Rendezvous With Trauma

Although his subsequent works like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous With Rama are better known in the science fiction genre, many critics rank Childhood’s End up there with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H.G.Wells’s The Time Machine. The book is said to provide an elegant Clarkean solution to one of the problems posedby technological development: how can spiritual development keep pace with scientific progress when by making man comfortable, science takes away man’s curiosity and drive? The answer is typical of an author who is described as the Grandmaster of Science Fiction writing, and of whom it is said that he “takes an idea and drops it into a quiet pool of thought…the ripples spread out, washing up on character, society, the world and the universe.”

That such a man, at a grand old age of 80 and suffering from a post-polio syndrome, should stand accused of being a paedophile is fantastic to say the least. The charges surfaced last week in a strange story in a British paper which claimed to quote Clarke himself defending his deviant behavior. The celebrated writer, who lives in Sri Lanka, has since denied the charge, but some of the damage is done. His adopted country has been embarrassed during its Golden Jubilee celebrations, and a soupcon of doubt hangs over a great mind and spirit.

The Clarke episode comeson the heels of another case in the US last year in which another fine mind, Nobel laureate Carleton Gadjusek, was convicted on similar charges. Is this for real? One may well ask. But then, as J.B.S. Haldane, whom Clarke himself quotes often, said, “The world is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine.”

Arthur C. Clarke was born in a seaside English town in 1917, son of a farmer. He first discovered science fiction at the age of 12 when he came across the pulp fiction magazine Amazing Stories and began writing similar stories for his school magazine.

Discontinuing school because of financial constraints, he took odd jobs and later voluntarily enlisted in the Royal Air Force, where he taught himself mathematical and electronics theory. After World War II ended, he entered college and obtained a degree in physics and applied mathematics and with the publication of Exploration of Space (1952) and Childhood’s End (1953), embarked upon a writing career that would dazzle thesci-fi world for the next half century and bring him every single award and prize on the block, not to speak of numerous Emmys and an Oscar nomination.

He married in 1953 but separated from his wife within six months, saying they were incompatible from the beginning. He first visited Sri Lanka in 1954, fell in love with the place and moved there some years later.Clarke’s greatness lies not in writing fantastic tales, but in what one critic called “speculative factual writing.” Isaac Asimov, himself a giant in the field, repeatedly praised his “nimble and most receptive mind,” saying, “Nothing reasonable frightens him simply because it seems fantastic, and equally important, nothing foolish attracts him simply because it seems fantastic.”

Some of his books and ideas were not only clairvoyant, but they presaged practical application. Clarke himself often reminds us that in “the history of scientific prediction, the wildest flights of fancy have fallen short of subsequent realities.”

None of thepropositions had greater ramifications than his theorising of global communications by satellites, an idea that led to worldwide television, and indeed, the Internet. In a short letter published by the British magazine Wireless World in 1945, Clarke proposed the notion of geosynchronous communication satellites, writing, “An artificial satellite at the correct distance from the earth would make one revolution every 24 hours i.e. it would remain stationary above the same spot and would be within optical range of nearly half the earth’s surface. Three repeated stations, 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit, could give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet.”

A few months later, he expanded the letter to a still brief four-page, four-diagram, seven-footnotes paper in Wireless World titled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays.”

It would be another 18 years before the first geosynchronous satellite was launched, proving Clarke right and setting off a communications revolution that still has theworld in awe and turmoil. The story goes that when he met CNN founder Ted Turner, Clarke ribbed him: “You owe me ten per cent of your gross.” His contribution to space science is so great that he was invited to co-broadcast the Apollo 11, 12 and 15 missions with Walter Cronkite on CBS.

He is equally, if not more recognised for his SF oeuvre of some 70 books, the best known of which is 2001: A Space Odyssey (by virtue of it being made into a movie) and its sequels 2010, 2061 and 3001. Acclaimed by many as possible the best SF film ever made (by Stanley Kubrick, who when first asked about Clarke is reported to have said: “You mean that nut who lives on a tree somewhere in India”) the story is centred around a black monolith sent to earth to encourage the development of Man and its exploration by the spaceship Discovery, piloted by the computer HAL 9000. The book has become such a cult classic that last year, SF buffs world over celebrated the 25th birthday of HAL, whose maker incidentally is a fictionalIndian named Dr Chandra.

In his other acclaimed masterpiece, Rendezvous with Rama, Clarke explores an asteroid-like craft (named Rama) which enters the inner solar system and equally mysteriously exits in its onward journey, indifferent to the intelligent life it meets. Critics say the book’s resolution, where man is ignored by extra-solar intelligence is “a unique repudiation of his homocentrism.” Both 2001 and Rama engendered sequels by virtue of their immense popularity.

Today, Clarke sits in his techno-oasis outside Colombo, still spilling out fantastic ideas, even as his fans worldwide react with dismay to the unsubstantiated story about paedophilia. Universally, they hope that it isn’t true. They hope that the epitaph he has chosen for himself (“He never grew up; but he never stopped growing.”) is as lofty as it was meant to be.