It is fitting and appropriate that I just read a half dozen obituaries, published in a half dozen cities, about Arthur C. Clarke, contributor to the development of the communications satellite, promoter of the space elevator concept and science fiction writer. It was the vision of Clarke and his fellows that forms one of the basic elements of our global information society. Like many people, my first introduction to Clarke was through the film 2001, which I confusingly watched as a very small child at home on Selectavision (another childhood marker of my father’s poor choice of technology early adoption - which culminated in the late 80’s when only relative poverty and brief hesitation prevented him from buying a $3000 optical disk reader/future paperweight as “CD-Rom would never catch on since it’s not rewritable.”). I remember 2001 as being difficult to watch as I think it came on two discs with four sides between them, which I can tell you is a format killing problem right there. Later, I encountered his work through the novel Childhood’s End, and like all geeks, I’ve grown to consider 2001 to be one of my favourite movies of all time.
Only recently, I have been reading some stray Clarke novels as I came across them during the re-organization of my library. It was my first encounter with raw, hard SF in a fair while - I generally think of myself primarily as a New Wave SF fan, which isn’t a place where hard science always has a function. For the past several months, I have been struck by Clarke’s blunt, honest assessment that both interplanetary and interstellar travel, on a raw “moving mass” level alone, are so frighteningly difficult as to possibly be wholly pointless. It’s enough to make one want to retreat from space exploration out of doubt and fear. Yet Clarke’s novels, blunt and slightly boring in their calculations regarding the time, energy and various technical problems involved, always envisioned a future in which those tasks are undertaken, and in some ways routine, if our species has the want or is forced by circumstance into reach them.
I am also filled with hope. I think of the difficulty of even crossing minor seas only millenia or two ago, of the space program-like expenditure that moved scholars from mainland Japan to China and back during the Tang Dynasty, to the network of coaling stations that made modern naval power possible, or the logistics of building the Pyramids. Before Clarke and others envisioned using geosynchronous satellites as communications relays, the kind of modern information society we live in was as impossible as a Roman-era jet age, but great minds crossed the darkness and once again made the impossible an everyday experience. Clarke was a true visionary, a hard science prophet with a saint’s faith in man’s ability to go beyond his limitations. He will be missed, as an advocate for science, as a gifted storyteller and as a friend to the potential of the human race.
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