RIP Arthur C. Clarke

The Poet Laureate of the Space Age Departs

When many people hear the name of Arthur C. Clarke, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which ironically opened in theaters forty years ago, next month, comes to mind. But the impact of Sir Arthur on-well--everything in the past sixty years was so much more.

Shortly after World War II, Clarke published a paper in Wireless World describing the concept of the Communication Satellite. If he had done nothing else in his life, this very insight which eventually revolutionized telecommunications would have been enough to bring Clarke ever-lasting fame.

Clarke would also write nonfiction, mostly about the promise of space exploration. But it was Clarke's stories and novels, touching again and again on the themes of the wonder and majesty of space travel and of the prospect of human transcendence that earned him the title of Poet Laureate of the Space Age.

One of his earliest stories, Rescue Party, depicts an alien space ship arriving at an Earth on the brink of total destruction, but oddly enough with no people present. When the aliens find where the people have gone, the bold daring of what the former inhabitants of the doomed Earth is heart lifting.

A personal favorite is a novel called The City and the Stars, which is set on a dying Earth billions of years in the future where humankind has retreated from the stars to cower in the last city on Earth, a technological paradise. But one young man is discontented enough to break free from the city, which he finds a prison, and seek once again fulfillment, at first in the outside world, and then out to the stars.

Childhood's End, an atypical Clarke novel, is set on a near future Earth in which aliens have arrived and have established a benign dictatorship. The problems of war, poverty, disease, and so on are eliminated. But the aliens have a hidden agenda, one that involves fostering the next step in human evolution.

Other novels in Clarke's early years included Prelude to Space (written in the early 50s about the first expedition to the Moon), The Sands of Mars, Earthlight, and A Fall of Moondust.