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Arthur C. Clarke Remembered

MARTIN GARDNER
DAVID MORRISON
JAMES RANDI
KENDRICK FRAZIER

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MARTIN GARDNER

Only once did I have the great pleasure of meeting Sir Arthur C. Clarke. It was for lunch in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Also at the table was a woman who talked incessantly about Jung and a handsome young black man who I later learned was the boxing champion of Sri Lanka. Arthur and Isaac Asimov at that time were, of course, the two giants of science fiction.

My acquaintance with Arthur, and my correspondence with him, arose from a mutual interest in recreational mathematics. The wall in Clarke’s early story “The Wall of Darkness” is a one-sided Moebius band. He was so intrigued by my Scientific American column on pentominoes that he wrote an article titled “Help! I’m a Pentomino Addict!” The twelve shapes played a role in one of his novels as a model of life’s endless combinatorial possibilities.

Sir Arthur not only will be remembered for his popular science fiction but also for the accuracy of his many predictions and for two memorable remarks:

“A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and, “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

Less well known, but my favorite, is the following: “I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.”

Martin Gardner’s latest book is The Jinn from Hyperspace (Prometheus, 2007), a collection of essays and reviews. For twenty-five years he wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.

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DAVID MORRISON

Science fact and science fiction lost one of our most visionary and influential heroes with the death of Arthur C. Clarke. He inspired my generation of space scientists with his vision of an exciting, transforming future beyond the Earth in novels such as The Sands of Mars, Islands in the Sky, Earthlight, Against the Fall of Night, and especially Childhood’s End. His creation with Stanley Kubrick of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which appeared in theaters a few months before Apollo 11, represented the zenith of science fiction movies—although, perhaps not so surprising in retrospect, it was not well reviewed and received only one Oscar for special effects.

I would particularly like to acknowledge Clarke’s contribution to my own field of understanding and protecting the Earth against cosmic impacts. I chaired the first scientific study of cosmic impact hazard, responding to a 1990 request from Congress to NASA. Our team proposed a “Spaceguard Survey” of near-Earth asteroids, and we called ourselves the Spaceguard Working Group. The name “Spaceguard” had been coined in Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama, in which it described a future system to detect any incoming asteroids or comets in time to protect the Earth from a catastrophic impact. Clarke graciously endorsed our use of the term, which has become synonymous with asteroid surveys. He supported our efforts to initiate this survey and was pleased to have his name associated with such a worthy endeavor.

Partly inspired by the new attention to the impact hazard, Clarke wrote a novel in 1994 on this theme: Hammer of God. The plot concerns efforts to deflect a large comet on a collision course with Earth. This novel was acquired by a Hollywood studio and became the basis for the 1998 film Deep Impact, although Clarke himself did not write the script. Deep Impact was an intelligent film, realistically depicting the impact threat and the ways we might respond if faced with such a calamity. Unfortunately it was released at the same time as the blockbuster film Armageddon, which made no effort toward accuracy, either scientific or political. If your memory of these two impact films is dominated by the antics of Bruce Willis in Armageddon, I recommend you watch Deep Impact again. Also well worth reading is Clarke’s New York Times op-ed of August 14, 1994, entitled “Killer Comets Are Out There. Now What?” for an articulate defense of the importance of the Spaceguard Survey and future efforts to develop a defense against cosmic impacts. (The New York Times reprinted this 1994 op-ed on March 23, 2008).

All of us who have been entertained and inspired by Sir Arthur Clarke mourn his passing.

David Morrison, a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, is a planetary scientist and astrobiologist who has played a leading role in developing the Spaceguard Survey of Near Earth Asteroids.

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JAMES RANDI

I first met Arthur at his home in Sri Lanka where I had gone with an NBC television crew during the taping of a TV special, “Magic or Miracle?” That was in 1983. The man credited with having “invented” the geosynchronous satellite was a trifle embarrassed. The president of Sri Lanka was due at his home to watch a football game via the only satellite dish that existed in all of the tiny island nation—Arthur’s dish—and that device was lying on its side, a victim of a recent storm. His mobile telephone, too, was “dead” because its charger had become disconnected, and I had the honor of wriggling down underneath a massive desk to plug in the transformer for him; the bits of wildlife I ran into underneath, I leave to your imagination.

Arthur facilitated our visit, and I recall that when we arrived at the airport and announced who our host was, we were instantly moved through immigration and customs and escorted outside to our waiting transportation; this man was highly respected in his new home and once commented to me that he found it far more agreeable to be a large fish in a small pond than any other configuration of those elements that he could imagine.

Over the years, I ran into Arthur C. Clarke several more times and once had the pleasure of hearing him speak at the United Nations. His thought process was evident from his speaking manner. As in his writing, everything he delivered was clear, concise, and effective.

I was an invited guest in New York City at the premiere of the Kubrick film 2001, and I saw Arthur in tears when he began to realize just how Kubrick had ignored the subtleties of the original story; we were both dismayed by the erroneous interpretations members of the audience offered as explanations of the “psychedelic” sequences in the film. I suggest that readers examine his short story “The Sentinel” —upon which that film was based—and The Lost Worlds of 2001, then see the film again for a better understanding of what it should have shown.

Arthur was a delight. Yes, I grieve at his passing, but—much more important—I celebrate his existence. If you want to see him at his very best, look up the short story titled “The Nine Billion Names of God.” When you get to the last line, if you don’t gasp, Arthur might have bored you….

James Randi is a professional magician, lecturer, and investigator of unusual claims. His books include The Truth about Uri Geller, Flim-Flam!, The Faith Healers, and An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural.

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KENDRICK FRAZIER

I had my considerable say about Arthur C. Clarke in my lengthy essay review “Visionary of 2001, and Way Beyond” in our May/June 2000 issue (ostensibly a review of his wonderful essay collection Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! but really more a profile of Clarke and his ideas). So I will only reiterate a few points and raise a couple of new ones.

Without his knowing it, as I am sure he did for countless others, Clarke shaped and guided my professional life and interests. I remember as a school kid in the ’50s coming across in our school library the newsletter of the British Interplanetary Society, which he then headed. That was so cool! Here we hadn’t even gotten into space yet, and already there was an “interplanetary” society. Science and space seemed to be the future, and we wanted to be part of it.

His science fiction, like Heinlein’s and Bradbury’s and Asimov’s, let loose our imaginations. We may have lived in small, isolated towns, but our minds were free to roam the universe. His writings, fiction and fact, were always a combination of clear-thinking, science-informed intellect, and soaring creativity expressed in prose of absolute clarity. What a rare and wonderful combination!

His books influenced generations of us. A glance over my own shelves finds these volumes, a mere sampling of his tremendous output: (Nonfiction) Interplanetary Flight, The Exploration of Space, The Coming of the Space Age, Profiles of the Future, Report on Planet Three, and the aforementioned Carbon-Based Bipeds; (short story collections) The Nine Billion Names of God; (novels) Childhood’s End, Rendezvous with Rama, The Songs of Distant Earth, Fountains of Paradise, and of course the 2001 novel series: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, and 3001: The Final Odyssey. I am now rereading my copy of The Lost Worlds of 2001, Clarke’s account of the writing of his novel and the screenplay with Stanley Kubrick, combined with never-used “outtake” chapters he wrote for the novel. These were fully developed alternative scenarios written and discarded as Clarke’s and Kubrick’s ideas clashed and evolved. Interesting reading still today.

I heard him speak in person only twice, in my Washington days, once at the Smithsonian Institution (where he inscribed my copy of Profiles of the Future to my wife and me) and once at the National Geographic Society. But his novels and nonfiction works were all freely available, and with new books coming out regularly, we didn’t have to talk with him to benefit from his inspiration. Shortly after becoming editor of the Skeptical Inquirer, I was delighted one day to receive a humorous letter to the editor from him intriguingly titled “Martian Technology,” inspired by our Viking landings on Mars and whimsically suggesting we must have found a way to camouflage the Martian canals (I published it in our Winter 1978 issue; I’m sure you all still have your copies!).

Over the ensuing years, we corresponded congenially from time to time. He was such a firm exemplar of reason and rationality, we could always count him as a friend and colleague.

In my 2000 review of Carbon-Based Bipeds, I took appreciative note of his included essay “Credo,” which stated his decidedly skeptical views about religion, and lamented that I hadn’t known of it to include in our then most recent Science and Religion issue, in 1999. We rectified that. With Sir Arthur’s kind permission, it appeared in our September/

October 2001 Science and Religion special issue.

In his later years he was quite ill and friends didn’t want to bother him too often. But my one regret is that I didn’t try to engage him in discussion of a question that I think is important to our times: How disillusioned was he that we hadn’t maintained the promise and momentum of the Apollo years in pushing outward into space? The first moon landing of 1969 came almost as early as anyone could possibly have envisioned. But Clarke and most other enthusiasts thought that would be just the beginning. The year 2001 was still a long way off, and routine manned trips to the moon and beyond by the early twenty-first century seemed fully credible. How disappointing that since Apollo 17 in 1972 we haven’t even ventured beyond Earth’s orbit.

Yes, cheaper and safer unmanned spacecraft have been doing the exploring for us to wonderful effect, but no one back then thought the manned space program, once it got going, would soon become so circumscribed. Instead, it was the microelectronics revolution that took off geometrically, with Moore’s law accurately describing its enormous growth and progress. That’s what Clarke and others thought would happen with human spaceflight. What happened?

Clarke’s innate technological optimism may have gone out of style in these more cynical and economically challenged times (I hope that optimism someday will return in a more sustainable form), and his full life of ninety years has now concluded. But he will live on in our memories forever. His work will certainly endure, continually being rediscovered by new generations of inquirers, and in that way he will continue to influence and shape the future.

Kendrick Frazier is editor of the Skeptical Inquirer and a former editor of Science News. Among his books is Solar System (Time-Life).