Since Clarke is himself an unswerving optimist, with an all but Buddhist reverence for life, the worlds that he creates, however strange, are usually basically benign. It is very rare in a Clarke story to find an “alien”—i.e., an extraterrestrial being—or an animal, or even a plant, that one feels one could not get on with, given a little practice. Moreover, the inanimate objects also acquire personalities. Here is Clarke describing the prehistoric earth in “The Sentinel,” the short story that was transformed into “2001”: “Such was our own Earth, the smoke of the great volcanoes still staining the skies, when that first ship of the peoples of the dawn came sliding in from the abyss beyond Pluto. It passed the frozen outer worlds, knowing that life could play no part in their destinies. It came to rest among the inner planets, warming themselves around the fire of the sun and waiting for their stories to begin.” And here is Clarke describing Alvin, the hero of “The City and the Stars,” in his first encounter with a strange robot: “None of the conventional control thoughts produced any effect. The machine remained contemptuously inactive. That suggested two possibilities. It was either too unintelligent to understand him or it was very intelligent indeed, with its own powers of choice and volition. In that case, he must treat it as an equal. Even then he might underestimate it, but it would bear him no resentment, for conceit was not a vice from which robots often suffered.” Stanley Kubrick once summarized Clarke’s gift by saying, “He can take an inanimate object like a star or a world, or even a galaxy, and somehow make it into a very poignant thing that almost seems alive.”

Clarke has made his home in Ceylon more or less permanently since 1956. What drew him there, and keeps him there, is the sea. Ceylon is surrounded by some of the most magnificent coral reefs in the world—reefs that abound in tropical marine life. Since 1951, Clarke—despite the fact that he has never learned to swim properly—has been an ardent deep-sea diver and photographer in such diverse places as the English Channel; Clearwater, Florida; the Great Barrier Reef of Australia; and along the coast of Ceylon. Of the more than five hundred articles, books, and short stories that he has written to date (Clarke has catalogued his output in four neatly handwritten looseleaf notebooks, with entries indicating when the work was done, who bought it, and how much was paid; the next entry will be No. 510), about a quarter have to do with the sea. The rest include technical electronics articles (most notably his classic paper on the communications satellite, which appeared in the October, 1945, issue of Wireless World, and in which he proposed extraterrestrial relay stations, plotted the orbits required, and set forth in great detail the fundamental principles of the satellite’s design); other scientific papers dating back to his R.A.F. days; short stories like “The Sentinel” and “Before Eden;” novels like “Earthlight” and “Against the Fall of Night;” popular scientific books like “The Exploration of Space” and “Interplanetary Flight;” and, of course, the enigmatic screenplay for “2001.” Despite all this activity, which has taken Clarke to most of the centers of space technology in the Western world as a consultant, a lecturer, or an observer, the spell of the sea has always drawn him back to Ceylon. He has summarized his feeling about Ceylon in “The Treasure of the Great Reef,” his most recent book on deep-sea diving. In it he describes the discovery and salvage of a seventeenth-century treasure ship that was sunk on the Great Basses Reef, off the south coast of Ceylon—an enterprise he undertook with Mike Wilson, a former British paratrooper, frogman, film producer, and professional diver, who introduced Clarke to diving and has been his partner in underwater explorations ever since. Of Ceylon, Clarke writes, “Though I never left England until I was thirty-three years old (or travelled more than a score of miles from my birthplace until I was twenty), it is Ceylon, not England, that now seems home. I do not pretend to account for this, or for the fact that no other place is now wholly real to me. Though London, Washington, New York, Los Angeles are exciting, amusing, invigorating, and hold all the things that interest my mind, they are no longer quite convincing. Their images are blurred around the edges; like a mirage, they will not stand up to detailed inspection. When I am in the Strand, or 42nd Street, or NASA Headquarters, or the Beverly Hills Hotel . . . my surroundings are liable to give a sudden tremor, and I see through the insubstantial fabric to the reality beneath.” He concludes, “And always it is the same: the slender palm trees leaning over the white sand, the warm sun sparkling on the waves as they break on the inshore reef, the outrigger fishing boats drawn up high on the beach. This alone is real; the rest is but a dream from which I shall presently awake.”

Clarke was born on December 16, 1917, in the small seaside town of Minehead, in Somerset, on the Bristol Channel. (His speech still carries the lilting accent characteristic of Somerset; “moon,” for example, becomes “moo-un,” with a melodic emphasis on the “moo.”) Clarke’s father was then a soldier at the front, and, to make ends meet, his mother, grandmother, and an aunt were running a boarding house, which still stands. After the war, Clarke’s father invested in a farm nearby, and when Clarke was about five the family moved from the boarding house to the farm. The first years there were a financial disaster, and this was compounded by the death of Mr. Clarke when Arthur was still in his early teens. By this time, there were three other children in the family—two brothers, Fred and Michael, and a sister, Mary. (Fred was until very recently a heating engineer, and is now the full-time director of the Rocket Publishing Company, a family enterprise that invests Clarke’s European royalties in various underwater and film operations. Michael has settled on the family farm and is running it, and Mary, a former Royal Navy Nursing Officer, is now married and at home.) Mrs. Clarke had to take over the farm herself to make a living for her four children. On a recent visit to Clarke in Colombo, I met Mrs. Clarke, who was making her first trip to Ceylon. She turned out to be a delightful ruddy, gray-haired woman somewhere in her seventies (Clarke says she simply will not tell her children how old she is, and none of them have been able to find out), who shares with the other Clarkes I have encountered a general lucidity of mind and fluidity of speech.

Even a casual reader of Clarke’s fiction cannot fail to be struck by the fact that its animals, robots, and aliens often appear to be more human than the human beings. Squeak, the first Martian discovered by the Earthlings in “The Sands of Mars,” and the lion that forms a charming friendship with a young boy in “The Lion of Comarre”—and even the squids in one of Clarke’s more recent stories, “The Shining Ones,” to say nothing of the wonderful aliens in “Childhood’s End” and the benign and melancholic ultimate intelligence, Vanamonde, in “The City and the Stars”—all have the appealing characteristics of domestic animals on a bizarre cosmic farm. Clarke is well aware of this and attributes it, in part, to the fact that he has always been more interested in things and ideas than in people. He also feels that it is attributable in part to his early life on the farm. In addition to the usual farm animals, the Clarkes were surrounded by dogs, which his mother raised professionally. Clarke recalls that at one point they had fourteen puppies in the house, which surged back and forth in waves between the rooms. “We were drowning in a sea of them,” he remembers. Clarke keeps two dogs—large German shepherds—in his house in Colombo, as well as a number of wild birds, which lodge in the interior nests that the Ceylonese put in their dining and living rooms to bring good luck. Clarke will not kill any animal that is not actively venomous, and during my visit with him I aided in gently depositing out-of-doors a considerable assortment of tropical spiders of impressive size and girth, which, Clarke insisted, wouldn’t hurt anything, and whose presence was necessary on the front lawn to preserve the delicate ecological balance. Indeed, Clarke’s first interest in science came through animals—prehistoric animals. He recalls driving in a pony trap with his father, and his father’s giving him a cigarette picture card showing a prehistoric reptile. Clarke was immediately fascinated, and began collecting the other cards in the series. Then, when he was about twelve, after a brief spell of fossil collecting, he suddenly discovered astronomy and, as he puts it, “that was it.” The next several years became a feast of reading astronomy books, copying down astronomical tables, and constructing telescopes. Clarke is a firm believer in the Freudian dictum that adult happiness lies in the fulfillment of unfulfilled childhood aspirations. As a child, he could not afford any scientific instrument that he did not make with his own hands. By way of compensation, he has now purchased a first-rate Questar telescope, which he sets up on his lawn in the evenings in order to watch the moon and planets and any satellites that happen to pass over Colombo. In addition, he owns a very advanced Zeiss microscope. He and I spent a few afternoons peering at various objects through the Zeiss—a butterfly wing, a plant stem, and a slide of a cross-section of tissue from a human brain, which had been lent to Clarke by a local surgeon. Clarke told me that while he was writing the novel “2001” he used to devote a good deal of time to contemplating the brain tissue, and that this is what had inspired him to write of astronaut David Bowman’s final transformation, “He seemed to be floating in free space, while around him stretched, in all directions, an infinite geometrical grid of dark lines or threads, along which moved tiny nodes of light—some slowly, some at dazzling speed. Once he had peered through a microscope at a cross-section of a human brain, and in its network of nerve fibers had glimpsed the same labyrinthine complexity. But that had been dead and static, whereas this transcended life itself. He knew—or believed he knew—that he was watching the operation of some gigantic mind, contemplating the universe of which he was so tiny a part.” The one childhood ambition that Clarke has never realized is to own the most elaborate possible Meccano set—the British equivalent of an Erector set. But the ambition is still with him. “In my declining years, when I am too feeble to totter out to the telescope, I could build almost anything I wanted with a set like that,” he says. [#unhandled_cartoon]