Arthur C. Clarke

NAME Sir Arthur Charles Clarke. 

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Widely considered one of the "Big Three" of 20th-century science fiction alongside Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. He is best known for writing the screenplay and novel 2001: A Space Adventure (1968). He is also celebrated as a "prophet of the space age" for his conceptualization of the geostationary communications satellite and for "Clarke’s Three Laws," most notably the third: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

BIRTH Born December 16, 1917, in Minehead, Somerset, England. (1)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Clarke was born into an English farming family in the seaside town of Minehead, in Somerset in south-western England. The family was solidly working-class rural English stock, with no particular scientific or literary heritage to speak of.

His father, Charles Wright Clarke, died when Arthur was still a child, leaving his mother, Nora Mary Clarke (née Willis), to raise the family.

He had a younger brother, Fred Clarke, who later maintained Arthur's vast archive of manuscripts and personal papers — referred to affectionately as the "Clarkives" — in Taunton, Somerset.  (2)

CHILDHOOD Clarke grew up near Bishops Lydeard in Somerset, on the family farm. As a boy, he enjoyed stargazing, fossil collecting, and reading American science fiction pulp magazines — particularly Amazing Stories. 

He attributed his fascination with science fiction to three specific formative encounters: reading the November 1928 issue of Amazing Stories in 1929; Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930); and The Conquest of Space by David Lasser (1931). He joined the Junior Astronomical Association as a teenager and contributed articles on astronautics to Urania, the society's journal, persuading the editor to add a dedicated "Astronautics" section. He also built his own telescope at around the age of thirteen. (3)

EDUCATION Clarke received his secondary education at Huish's Grammar School in Taunton. 

He left school at eighteen and moved to London in 1936, taking a job with the Board of Education as a pensions auditor in the Civil Service. 

After serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II, he returned to academic study on a government grant. He was awarded a Fellowship at King's College London, where he obtained a first-class honours degree in Physics and Mathematics in 1948.  (4)

CAREER RECORD 1936 Moved to London to work as a pensions auditor in the Board of Education. He joined the British Interplanetary Society and began his advocacy for space travel.

1941-1946 Served in the Royal Air Force during World War II.

1948-1950 Worked as Assistant Editor for Physics Abstracts.

1951 Became a full-time writer following the success of his early novels and short stories.

1956 Emigrated to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to pursue his passion for underwater exploration while continuing his prolific writing career.

1964-1968 Collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

1980s-1990s Hosted several popular television series on unexplained phenomena and science.

APPEARANCE In his prime, Clarke was a trim, unremarkable-looking Englishman of medium build — pleasant-featured rather than strikingly handsome, with dark hair that gradually greyed as he aged. 

Clarke in 1965

He had bright, alert eyes that conveyed his intense intellectual curiosity. 

In later life, particularly following his diagnosis with post-polio syndrome in 1988, he used a wheelchair regularly and his voice became somewhat halting and deliberate. 

Photographs from his years in Sri Lanka often show him tanned, casually dressed, and at ease — the image of a man who had decisively left English formality behind. 

FASHION Clarke had no discernible interest in fashion or personal style. In his London years he dressed as a modestly paid civil servant would — practically and without fuss. 

After moving to Sri Lanka in 1956, his style became emphatically casual and tropical: open-collared shirts, light trousers, and the comfortable, unpretentious clothing of a man who spent much of his time on or beneath the sea. He never cultivated the tweed-jacketed public image of the traditional English man of letters. 

CHARACTER Those who knew Clarke well described him as self-absorbed — almost to the point of social obliviousness — but entirely without malice. His London flatmates gave him the nickname "Ego" because of his all-consuming focus on his own intellectual interests, and he embraced it cheerfully, later naming his study his "ego chamber." 

Optimistic, intellectually restless, and deeply curious, Clarke possessed a rare ability to bridge the gap between hard science and poetic imagination. While he was a visionary, he remained grounded in the belief that humanity's future lay in the stars rather than in self-destruction

SPEAKING VOICE Clarke spoke in a soft, measured Somerset burr — the accent of his West Country upbringing, which he never entirely lost even after decades in Sri Lanka. 

In his many television appearances, his voice was calm, deliberate, and professorial: authoritative but approachable, well-suited to his role as a populariser of science. 

In his final years, post-polio syndrome gave his speech a halting, effortful quality, and most of his late public communications were delivered via pre-recorded video messages. 

SENSE OF HUMOUR Clarke possessed a dry, ironic wit sharpened by decades of correspondence with scientists, writers, and film directors. When journalists enquired whether he was gay, his standard reply was: "No, merely mildly cheerful." 

He was fond of aphorisms — most famously, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" — and delivered them with a straight face and comic timing. 

His short story collection Tales from the White Hart (1957) showcases a more playful, barroom-anecdote style of humour — a Clarke less often seen, but genuinely funny. (2)

RELATIONSHIPS 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; the divorce was not finalised until 1964. "The marriage was incompatible from the beginning," Clarke said. Marilyn never remarried and died in 1991. Clarke never remarried. 

He was close throughout his later life to a Sri Lankan man, Leslie Ekanayake (July 13, 1947 – July 4, 1977), whom he described in the dedication to The Fountains of Paradise as "my only perfect friend of a lifetime." Clarke and Ekanayake are buried together in Kanatte Cemetery in Colombo. 

MONEY AND FAME Clarke earned significant wealth from his prolific writing career, particularly after 2001: A Space Odyssey brought him international fame in 1968. 

In the early 1970s, he signed a three-book publishing deal — a record for a science fiction writer at the time.

In Sri Lanka, he was held in extraordinarily high esteem: when fellow science fiction writer Robert Heinlein visited, the Sri Lanka Air Force provided a helicopter to take the two writers around the country. 

He could have been enormously wealthy from a patent on the geostationary communications satellite, but when asked why he hadn't pursued one, Clarke always replied: "A patent is really a licence to be sued." 

He lived comfortably in Colombo for the second half of his life, running a diving school alongside his writing, and employing a Sri Lankan "adoptive family" of staff and assistants who were among the thousands at his funeral. (2)

FOOD AND DRINK Clarke was a teetotaller — a fact noted by Michael Moorcock among others. 

Clarke welcomed distinguished visitors to his Colombo home, including scientists, astronauts, and celebrities, but that he remained, in culinary terms, an Englishman abroad: loyal to toast and tomato soup rather than Sri Lankan curries.

MUSIC AND ARTS In his London years in the late 1930s, Clarke was enthusiastic enough about music to organise a programme of science fiction-themed music for meetings of the Science Fiction Association — though the audience response, according to one contemporary account in Novae Terrae (March 1938), ranged from enthralled to "stonily resigned" as the evening wore on. 

He was a passionate admirer of Stanley Kubrick's use of classical music in 2001: A Space Odyssey — including Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra and the Strauss waltzes — which was largely Kubrick's creative decision. (5)

WRITING CAREER Arthur C. Clarke began publishing in 1937 in the bulletin of the British Interplanetary Society, which was rather like beginning one’s literary career in the minutes of a very enthusiastic committee meeting. His first professional fiction sale, “Rescue Party,” appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1946, and already contained the Clarke signature: vastness, irony, and humanity arriving slightly underprepared.

His first book, Interplanetary Flight (1950), was not a novel at all but a startlingly rigorous manual of space travel, written when rockets were still mostly associated with fireworks and alarming military experiments. It has been called the first English book to set out the mechanics of spaceflight properly, which is a little like saying someone produced the first sensible handbook for dragon-riding. Its success persuaded Clarke to write full-time.

His early novels arrived in a remarkable rush. Prelude to Space, dashed off in a three-week holiday in 1947, anticipated the moon race before governments had quite got round to it. Then came Childhood's End (1953), perhaps his most haunting work, in which transcendence turns out to be both glorious and unsettling — a combination Clarke relished. The City and the Stars (1956) stretched his imagination to the cosmic horizon, while A Fall of Moondust (1961) made peril on the Moon feel as matter-of-fact as a railway delay.

Then, of course, came the monolith. Clarke’s collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey and its companion novel made him an international oracle of the Space Age. Few writers have become famous by persuading audiences that a black rectangle might know more than they did. He followed it with Rendezvous with Rama (1973), perhaps the purest expression of his sense of cosmic mystery, and The Fountains of Paradise (1979), where he casually proposed a space elevator as though everyone had been meaning to build one.

His later decades were astonishingly productive. The Odyssey sequence rolled on through 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, and 3001: The Final Odyssey. He also wrote treasures such as The Songs of Distant Earth — his own favourite — and increasingly partnered with writers like Gentry Lee and Frederik Pohl. By the end he had written nearly a hundred books, which seems almost rude.

And then there were the short stories, where Clarke often compressed an abyss into ten pages. “The Nine Billion Names of God,” collected in The Nine Billion Names of God, ends with one of literature’s most elegant cosmic punchlines. “The Star” manages to turn theology into tragedy. And Tales from the White Hart revealed another Clarke entirely — sly, anecdotal, and funny, as though the prophet of the space age had slipped into the corner pub and started telling outrageous stories over a pint.

LITERATURE In addition to his own work, he was a voracious reader of hard sciences and classical literature. He cited H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon as his greatest literary influences

Clarke corresponded with C. S. Lewis in the 1940s and 1950s and they met once in Oxford to discuss science fiction and space travel

NATURE Clarke had a lifelong, passionate engagement with the natural world — specifically, the ocean. His move to Sri Lanka in 1956 was driven primarily by a desire to explore its coral waters, and he spent years scuba diving off the coasts of Sri Lanka and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. 

He discovered the underwater ruins of the original Koneswaram Temple at Trincomalee in 1957 during a diving expedition with photographer Mike Wilson.

Clarke set up a diving school near Trincomalee that continued to operate after his death through the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation. 

He was also a vocal champion of environmental causes: he was deeply concerned about climate change and fossil fuel dependency, describing oil addiction as "one of our most self-destructive behaviours," and became a patron of the Gorilla Organization, lending his name to efforts to protect gorillas threatened by tantalum mining in 2001.  (2)

PETS Clarke kept various animal companions at his Colombo home over the decades, usually dogs, and also a pair of monkeys he described as mischievous. In his later years he was particularly fond of his Chihuahua, Pepsi, whom he called his "ferocious guardian of privacy." He described himself as always having been fond of animals — a sentiment reflected in his emotionally powerful short story "Dog Star" 

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Scuba diving was Clarke's defining passion outside writing, and the reason he emigrated to Sri Lanka. He was a member of the Underwater Explorers Club. 

He also retained a lifelong love of astronomy — he had been stargazing since boyhood, building his own telescopes in his teens and joining the Junior Astronomical Association. In his London years he was an active member of the British Interplanetary Society, attending meetings and writing for its bulletin. 

Photography was another pursuit — he and Mike Wilson produced photographically illustrated books of their underwater explorations. (2)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Clarke graduated with a first-class honours degree in Physics and Mathematics from King's College London. 

His most significant scientific contribution was the proposal — laid out in his 1945 Wireless World paper — that geostationary orbits would be ideal for telecommunications relay satellites. The geostationary orbit, 36,000 kilometres above the equator, is today officially named the Clarke Orbit by the International Astronomical Union in his honour. 

In interviews given shortly before his death, he explained that a lawyer had advised him not to patent his geostationary communications satellite idea, on the grounds that the concept was "too far-fetched to be taken seriously." Clarke always told the story with good humour, his standard quip being: "A patent is really a licence to be sued."

Clarke did, however, write a sardonic short story on the subject — "Patent Pending" (1954) — about a Frenchman who invents a device for recording and replaying human sensations, a kind of ultimate virtual reality machine. It is Clarke's wry, fictional engagement with the whole business of invention and intellectual property — from a man who gave away his greatest idea for free.

In the 1950s he corresponded with Dr. Harry Wexler, chief of the Scientific Services Division of the U.S. Weather Bureau, about satellite applications for weather forecasting, correspondence that helped establish the field of satellite meteorology. 

His 1951 book The Exploration of Space was used by rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun to persuade President Kennedy of the feasibility of a Moon landing. 

Clarke also predicted, with extraordinary accuracy, the internet, online banking, email, mobile phones with GPS, and remote surgery — in writings and television broadcasts from the late 1950s through the 1970s. 

His three famous laws, first published in Profiles of the Future (1962), include the best-known: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."((3)

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY Clarke identified as an atheist in his later years, stating plainly in 2000: "I don't believe in God or an afterlife." Earlier, he had called himself a logical positivist from the age of ten, and when enlisting in the RAF he insisted his dog tags be marked "pantheist." 

He described himself at various times as a "crypto-Buddhist," insisting that Buddhism is not, in his view, a religion. 

He left written funeral instructions: "Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral." Nevertheless, his fiction returns obsessively to quasi-religious themes: transcendence, the nature of consciousness, and humanity's relationship with godlike intelligences. 

He was honoured as a Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism. (2)

POLITICS Clarke was broadly anti-nationalist and internationalist in outlook. He wrote: "It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars." 

He opposed sovereignty over space: "There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum." 

He described himself as anti-capitalist, stating that "the goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play" and calling for the dismantling of the present "politico-economic system." 

In 1984, Clarke testified before the United States Congress against the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), putting him at odds with his old friend Robert Heinlein, who confronted him angrily on the subject at a dinner at Larry Niven's home in California. 

Image by Chat GBT

Clarke was a passionate advocate for renewable energy and one of the early prominent voices warning about climate change and fossil fuel dependency. 

SCANDAL In late 1997, shortly after Clarke's knighthood was announced in the New Year Honours, the British tabloid Sunday Mirror published an allegation that Clarke had paid boys for sex. The Sri Lankan police investigated and found the charge baseless. According to The Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Mirror subsequently published an apology, and Clarke chose not to sue for defamation. The investiture was delayed at Clarke's own request until the matter was resolved, and the knighthood was formally conferred in Colombo on May 26, 2000. 

MILITARY RECORD Clarke served in the Royal Air Force from 1941 to 1946 as a radar instructor and specialist. He initially served in the ranks as a corporal instructor on radar at No. 2 Radio School, RAF Yatesbury, Wiltshire. He was commissioned as a Pilot Officer (Technical Branch) on May 27, 1943, promoted to Flying Officer on November 27, 1943, and appointed Chief Training Instructor at RAF Honiley, Warwickshire. As an officer, he was in charge of the first radar talk-down equipment — the Ground Controlled Approach (GCA) system — during its experimental trials, a role he fictionalised in Glide Path (1963). He was demobilised with the rank of Flight Lieutenant.  (3)

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Clarke was a vigorous physical man in his middle years — a dedicated scuba diver who explored some of the most demanding diving environments in the world. 

In 1962, he contracted polio, which curtailed his diving activities and left lasting deficits. In 1988, he was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome, a degenerative condition that progressively confined him to a wheelchair for the last two decades of his life. He was a long-standing vice-patron of the British Polio Fellowship. 

Despite physical deterioration in his final years — which gave him halting speech and severely restricted his mobility and travel — his mind remained sharp until nearly the end of his life. (2)

HOMES Clarke grew up on a farm near Bishops Lydeard, Somerset. He moved to London in 1936, sharing a flat in Gray's Inn Road with fellow science fiction writers. After the war he lived in London while studying at King's College.

From 1956 he lived in Sri Lanka — first in the coastal village of Unawatuna on the south coast, then in Colombo, Sri Lanka's largest city, where he remained for the rest of his life. He maintained a property in Colombo that included a room he called his "ego chamber" — filled with memorabilia, manuscripts, and correspondence accumulated over a lifetime. 

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami left his home unharmed but destroyed his diving school at Hikkaduwa near Galle.

Clarke at his home in Sri Lanka, 2005

TRAVEL Clarke was an inveterate traveller in his middle decades. He travelled to Australia to dive on the Great Barrier Reef. He visited the United States frequently — it was on a trip to Florida in 1953 that he met and married his wife and he addressed the United Nations in New York on the peaceful uses of outer space. 

He worked with Stanley Kubrick in New York and later with Peter Hyams in Los Angeles — famously managing the collaboration with Hyams on 2010 entirely by email, one of the earliest uses of the medium for long-distance creative collaboration. 

His post-polio syndrome in his later years made travel increasingly difficult and eventually impossible; most of his late-career communications with the outside world were via video message from Colombo. (2)

DEATH Clarke died in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on March 19, 2008, at the age of 90. The cause of death was reported by his aide as respiratory complications and heart failure stemming from post-polio syndrome. Clarke had reviewed the manuscript of his final novel, The Last Theorem (co-written with Frederik Pohl), just days before his death

Just hours before his death, a major gamma-ray burst — GRB 080319B — reached Earth, setting a new record as the farthest object visible to the naked eye from Earth. Science writer Larry Sessions proposed it be named "the Clarke Event," a tribute that American Atheist Magazine described as fitting for "a man who contributed so much, and helped lift our eyes and our minds to a cosmos once thought to be province only of gods." 

He was buried in Colombo on March 22, 2008, in traditional Sri Lankan fashion, attended by thousands, including his younger brother Fred and his Sri Lankan adoptive family. 

In January 2024, a sample of Clarke's DNA was launched on the Peregrine Mission One, aimed at the Moon. 

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Clarke co-wrote the screenplay and novel of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) with director Stanley Kubrick; the film is widely regarded as one of the most influential ever made, and both were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. 

He appeared in 2010 (1984) — the film adaptation of his 2010: Odyssey Two — in a cameo as the man feeding pigeons outside the White House

He appeared as himself as a commentator for CBS News's broadcast of the Apollo 11 Moon landing on July 20, 1969, alongside Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra. 

He presented three television documentary series: Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (1981), Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers (1984), and Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious Universe (1994). 

A 1982 episode of the British comedy series The Goodies parodied his Mysterious World format. (1) (2)

ACHIEVEMENTS Proposed the geostationary communications satellite in 1945; the geostationary orbit is officially named the Clarke Orbit by the International Astronomical Union ,

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), with Stanley Kubrick (1)

Received the Kalinga Prize (UNESCO award for popularising science), 1961 

Awarded the 1982 Marconi International Fellowship for his satellite communications work 

Appointed CBE in 1989 "for services to British cultural interests in Sri Lanka" (1)

Knighted in 2000 "for services to literature" 

Awarded Sri Lanka's highest civilian honour, Sri Lankabhimanya, in 2005 

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Britannica (3) EBSCO Research Starters (4) Arthur C. Clarke Foundation (5) Doctor Strangemind