Nearly a year ago, I wrote about a childhood hero of mine, on the tenth anniversary of his death. Today, I’m writing about another one, and it’s a happier occasion: it’s Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s 90th birthday!
Clarke has always been my favourite of the ‘big three’ post-war science fiction writers: he evokes a sense of wonder at the universe that was mostly missing in Asimov and Heinlein, as much as I loved their stories.1 From the decaying billion-year-old city of Diaspar in Against the Fall of Night (1953), to the giant interstellar interloper in Rendezvous with Rama (1973), to the last visitors from home in Songs of Distant Earth (1986), Clarke’s universe is indifferent to humanity’s presence, but it’s precisely our human qualities which make its immensities explicable and bearable. It’s terrific stuff, at its best Wellsian and Stapledonian, and just talking about it makes me want to go re-read it all again …
I was casting around for some way to connect Clarke to the themes of this blog. I could have speculated on the parallels between the British Interplanetary Society, in which he was heavily involved from the 1930s to the 1950s, and aviation advocacy groups like the Royal Aeronautical Society or the Air League of the British Empire. Or there’s his wartime work for the RAF on ground control approach radar. Or the way his experience of being billeted in the bombed-out East End in 1941 apparently inspired him to write a chapter on space warfare which he later used in Earthlight.2 Or the fact that the first publication of his famous idea for communication satellites in geosynchronous (or ‘Clarke’) orbits was in a letter on potential scientific applications of V2 rockets, which appeared in the February 1945 issue of Wireless World — at a time when V2s were still falling on London!3
But then I found that in March 1946, RAF Quarterly published a prize-winning essay by Clarke on “The rocket and the future of warfare”, which was outside Clarke’s usual range of topics, but well within mine — just too perfect a fit to ignore! But it’s not available online like his satellite stuff, and nobody around here has the RAF Quarterly. Luckily it was reprinted in Ascent to Wonder, a compilation of his more technical papers, so I made an impromptu trip to the State Library this afternoon to check its copy.4
Read the rest of this entry »
- Asimov’s non-fiction more than made up for this lack, of course.
- Neil McAleer, Odyssey: The Authorised Biography of Arthur C. Clarke (London: Victor Gollancz, 1992), 47.
- Arthur C. Clarke, “V2 for ionosphere research?”, Wireless World, February 1945, 58. His better known paper devoted to geosynchronous communication satellites was published in the same journal the following October. See here for more on both articles.
- Arthur C. Clarke, “The rocket and the future of warfare”, RAF Quarterly, March 1946, 61-9; reprinted in Arthur C. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder: A Scientific Autobiography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984), 71-9.


Comments
Graham Bell, Graham Bell, Erik Lund, Chris Williams, JDK
Pterodactyl Robot « The Grumpy Owl, links for 2008-04-19 « Dirtybronson, 10,000 BC (Movie) - Page 2 - Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum, Airminded · I seem to have started something …, Brett Holman, Rob Northrup [...]
Alison Smith, Brett Holman, Jakob
Chris Williams, Erik Lund, Chris Williams, Erik Lund, Ian Evans, CK [...]
Erik Lund, Chris Williams, Erik Lund, Brett Holman, CK, CK [...]
Why use LaTeX? « LaTeX for Humans, Brett Holman, Sarah Whitfield, Sarah Whitfield, Brett Holman, Jm [...]
CK, Brett Holman, Chris Williams