Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke was a British science fiction writer and futurist whose visionary novels and short stories shaped the genre and anticipated technologies that later became reality.

Arthur C. Clarke spent most of his adult life in Sri Lanka, writing novels and nonfiction that combined rigorous scientific thinking with a sense of cosmic wonder that few science fiction writers have matched. He is one of the “Big Three” of science fiction’s golden age alongside Asimov and Heinlein, and his influence on the field — and on actual space science and technology — is difficult to overstate.

2001: A Space Odyssey, developed simultaneously with Stanley Kubrick’s film, remains his most discussed work: an account of human evolution, artificial intelligence, and first contact that operates simultaneously as hard SF and as something closer to metaphysical meditation. The HAL 9000 sequences are among the most suspenseful in science fiction, and the final section, whatever it ultimately means, has the quality of genuine strangeness that separates great SF from merely good SF. Childhood’s End is his other great novel — a first-contact story that builds to a conclusion of enormous scope and genuine desolation.

Clarke’s prose is functional rather than literary, and his characterization is a known weakness: his human beings are often less interesting than the ideas and machines that surround them. But his ideas are extraordinary — the geosynchronous communications satellite, the space elevator, the nature of post-human intelligence — and his best work has the quality of all great science fiction: it enlarges the imagination by making the unimaginable seem not just possible but inevitable.