The Star | Author Biography
Arthur C. Clarke was born on December 16, 1917, in Minehead, Somerset, England. He was brought up on a farm by his parents Charles Wright Clarke and Norah Mary Willis Clarke. Just before his ninth birthday, Clarke took his first airplane ride and was thrilled by air travel. He combined his interest in flying with rocketry and, by the time he entered his early teens, he was making homemade rockets, fireworks, and experimenting with communication devices. Clarke built his own refractor telescopes from old lenses, cardboard tubes, and miscellaneous spare parts. At age seventeen Clarke built a lightbeam transmitter, which used light to transmit sound. It formed the basis for Clarke’s later design for what became the communications satellite.
As a child, Clarke briefly attended an Anglican Church Sunday school. He later recalled that after a few months he concluded that it was ‘‘a bunch of nonsense’’ and refused to return. His rejection of religion and his interest in science and technology form the basis for much of his writing. Nearly all of his fiction involves underlying religious themes, with the spiritual evolution of humankind a particularly prominent theme.
There is speculation that the death of his father when Clarke was only thirteen was a great influence on his life. His writing reflects this loss and often features father figures and father-son relationships, perhaps most prominently in the novel Childhood’s End. Another important influence on Clarke’s later career as a writer was his discovery, at the age of twelve, of the magazine Amazing Stories, which features science fiction as well as fantasy tales.
Clarke was an early member of the British Interplanetary Society, a group of science fiction fans and writers. He began publishing science fiction stories in the 1930s and early 1940s—the beginning of the period known as ‘‘the Golden Age of Science Fiction,’’ when most of the genre’s acknowledged masters, including Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein were beginning their careers. In 1941 he joined the British Air Force, becoming adept in radar applications, mathematics, and electronics. After World War II he entered college and took degrees in physics and mathematics. By the early 1950s, with the publication of his first nonfiction book, The Exploration of Space, and the novel Childhood’s End, Clarke became a full-time and very prolific writer. He continued to write both fiction and nonfiction works that draw from his extensive scientific background. He is acknowledged as the preeminent writer of ‘‘hard science fiction’’ that does not depart from known science or natural law or employ elements of the fantastic, and his nonfiction writings are praised for their ability to make scientific ideas understandable to a general readership.
Clarke first visited Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1954 and established permanent residence there in 1975. He lived there part-time for twenty years, required by local laws to leave the country for at least six months a year. During the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey, he was in the United States for so long that he had to obtain a Resident Alien card. He joked that the card always made him ‘‘feel like a certified extraterrestrial.’’ He was finally able to obtain legal ‘‘Resident Guest’’ status in Sri Lanka when that country passed what became known as ‘‘The Clarke Act’’ in 1974. He continues to live and write in Sri Lanka. Late in the twentieth century, Clarke has expressed optimism that he will live into the year 2001 and the new millennium.
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