writer and critic James Gunn thinks it should be used in science fiction, as a way of creating a representative humanity in which the important work — the ideas of the tale — can be made manifest by the character’s reaction to them.

That can still make for powerful fiction, but you can see from the characters in The City and the Stars that their very flatness of affect is the result of their situation, living a changeless life in the eternal city. Or think of Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the difference between humans and their technology is not always apparent, the crew of Discovery sometimes seeming as robotic as Hal himself.

None of this matters when, as did Stapledon, Clarke takes our imagination into the deep future and rotates our view back around to see what our world looks like from that perspective. He was dismissive of the idea that science fiction is nothing but escapism, telling Alice Turner:

“It’s hard to define science fiction these days, especially since the mainstream seems to be moving in that direction. Traditionally, it’s been a form that offered a good story, and I suppose you could call that escapism, in a positive sense. C.S. Lewis, who wrote it himself, said, ‘The only people who think there’s something wrong with escapism are jailers.'”

But I also like what he told Alan Watts: “The purpose of the universe, Alan, is the perpetual astonishment of mankind.” Clarke was a writer who thought not in terms of years but of aeons, and not so much of individual humans as of the species. Re-reading Clarke, then, should also take us to his collected non-fiction, the hefty volume called Greetings! Carbon-Based Bipeds (1999). Here the twin strands of Clarke’s work come together, a lifetime of enthusiasm for and optimism about technology and the deep spaces to which it can take us all.

Addendum: The Rosetta Books ebook edition of Visionary, Neil McAleer’s revised biography of Arthur C. Clarke, is now available through Amazon.

Arthur C. Clarke: On Cities and Stars

by Paul Gilster | Apr 2, 2013 | Culture and Society | 13 comments

I’ve always wondered how Arthur C. Clarke coped with the news he received in 1986, when doctors in London told him he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a terminal illness that in the States is often called Lou Gehrig’s disease. The diagnosis was mistaken — it turns out Clarke actually suffered from what is known as ‘post-polio syndrome,’ a debilitating but not fatal condition. For two long years, though, he must have thought through all the symptoms of ALS, knowing that the degenerative motor neuron breakdown could gradually sap him of strength and movement. How would such an energetic man cope with an agonizing, slow fade?

Neil McAleer’s revised biography (Visionary: The Odyssey of Sir Arthur C. Clarke) gives the answer, as recounted by Clarke’s brother Fred:

“…after the initial shock, Arthur more or less said, damn it, he’d got an enormous amount he wanted to do, and if he’s only got fifteen months to do it, he’d better whack into it. And he did whack into it, and the next year he produced four books.

“Eighteen months later he was still writing, and all the horrible things they told him might happen hadn’t happened to him. Of course they had told him all the things he should do to keep it under control—what diets to take and what exercises to do, which he very religiously did. He carried on working intensely and produced an enormous amount of work, which might have been the saving grace. If he had been the sort to say, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die in fifteen months,’ he probably would have…”

That story speaks volumes about the man, identifying a resolve that kept him working despite his other ailments into his nineties. It also tells me that he was able to place himself mentally in a context that weighed a single human life against the broad movement of history. I think Clarke was happy to see himself as someone who instigated currents of thought, changed perspectives and launched careers. He did these things for people of all ages both by the example of his own life and by the lives he created in fiction that showed us what humanity might become.

Young Writer at Work

By the time Clarke moved from Somerset to London in 1936 he was already suffused with science fiction and in particular enraptured with Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, not to mention the second-hand copies of American science fiction magazines that were then available in England. He spoke of the ‘ravenous addiction’ these magazines inspired and the effect that Stapledon’s novel, with a time scale spanning five billion years, had upon his imagination. He was twelve years old when he first read Last and First Men, awed by its cosmic reach and its placement of the evolution of humanity against the broader backdrop of the cosmos.

Think for a moment of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Has any film ever covered a wider swath of time, from the beginnings of tool making to the apotheosis of the species in an extraterrestrial encounter? This was Clarke’s stage, but the other great discovery of his youth, David Lasser’s The Conquest of Space (1931) gave him the technology he would spend a life examining. Lasser was the founder of the American Interplanetary Society (which became the American Rocket Society and, eventually, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics). He was also, for a time, the editor of Hugo Gernsback’s Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories. If Stapledon brought Clarke the cosmos, Lasser gave the boy a focus on the attainable, the idea of space as a reachable frontier.

In London, Clarke had a tiny flat in Norfolk Square and was soon co-editing (with science fiction writer William Temple) the fanzine Novae Terrae, whose editorial sessions were so cramped in Clarke’s quarters that Temple once said “…there was hardly room for the two of us, and A[rthur]’s Ego had to be left outside on the landing.” Clarke’s nickname of Ego derives from this period when Temple and Clarke both discovered the latter’s competitive nature. I think McAleer is right in stressing, though, that Clarke’s volubility was largely the result of his enthusiasms. This was a man who loved, above all else, the communication of an idea.

Into the Remote Future

For those keeping score, Novae Terrae would soon become, under the editorship of Ted Carnell, the influential magazine New Worlds. But in the days just before World War II, while working on issues of Novae Terrae and assorted publications for the British Interplanetary Society, Clarke found time to begin developing his first novel from ideas that had come to him back in Somerset. “Against the Fall of Night” would appear in an early version in Startling Stories in November of 1948, but that hardly ended the tale. Clarke kept rewriting the story, seeing it into print as a novel from Gnome Press in 1953 and then putting it through a major revision as The City and the Stars, published in 1956.

I seldom think of Clarke as a reader of poetry, but he clearly knew his Housman:

Here, on the level sand,
Between the sea and land,
What shall I build or write
Against the fall of night?

The words are from Housman’s poem “Smooth Between Sea and Land.” Maybe the idea of long stretches of sand and a metaphorical night that comes to us all fired his imagination. I came across The City and the Stars just a few years after it was published and was mesmerized by its setting in much the way Clarke was taken with Stapledon’s Last and First Men. Here was Diaspar, the city of the far future, the only city on planet Earth, whose inhabitants moved through a high-tech monument to stasis. Nothing changes in Diaspar even as the world around it loses its oceans and becomes desert. Clarke would have much to say about the kind of inward thinking that his characters have to overcome, but the unmistakable fact about Diaspar is that the city at the end of time is also achingly, eerily beautiful.

Here’s science fiction writer Jo Walton on the book, nailing its essential allure:

The plot is quite simple. Diaspar is beautiful but entirely inward turned. Alvin looks out and discovers that there is more in the universe than his one city. He recovers the truth about human history, and rather than wrecking what is left of human civilization, revitalises it. By the end of the novel, Man, Diaspar, and Earth have begun to turn outward again. That’s all well and good. What’s always stayed with me is the in-turned Diaspar and the sense of deep time. That’s what’s memorable, and cool, and influential. Clarke recognized though that there isn’t, and can’t be, any story there, beyond that amazing image. It’s a short book even so, 159 pages and not a wasted word.

As to its author, I love the way he could never let this book go. It was, after all, his first novel, and as such it was perhaps the most deeply inspired by the reading of his youth. When he wrote a new preface to it in 1955, he noted that developments in information theory encouraged him to re-think the future course of humanity, a revision that would lead, says McAleer, to a whopping seventy-five percent new prose. The man was indefatigable; he couldn’t let go when ideas seized him, and when he had the wind behind him, no horizon was too far to strive for.

Restless Thoughts from Orbit

On the same visit to the United States in which he met Neil McAleer and learned that he did not have ALS after all, Clarke visited the National Air and Space Museum with Gregory Benford, long-term colleague Fred Durant and Hector Ekanayake, whose friendship with Clarke in Sri Lanka spanned decades. Benford noted the lack of long-term perspective in much contemporary science fiction and pointed out that The City and the Stars had been written before the discovery of DNA, so biology made no significant appearance in the story. Benford and Clarke’s Beyond the Fall of Night (1990) would be the result of that conversation.

McAleer’s biography gives the details on all of Clarke’s books, but my childhood fascination with The City and the Stars has kept me focused on the early stages of Clarke’s career in London and the ideas that began germinating both there and earlier in Somerset. The Signet paperback illustrated here is not the edition I first encountered, but I have to run it because of my love of Richard Powers, whose cover art appeared in so many paperbacks from this period. In this case, Powers’ surreal images go far toward capturing the timeless allure of the city in the desert.

The letters that McAleer has access to offer insights from Clarke’s old associates, and some new ones as well. In 2006 a British engineer named Nicholas Patrick was about to fly on a Space Shuttle mission, Discovery STS-116. He wrote Clarke to invite him to the launch, telling him he had been reading Clarke’s books since growing up in London. Due to his health problems, Clarke was unable to appear, though he wrote an enthusiastic response thanking Patrick, who replied:

“I am sad to hear that you will not be able to attend the launch, but understand completely given the circumstances. Perhaps instead, if you are willing, I might email you from orbit. “A month ago I reread The City and the Stars, perhaps my favourite book, and was again drawn by the ideas in it. Ever since I first read it, I have wanted to find an old spaceship and travel to distant suns. I shall be very happy in low earth orbit, but I don’t think it will completely satisfy me.”

And that’s the thing: Anyone who has grown up with The City and the Stars is going to find even the wonders of Earth orbit a bit tame. Clarke was always at his best as a science fiction writer when taking the long view. His characters would learn to burst free from Diaspar, but its very conception is as staggering and poetic as anything he ever wrote. From the book:

Here was the end of an evolution almost as long as Man’s. Its beginnings were lost in the mists of the Dawn Ages, when humanity had first learned the use of power and sent its noisy engines clanking about the world. Steam, water, wind-all had been harnessed for a little while and then abandoned. For centuries the energy of matter had run the world until it too had been superseded, and with each change the old machines were forgotten and new ones took their place. Very slowly, over thousands of years, the ideal of the perfect machine was approached – that ideal which had once been a dream, then a distant prospect, and at last reality: No machine may contain any moving parts. Here was the ultimate expression of that ideal. Its achievement had taken Man perhaps a hundred million years, and in the moment of his triumph he had turned his back upon the machine forever. It had reached finality, and thenceforth could sustain itself eternally while serving him.

Thus Clarke’s description of the computer that runs Diaspar free from all human intervention. What continues to confound me about Clarke is what McAleer brings out so well, the duality between an imagination capable of transcending time and the canny engineering horse-sense that spawned near-term space achievements. This is the man who dreamed up communications satellites when not dreaming of eternal cities of the far future. Tomorrow, then, let’s look at Clarke the space pioneer.