News for Kidz: Arthur C Clarke as a child

Arthur C. Clarke – As a child

WHO IS HE? WHY HE IS FAMOUS QUICK FACTS TIMELINE

BIRTH AND FAMILY CHILDHOOD/ SCHOOLING LOVE FOR SCIENCE & SCIENCE-FICTION ROLE MODELS ADULT WORK AS AN AUTHOR
WRITING ABOUT CHILDHOOD CLARKE’S LAWS QUOTES Read More

Other Famous People as Kids News for Kidz home

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WHO IS HE?

Living legend Visionary A prophet of the space age

Leader of Science Fiction A modern-day Time Traveller

Sir Arthur Knighted by the Queen of England Ex-RAF pilot

The scientist’s favorite sci-fi writer Revered by astronauts

The inventor of the communication satellite

Author of famous book and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey

Pseudonyms: E. G. O'Brien; Charles Willis.

WHY HE IS FAMOUS?

É For decades, the author of the science-fiction classics "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Childhood's End" has exhibited an uncanny ability to see the future.

É He introduced the first talking and “intelligent” computer, HAL

É He has won honorary degrees from universities all over the world.

É He has won Emmies

É The only novelist to win science fiction's coveted quartet--the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, and Jupiter awards

É A special award is named after him: the Arthur C Clarke award for the best new science fiction book published in Britain

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QUICK FACTS

Place of Birth: Minehead, Somerset, England

Place of Residence: Colombo, Sri Lanka

Hobbies and other interests: "Observing the equatorial skies with a fourteen-inch telescope," table-tennis, scuba diving, and "playing with his Rhodesian Ridgeback and his six computers."

Has a Chihuahua called Pepsi

Spouse: Marilyn Mayfield (married for a year in 1953)

Family: Hector and Valerie Ekanayake and their three daughters Cherene, Tamara and Melinda, all of whom call him “Uncle Arthur”

First Publication: The Sands of Mars, 1946

Most Famous Works: 2001: Space Odyssey

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Today's Quote:

Check back to see a new quote of Arthur C Clarke every day!
or, click here for the whole list

COLOMBO, SRI LANKA--Leaning forward in his wheelchair, the 83-year-old man speaks deadpan into the tape recorder: "Testing one, two, three. Testing. This is not Arthur Clarke, this is his clone."

TIMELINE

1917	Born 16 December, Minehead, Somerset, UK
1923	Given a set of 3-D dinosaur picture cards, which started his interest in science
1924	The Clarke family moved to Ballifants farm where Arthur built his own telescope and made drawings of the Moon
1928	Started at Huish's Grammar School
1928	Saw his first American 'pulp' magazine, Amazing Stories
1930	William Stapledon's science fiction novel Last and First Men started Arthur's interest in the distant future

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/on-line/clarke/biog.asp

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BIRTH AND FAMILY

Birthplace: Minehead, Somerset, England. An English seaside town, 1917

Arthur C. Clarke was the first child of Mary Nora (Willis) Clarke and Charles Wright Clarke, who fought in WWI. When Charles Clarke was discharged, after the end of WWI, in 1918, the family moved to a farm called Beetham, near the town of Chard, also in the county of Somerset, England.

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With mother Nora and siblings

Clarke's brother, Frederick William, was born in 1921. His sister, Mary, and his other brother, Michael, were born sometime after that. Because of financial problems with the farm, it was sold at a loss and in 1924, the Clarkes moved to Ballifants, another farm

CHILDHOOD/ SCHOOLING

Unfortunately, when Clarke was only 13, his father, Charles Clarke died in a Bristol hospital in May of 1931. His mother, left with her children, gave riding lessons to augment the family income.

In 1927, Clarke started Huish's Grammar School.

LOVE FOR SCIENCE & SCIENCE-FICTION

He became interested in science in early age, when someone gifted him with a set of dinosaur cards.

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I think an awful lot of people get interested in science through dinosaurs. I've been interested in real science all my life: Arthur C Clarke

Arthur constructed his first telescope at thirteen. He loved to experiment with telescopes and rockets. He mapped the moon using a homemade telescope.

With a camera

Clarke first discovered science fiction at the age of twelve, when he encountered the pulp magazine Amazing Stories.

The encounter soon became an "addiction," as Clarke describes in the New York Times Book Review: "During my lunch hour away from school I used to haunt the local Woolworth's in search of my fix, which cost threepence a shot, roughly a quarter today."

The young Clarke then began nurturing his love for the genre through the books of such English writers as H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon.

He started writing his own 'fantastic' stories for a school magazine while in his teens, but was unable to continue his schooling for lack of funds. He consequently secured a civil service job as an auditor, which left him plenty of free time to pursue his "hobby."

ROLE MODELS

In an address to the British Interplanetary Society, "Space Travel in Fact and Fiction," Clarke discussed his literary forebears, adding the great astronomer Johannes Kepler to the list. Kepler, who discovered the laws governing the motion of the planets, also composed a story about a Moon voyage in 1643. Kepler would prove to be an ideal role model for Clarke.

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ADULT WORK

He graduated from Huish's in 1936 and left that same year for London. He got a job at the Exchequer and Audit Department of the Civil Service. Also in London, he joined the British Interplanetary Society. His apartment became the headquarters of the British Interplanetary Society, and in 1949 he became its chairman.

There he started to experiment with astronautic material in the BIS, as well as write for the BIS Bulletin.

Clarke served from 1941 to 1946 in the Royal Air Force, specializing in radar, and sold during the service his first science-fiction stories. In 1945 he wrote a technical paper that was the forerunner of communication satellites. The essay war reprinted in ASCENT TO ORBIT, a collection of his technical writings that he brought out after receiving the Marconi Award in 1982 for his contributions to communications technology.

After the war Clarke entered King's College, London, and took his B.Sc. with honors in physics and mathematics in 1948.

He was a commentator, with Walter Cronkite, on the U.S. Apollo space missions that put the first men on the moon in the years 1968 to 1970, and he hosted two major series that still play on international television.

AS AN AUTHOR

Sci-fi editor David Pringle Pringle admits, "Clarke writes an unusually pure form of science fiction." Clarke's City and the Stars, he writes, "succeeds in evoking a childlike sense of wonderment." The elegant novel, about the last city on Earth and a lone boy who yearns to escape, conforms "to popular science fiction stereotypes ... and moreover does it beautifully."

In the popular mind, he is most noted for his screenplay, 2001, A Space Odyssey, released in 1968 by MGM and directed by Stanley Kubrick, perhaps the most celebrated science fiction movie of all time. Clarke has a gigantic list of other works. Many of them are science fiction of a high order.

Rendezvous with Rama is an expression of wonder in the presence of Mystery. This novel was written in 1973, and it is the only work to win all four major awards in its genre.

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WRITING ABOUT CHILDHOOD

Clarke's writings are in genre of "hard" science fiction--stories in which science is the backbone and where technical and scientific discovery are emphasized. He is considered one of the main forces for placing "real" science in science fiction.

Clarke's fiction also examines the romantic side of science, often taking an almost mystical view of the universe. Childhood's End, his first successful novel, begins simply enough with the first appearance of extraterrestrials on Earth. They come to guide Earth to peace and prosperity by eliminating all individual governments (and, therefore, war) and solving the problems of poverty, hunger and oppression. The story ends, however, with the children of Earth developing extrasensory powers and joining the Overmind, a collective galactic "spirit" that makes their bodies--and Earth itself--expendable. Despite past criticism of the novel as presenting a bleak future, Thomas M. Disch observed in the Times Literary Supplement that the novel "has a way of lingering in the imagination that suggests it may in time, and defiance of all criticism, find a place in the supreme pantheon of (science fiction)." Science Fiction Review writer Gene DeWeese declared that thirty years after the book's publication, Childhood's End "in my opinion (is) the best SF novel ever written.” The book is often placed alongside Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and H.G.Wells' The Time Machine.

A second theme found in Clarke's work which resonates in popular culture suggests that no matter how technologically advanced humans become, they will always be infants in comparison to the ancient, mysterious wisdom of alien races. Humanity is depicted as the ever-curious child reaching out into the universe trying to learn and grow, only to discover that the universe may not even be concerned with our existence.

The aspect of "spiritualism" is an important one to Clarke as he feels that the search for man's place in the universe is humankind's fundamental quest. This quest takes many forms throughout Clarke's prose but the most prevalent is the Phoenix-like rebirth of childhood.

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QUOTES

"We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return ... The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation ... the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began."

I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

The moon is the first milestone on the road to the stars.

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.

We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 -- and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.

A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

New ideas pass through three periods:
*It can't be done.
*It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing.
*I knew it was a good idea all along !

"We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins."

"He never grew up; but he never stopped growing."

"A well stocked mind is safe from boredom."

We do live in an infinitely richer world and are definitely better for it.

I cannot imagine life before e-mail. Our ancestors live in a tiny limited world, knowing nothing about what was going on beyond the horizon.

But it is true that we are getting two different worlds now. Some people have access to information and I am sure a few yak herders in Mongolia do have access to e-mail. But the bulk of the world does not.

Technology began with fire, with tools and has gone all the way to now.

So imagination is perhaps the thing that distinguishes human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom.

I think an awful lot of people get interested in science through dinosaurs.

I've been interested in real science all my life.

I hate any form of cruelty. I hate hunting.

One of the problems with communications is you get "overcommunicated."

``Sometimes I feel like I'm really not writing it, I'm discovering it

"As far as the future is concerned, any political or sociological prediction is impossible," Clarke has said. "The only area where there is any possibility of success is the technological future."

By the way, I was - in a strange way - involved in a cloning project. There was a project afoot to send me into outer space along with a lot of other people. Not the whole me, though - just a hair from my head, while I still had some. It was quite a serious project by a company that launched a lot of spacecraft. The idea was that maybe in a hundred million years or so, an advanced civilization would find this little space capsule containing my hair, an Arthur C. Clarke would be cloned from it, and I would thus pop up in another galaxy in the distant future. Interesting thought.

CLARKE’S LAWS

CLARKE’S FIRST LAW:When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he says it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

CLARKE’S SECOND LAW The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

CLARKE’S THIRD LAW Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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