Clarke, Arthur C. (1917—)

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Clarke, Arthur C. (1917—)

British writer Arthur Charles Clarke's long and successful career has made him perhaps the best-known science fiction writer in the world and arguably the most popular foreign-born science fiction writer in the United States. Clarke is best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the film script he wrote with noted director Stanley Kubrick.

Clarke's writings are in genre of "hard" science fiction—stories in which science is the backbone and where technical and scientific discovery are emphasized. He is considered one of the main forces for placing "real" science in science fiction; science fiction scholar Eric Rabkin has described Clarke as perhaps the most important science-oriented science fiction writer since H. G. Wells. His love and understanding of science coupled with his popularity made him a central figure in the development of post-World War II science fiction. Clarke's success did much to increase the popularity of science and create support for NASA and the U.S. space program.

For Clarke, technological advancement and scientific discovery have been generally positive developments. While he was cognizant of the dangers that technology can bring, his liberal and optimistic view of the possible benefits of technology made him one of the small number of voices introducing mass culture to the possibilities of the future. His notoriety was further enhanced domestically and globally when he served as commentator for CBS television during the Apollo 11, 12, and 15 Moon missions.

A second theme found in Clarke's work which resonates in popular culture suggests that no matter how technologically advanced humans become, they will always be infants in comparison to the ancient, mysterious wisdom of alien races. Humanity is depicted as the ever-curious child reaching out into the universe trying to learn and grow, only to discover that the universe may not even be concerned with our existence. Such a theme is evident in the short story "The Sentinel" (1951), which describes the discovery of an alien artifact created by an advanced race, millions of years earlier, sitting atop a mountain on the moon. This short story provided the foundation for 2001 (1968). One of Clarke's most famous books, Childhood's End (1950), envisions a world where a portion of earth's children are reaching transcendence under the watchful eyes of alien tutors who resemble satanic creatures. The satanic looking aliens have come to earth to assist in a process where select children change into a new species and leave earth to fuse with a cosmic overmind—a transformation not possible for those humans left behind or for their satanistic alien tutors.

Clarke's achieved his greatest influence with 2001, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including best picture, and ranked by the American Film Institute as the 22nd most influential American movie in the last 100 years. Clarke's novelization of the movie script, published under the same title in 1968, had sold more that 3 million copies by 1998 and was followed by 2010: Odyssey Two (1982). The sequel was made into a film directed by Peter Hyams, 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984, starring Roy Scheider). Clarke has followed up the first two books in the Odyssey series with 2061: Odyssey Three (1988) and 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997).

The impact of 2001 is seen throughout American popular culture. The movie itself took audiences on a cinematic and cerebral voyage like never before. As Clarke said early in 1965, "MGM doesn't know it yet, but they've footed the bill for the first six-million-dollar religious film." The film gave the public an idea of the wonder, beauty, and promise open to humanity at the dawn of the new age of space exploration, while simultaneously showing the darker side of man's evolution: tools for progress are also tools for killing. Nowhere is this more apparent than in HAL, the ship's onboard computer. Although Clarke possesses a liberal optimism for the possibilities found in the future, HAL poignantly demonstrates the potential dangers of advanced technology. The name HAL, the computer's voice, and the vision of HAL's eye-like optical sensors have since become synonymous with the danger of over reliance on computers. This is a theme seen in other films ranging from Wargames (1983) to the Terminator (1984, 1991) series. The killings initiated by HAL and HAL's subsequent death allow the surviving astronaut to pilot the ship to the end of its voyage. Here the next step of man takes place as the sole survivor of this odyssey devolves into an infant. The Star Child is born; Man evolves into an entity of pure thought. The evolution/devolution of the astronaut completes the metaphor that humanity does not need tools to achieve its journey's end, our final fulfillment, but only ourselves.

The message of 2001 is powerfully reinforced by the music of Richard Strauss. Strauss' dramatic "Also Sprach Zarathustra," composed in 1896, was used several times during the movie but never with more impact than in the "Dawn of Man" segment. As the movie progressed, this music (as well as music composed by Johan Strauss) came to carry the narrative nearly as effectively as the dialogue.

Some have even suggested that the film influenced the language of the astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 mission. When HAL reports the "failure" of the AE 35 Unit, he says "Sorry to interrupt the festivities, but we have a problem." On the Apollo 13 command module, named Odyssey, the crew had just concluded a TV broadcast which utilized the famous "Zarathustra" theme when an oxygen tank exploded. The first words sent to Earth were "Houston, we've had a problem."

—Craig T. Cobane