Follow Us / Contact Us

Links to Bibliographies

Alan Dean Foster

Eddie Jones

The Big Three
--- Isaac Asimov
--- Arthur C. Clarke
------ Introduction
------ A Space Odyssey
------ Rama
------ Other Novels
------ Collections & Omnibuses
------ Venus Prime
------ Non-Fiction
------ Interviews & Biography
------ Short Fiction
--- Robert A. Heinlein

J.R.R. Tolkien

Lin Carter

Patrick Moore

Philip E. High

Richard C. Meredith

Robert Silverberg

Robert E. Vardeman

Fighting Fantasy

Science Fiction Magazines

Science Fiction and Fantasy Series

SF Universes and Fantasy Worlds

Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset on 16 December 1917 and grew up on a farm enjoying stargazing and reading science fiction magazines. After secondary education at Huish Grammar School in Taunton, he joined the Board of Education as a pensions auditor.

During the Second World War he served in the Royal Air Force as a radar specialist and was involved in the early warning radar defence system and later worked on ground controlled approach radar as documented in his only non-science fiction novel, the semi-autobiographical Glide Path. Clarke initially served in the ranks as a corporal instructor on radar. He was commissioned as a Pilot Officer in 1943 before being promoted to Flying Officer. He was then appointed chief training instructor before being demobilised in 1946 with the rank of flight lieutenant.

After the war Clarke earned a first-class degree in mathematics and physics at King's College London. Although he was not the originator of the concept of geostationary satellites, Clarke proposed a satellite telecommunications system in 1945 - an idea that won him the Franklin Institute Stuart Ballantine Gold Medal in 1963. He was the Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society from 1946 to 1947 and again from 1951 to 1953.

While Clarke had a few stories published in fanzines between 1937 and 1945, he did not make his first professional sales until 1946 when Loophole and Rescue Party appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1946. In 1948 Clarke wrote The Sentinel for a BBC competition. Although the story was rejected, it changed the course of Clarke's career. Not only was it the basis for 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it also introduced a more cosmic element to Clarke's work. Many of Clarke's later works feature a technologically advanced but still-prejudiced mankind being confronted by a superior alien intelligence. In the cases of The City and the Stars, Childhood's End, and the 2001 series, this encounter produces a conceptual breakthrough that accelerates humanity into the next stage of its evolution.

Clarke also wrote a number of non-fiction books describing the technical details and societal implications of rocketry and space flight. The most notable of these may be The Exploration of Space (1951) and The Promise of Space (1968). In recognition of these contributions the geostationary orbit 22,000 miles above the equator is officially recognised by the International Astronomical Union as a Clarke Orbit.

On a trip to Florida in 1953 Clarke met and quickly married Marilyn Mayfield, a 22-year-old American divorcee with a young son. They separated permanently after six months, although the divorce was not finalised until 1964. Clarke never re-married but was close to a Sri Lankan man, Leslie Ekanayake, whom the author called his "only perfect friend of a lifetime" in his dedication to The Fountains of Paradise. Clarke is buried with Ekanayake, who pre-deceased him by three decades. In his biography of Stanley Kubrick, John Baxter cites Clarke's homosexuality and the more tolerant laws in Sri Lanka as a reason why he relocated there. Journalists who enquired of Clarke whether he was gay were told, "No, merely mildly cheerful."

Clarke emigrated to Sri Lanka in 1956 and lived there until his death in 2008. He was an avid scuba diver and a member of the Underwater Explorers Club. In addition to writing, Clarke set up several diving-related ventures with his business partner Mike Wilson. In 1956, while scuba diving, Wilson and Clarke uncovered the Koneswaram temple. In 1961, while filming off Great Basses Reef, Wilson found the wreck of a ship that had belonged to the Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb. Plans to dive on the wreck the following year were delayed when Clarke developed paralysis, which was ultimately diagnosed as polio. A year later, Clarke observed the salvage from the shore and the surface. In 1988 he was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome and needed to use a wheelchair most of the time thereafter. Clarke was for many years a Vice Patron of the British Polio Fellowship.

Living in Sri Lanka and learning its history also inspired the backdrop for his novel The Fountains of Paradise in which he described a space elevator. This, he believed, would make rocket based access to space obsolete and, more than geostationary satellites, would ultimately be his scientific legacy. His many predictions culminated in 1958 when he began a series of magazine essays that eventually became Profiles of the Future, published in book form in 1962. A timetable up to the year 2100 describes inventions and ideas including such things as a "global library" for 2005. The same work also contained "Clarke's First Law" and text that became Clarke's three laws in later editions.

1. 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.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Clarke discussed the possibility of a collaborative film project with film director Stanley Kubrick when they met in New York in 1964. They decided to base the story loosely on one of Clarke's short stories: The Sentinel. Originally, Clarke was going to write the screenplay for the film, but as the idea for 2001: A Space Odyssey developed, Kubrick suggested that, before beginning work on the script, they should first give their imaginations free rein by writing a novel on which they would base the film. This is more or less the way it worked out, though toward the end, novel and screenplay were being written simultaneously, with feedback in both directions. The novel was published a few months after the release of the movie, which led some to believe it was a novelisation of the film. In 1972, Clarke published The Lost Worlds of 2001, which included his accounts of the production and alternate versions of key scenes.

In the early 1970s Clarke signed a three-book publishing deal with Gollancz, a record for a science fiction writer at the time. The first of the three was Rendezvous with Rama (1973), which won all of the main genre awards and spawned sequels that, along with the 2001 series, formed the backbone of his later writing career.

In a 1974 taped interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the interviewer asked Clarke how he believed the computer would change the future for the everyday person, and what life would be like around the year 2001. Clarke accurately predicted many things that became reality - responding to a question about how the interviewer's son's life would be different, Clark responded: "He will have, in his own house, not a computer as big as this [points to nearby computer] but at least a console through which he can talk through his local computer and get all the information he needs for his everyday life, like his bank statements, his theater reservations, all the information you need in the course of living in our complex modern society, this will be in a compact form in his own house . . . and he will take it as much for granted as we take the telephone."

During the 1980s Clarke became well known to many for his eponymous television programmes: Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, World of Strange Powers and Mysterious Universe. In 1989 he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to British cultural interests in Sri Lanka. Clarke was then knighted in 1998 and was awarded Sri Lanka's highest civil honour, Sri Lankabhimanya, in 2005.

Clarke appeared in a science fiction film in 1994 when he portrayed himself in Without Warning, an American production about an apocalyptic alien first contact scenario presented in the form of a faux newscast. That same year, after using his influence at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to steer the space shuttle Endeavour over the gorilla habitat in Rwanda, he became a patron of the Gorilla Organization which fights for the preservation of gorillas. When tantalum mining for cell phone manufacture threatened the gorillas, he lent his voice to their cause.

Clarke and his home were unharmed by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, but his diving school" at Hikkaduwa was destroyed. He made humanitarian appeals and the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation helped works towards better disaster notification systems. The diving school has since been rebuilt.

In September 2007, Clarke provided a video greeting for NASA's Cassini probe's flyby of Iapetus (which plays an important role in 2001: A Space Odyssey). Later in the year, on his 90th birthday, he recorded a video message to his friends and fans bidding them goodbye. Clarke died in Sri Lanka on 19 March 2008 following respiratory complications and heart failure stemming from post-polio syndrome. A few days before he died, he had reviewed the manuscript of his final work, The Last Theorem, on which he had collaborated by e-mail with his friend Frederik Pohl. Clarke was buried in Colombo in traditional Sri Lankan fashion on 22 March.
 

References
- Arthur C. Clarke - Official Website - retrieved 27 April 2018
- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - Arthur C. Clarke - retrieved 9 September 2012
- The Internet Speculative Fiction Database - Arthur C. Clarke - Summary Bibliography - retrieved 9 September 2012
- Wikipedia - Arthur C. Clarke - retrieved 9 September 2012 - the text above is a revised version of the Wikipedia article
 

An illustrated bibliography is available here.
 

Lists of the first publications of Arthur C. Clarke's non-magazine published fiction appear below along with a selection of non-fiction and autobiographical writings.
Titles in black are novels, while those in blue are collections and omnibuses.

Top