Sir Arthur C Clarke:AMONG THE giants of the imaginative promotion of the ideas of interplanetary travel, the colonising by man of nearby planets and the urgent need for peaceful exploration of outer space, Sir Arthur C Clarke, who has died aged 90, was pre-eminent because of his hard and accurate predictions of the detailed technologies of space flight and the use of near-Earth space for global communications.
Yet, in spite of his deep seriousness, JB Priestley described him in the 1950s as the happiest writer he had ever known.
Tallish, bespectacled, rather big-eared and thinning on top, Clarke tended to be described by friends as a beaming and highly articulate shambles of a chap, a man to whom convention meant very little, yet his mind was like a razor.
Unlike earlier writers on space travel, his imagination and creativity sprang, not from fantasy, but from sharp scientific and technical insight, unfettered by the arbitrary limitations of the perceptions of his time. His amazing career was possible largely because he was never, in any ordinary sense, quite a part of this world. Indeed, he chose to live in Sri Lanka, partly because it helped him neutralise the influence of western culture.
As he approached 80, it seemed that he had done almost everything that was possible in a lifetime, for he had written dozens of books, plumbed the depths of the Indian Ocean, carried the imagination of mankind to the remotest parts of the galaxy and gained honours in every corner of the globe.
However he then declared that one of his many remaining ambitions was to observe the meeting of alien intelligence with intelligence on Earth, a declaration he qualified by adding with his usual smile - "if there is true intelligence on Earth".
The great American astronomer Carl Sagan, no less interested in alien intelligence, replied rapidly, if informally, that the existence of Clarke was proof enough.
Sagan was one of the many post-war teenagers whose lives were changed profoundly by Clarke's non-fiction book Interplanetary Flight. This did more than spell out the technical case for space flight as a close and exciting reality. It embraced aspects of a new philosophy - in many ways Clarke's lifelong philosophy - that sprang from the perceived and enormous spiritual need for exploratory adventures of a new kind which, by their magnitude and imagination, might pull and hold mankind together.
Written in 1949 and published on both sides of the Atlantic, it was unique. The text, uncluttered by equations, is aimed at the general reader, yet all the relevant mathematics are gathered in an appendix. The arguments are clear and accessible.
The turning point in Clarke's career came in 1952 with the publication of The Exploration of Space, a non-fiction work that became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.
Clarke's stature and impact was probably greater than that accorded by popular acclaim, for he was highly critical of the limitations and military basis of major space programmes. He was bitterly critical of the 1980s concept of Star Wars and, well before this emerged as US policy, sent a personal appeal to the US congress. His video statement, A Martian Odyssey, which was read into the congressional record, argued that money spent on intercontinental ballistic missiles could be channelled into an international voyage to Mars to mark the 500th anniversary of the voyage of Columbus in search of the Americas in 1492.
This underlying seriousness led him to view his creative participation in commercial, if poetic, other-worldly enterprises, such as the film in 1968 of his book 2001: A Space Odyssey as a kind of scenario writing, not to be taken as an example of his central work.
In this, however, many would disagree, for 2001 ("a glorified screenplay", according to Clarke) was in many ways so accurate and convincing that Alexei Leonov, the first space-walking human, said he felt that it had carried him into space again. The film director Stanley Kubrick viewed Clarke's ability as unique.
Inevitably, since he was slightly unhappy about the book and the film, Clarke extended 2001: A Space Odyssey into a loosely linked trilogy - 2010: Odyssey 2 and 2061: Odyssey 3. Commenting on these books, Clarke said emphatically that "2010 is better than 2001, but 2061 is the best". But in its timing and public acceptance, 2001 rode space enthusiasm at its height.
Strangely, out of his huge corpus of books, novels, short stories, plays, films, TV series and anthologies - the 1992 authorised biography by Neil McAleer lists 137 titles - Clarke had a special affection for his interstellar novel The Songs of Distant Earth.
With its context and action entirely removed from and remote from Earth, it is the first of a new genre. Although not completed until 1985, it was the novel in which he finally shook the last vestiges of earthly soil from his imagination, freeing his curiosity to probe the deepest recesses of the universe and allowing him to isolate and examine human relationships.
Born in Minehead, Somerset, England, during the final battles of the first World War, Clarke went to Huish's grammar school, Taunton, and at 19 into the civil service.
His father was a telephone engineer and his mother Nora (Willis) was a telegraphist. At 17 he joined the British Inter-planetary Society, an organisation then widely regarded as crackpot, but of which he became treasurer and chairman.
In the civil service his mathematical ability took him into auditing. In 1941 he joined the RAF where, via electronics training, he became an instructor at radio school. Finally he went to work on the development of American ground control approach radar in Cornwall.
On leaving the RAF in 1946, he went to King's College London, gaining a first in physics and mathematics, and then sought a postgraduate degree in astronomy.
In 1953 he married Marilyn Mayfield. Eleven years later the marriage was dissolved. His last years were increasingly limited as post-polio syndrome left him confined to his wheelchair. He is survived by a brother and sister.
Arthur Charles Clarke: born December 16th, 1917; died March 18th, 2008.