Clarke, Arthur C. 1917-2008 (Arthur Clarke, Arthur Charles Clarke, E.G. O'Brien, Charles Willis)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born December 16, 1917, in Minehead, Somersetshire (now Somerset), England; died of respiratory complications, March 19, 2008, in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Novelist, short-story writer, science writer, screenwriter, essayist, broadcaster, underwater explorer, and author. Clarke turned a childhood fascination with science, quasi-science, and science fiction into an immensely successful career as a writer and broadcaster. He earned dozens of awards along the way and prompted many to classify him as one of the most prolific scientific prophets of the twentieth century. Because so many of his predictions came true, he was also regarded as one of the most prescient seers of his age. Clarke was respected equally as a science writer and a science fiction writer, and he alternated between genres, publishing more than one hundred books in his career. One of his earliest predictions came in 1945 when he postulated a universal network of telecommunication satellites in a fixed orbit above the earth. The Syncom II became a reality in 1963, and about twenty years later Clarke was awarded a Marconi international fellowship and a special Emmy Award for contributions to satellite broadcasting. In 1951 he published the popular nonfiction book The Exploration of Space, which, somewhat surprisingly, won an International Fantasy Award. Many more such works would follow. Clarke wrote dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories. An early success was the novel Childhood's End (1953), which explored a theme that would thread its way through many of his writings: humankind is only one step in an evolutionary process that began when an ape picked up a tool and will continue until the human consciousness no longer requires a physical, earth-bound body to sustain it. The same theme came stunningly to life fifteen years later in Clarke's seminal collaboration with filmmaker Stanley Kubrick—2001: A Space Odyssey. To many fans, despite an elusive story line, it ranks as one of the greatest science fiction films ever made. Clarke moved smoothly into the medium of television as the host of popular series like Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (1980), and he appeared as an amiable and popular lecturer at universities and public venues around the world. Having settled in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the 1950s, he became affiliated with academic centers there, such as the Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Modern Technologies and the University of Moratuwa. In Sri Lanka, Clarke also came as close as he could to the weightlessness of outer space when he became a serious underwater explorer. He owned a diving business, Underwater Safaris, from 1984 until his death. He wrote several books on his underwater world, including The Reefs of Taprobane: Underwater Adventures around Ceylon (1957). Clarke's later years were hampered by declining health, but he stayed active. He remained optimistic about the terrestrial and extraterrestrial future of mankind, as revealed in The Snows of Olympus: A Garden on Mars (1995). He finished a final science fiction novel, The Last Theorem, only days before his death. Clarke's multitude of honors include a telecommunications satellite, an asteroid, a dinosaur, and another satellite named in his honor, a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and prizes from virtually every prominent scientific organization and science fiction society in the English-speaking world. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Clarke, Arthur C., The View from Serendip, Random House (New York, NY), 1977.

Clarke, Arthur C., Ascent to Orbit: A Scientific Autobiography; The Technical Writings of Arthur C. Clarke, Wiley (New York, NY), 1984.

Clarke, Arthur C., Astounding Days: A Science-Fictional Autobiography, Bantam (New York, NY), 1989.

Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, March 19, 2008, sec. 2, p. 11.

Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2008, pp. A1, A12.

New York Times, March 19, 2008, p. C12.

Times (London, England), March 20, 2008, p. 76.

Washington Post, March 19, 2008, p. B7.