Sir Arthur C. Clarke - 1917 - 2008

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By one of those odd coincidences, I was flicking through the archives of the BBC Radio 4 website yesterday, in search of something else, when I came across this interview, recorded in 2005, with the author, little thinking that this would be the last time I'd hear it while he was still alive.

I saw the news of his demise online, rather than learning of it over a satellite link through the TV, or, as he might once have imagined, in a news update broadcast from Earth, whilst I was pottering about on Mars or the Moon. Suffice it to say, the death of Arthur C. Clarke marks the passing of one of the most popular visionaries of the 20th Century, and one who will be most famously remembered as the the man who, along with Stanley Kubrick, gave us the cinematic epic, '2001 - A Space Odyssey'.

Clarke actually had a solid background in science, spending part of WWII working on what was the most advanced radar system in the world; moreover, he is credited with being the first person to suggest satellites orbiting above Earth as a useful means of transmitting radio signals between remote global locations - an idea that was later taken up by the TV industry, so that due to Clarke's immortal legacy, humankind is now able to watch live cricket at all hours of the day and night in England, whilst it is being played in Australia, India, New Zealand Pakistan, South Africa, and even Clarke's chosen domicile, Sri Lanka.

His prodigious output saw him write numerous short stories, novels and assorted books on our rather mysterious world, some of which he presented in his own TV series. His writing career spanned more than five decades, and I'm going to look quickly at a couple of his short stories, each describing scenarios depicting the end of this world as we know it - they might not be rated among his best tales, but all three have nevertheless stayed with me over the years. In no particular order, they are, 'No Morning After' and 'Nemesis'.

The first, 'No Morning After', relates the attempts of a concerned race of extraterrestrial beings - the Thaarn - who attempt to contact Earth in order to warn us of an impending disaster, in this case the imminent explosion of the Sun - unfortunately the only individual with whom they can establish contact - via a type of mind-link - is a disillusioned missile designer, Dr. William Cross, sitting morosely alone in his office, getting trashed on whisky.

Whilst lost in shallow thoughts of pointless despair, and staring blankly at a wall, the Thaarn home in on his (semi-)conscious mind, and the wall before him appears to dissolve. Thus he now finds himself looking down a long tunnel, and begins to hear what he mistakenly assumes to be voices in his head, as described here...

"Bill," the voice began, "listen carefully. We have had great difficulty in contacting you, and this is extremely important."

Bill doubted this on general principles. Nothing was important any more.

"We are speaking to you from a very distant planet'" continued the voice in a tone of urgent friendliness. "You are the only human being we have been able to contact, so you must understand what we are saying."

Bill felt mildly worried, though in an impersonal sort of way, since it was now rather hard to focus on his own problems. How serious was it, he wondered, when you started to hear voices? Well, it was best not to get excited. You can take it or leave it, Dr. Cross, he told himself. Let's take it until it gets to be a nuisance.

"OK," he answered with bored indifference. "Go right ahead and talk to me. I won't mind as long as it's interesting."

There was a pause. Then the voice continued in a slightly worried fashion.

"We don't quite understand. Our message isn't merely interesting. It's vital to your entire race, and you must notify your government immediately.

"I'm waiting," said Bill. "It helps to pass the time."

Five hundred light years away, the Thaarn conferred hastily among themselves. Something seemed to be wrong, but they could not decide precisely what. There was no doubt they had established contact, yet this was not the sort of reaction they had expected. Well, they could only proceed and hope for the best.

They then tell him how he can save himself and everyone else on the planet simply by walking into wormhole-like tunnels they will replicate across the globe, enabling the humans to traverse space and walk straight onto another habitable planet, upon which they will be able to reconstruct their civilisation.

For his part Dr.Cross muses on the ingenuity of the human mind to create such vivid and realistic hallucinations. Following more dialogue with what he believes to be his 'ingenious hallucination', he opines that after all it might not be such a bad thing if the world was to be consumed in a gigantic ball of incandescent plasma, surmising that the human race was fed up worrying about the Cold War, the high cost of living, and so on - after which he thanks them for the message, and tells the Thaarn not to bother - which elicits the following reaction...

There was consternation on Thaar. The Supreme Scientist's brain, floating like a great mass of coral in its tank of nutrient solution, turned slightly yellow about the edges - something it had not done since the Xantil invasion five thousand years ago. At least fifteen psychologists had nervous breakdowns and were never the same again. The main computer in the College of Cosmophysics started dividing every number in its memory by zero, and promptly blew all its fuses."

Although a light-hearted tale in itself, it does nevertheless remind us that whilst we have no idea what sort of reaction we might elicit in ourselves from sentient beings elsewhere in space, there is no telling what their first - or last - impressions of us might be.

Although we have people making worthy efforts to contact intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, such as those in the METI project, the recent news that someone is planning to beam a Doritos ad 42 light-years out to a nearby star, 47 UMa, isn't heartening - I imagine that one way of incurring the wrath of potentially unfriendly aliens would be by spamming them with junk food ads - or even worse, asking them for help with complicated Ikea assembly manuals.

Nemesis joins two stories into one, propelling two very different protagonists from their own troubled times far into the future of a dying Earth, long after human civilisation has ceased to exist there - one a mad dictator, the Master, intent on reigniting the reign of terror he had instigated in his own time, the other a philosopher named Trevindor who had become persona non gratis, in a future era of humanity through which the Master had unwittingly overslept. This from Nemesis...

'The Master's dreamless sleep was more than half ended when Trevindor the Philosopher was born, between the fall of the Ninety-seventh Dynasty and the rise of the Fifth Galactic Empire. He was born on a world very far from Earth, for few were the men who ever set foot on the ancient home of their race, now so distant from the throbbing heart of the Universe. They brought Trevindor to Earth when his brief clash with the Empire had come to its inevitable end.

Here he was tried by the men whose ideals he had challenged, and here it was they pondered long over the manner of his fate. The case was unique. The gentle philosophic nature that now ruled the Galaxy had never before met with opposition, even on the level of pure intellect, and the polite but implacable conflict of wills had left it severely shaken. It was typical of the Council's members that, when a decision had proved impossible, they appealed to Trevindor himself for help.

The philosopher duly comes up with a few suggestions for the nature of his own punishment, the last of which is the one chosen...

"It is agreed. We will send you to an age when the Sun is still warm enough for life to exist on Earth, but so remote that any trace of our civilisation is unlikely to survive. We will also provide you with everything necessary for your safety and reasonable comfort..."

In fact they send him a metallic building in this very spirit, with the attached note...

To Trevindor, the greetings of the Council,
This building which we have sent after you through the time-field will supply all your needs for an indefinite period. We do not know if civilisation will still exist in the age in which you find yourself. Man may now be extinct, since the chromosome K Star K will have become dominant, and the race may have mutated into something no longer human. That is for you to discover. You are now in the twilight of the Earth, and it is our hope that you are not alone. But if it is your destiny to be the last living creature on this once lovely world, remember that the choice was yours. Farewell.

As luck, or otherwise, would have it, he's not the only living creature left on Earth, as he discovers upon encountering the Master - and peering into the latter's mind, Trevindor comes face to face with reality from which the Master had come...

"The Master was beginning to stir once more, and into Trevindor's mind crept broken fragments of thought. Pictures of the world the Master had known began to form in the watcher's brain. At first Trevindor could make no sense of them then, suddenly, the jumbled shards fell into place and all was clear.

A wave of horror swept over him at the appalling vista of nation battling against nation, of cities flaming to destruction and men dying in agony. What kind of world was this? Could men have sunk so low from the peaceful age Trevindor had known? There had been legends, from times incredibly remote, of such things in the early dawn of Earth's history, but man had left them with his childhood. Surely they could never have returned! The broken thoughts were more vivid now, and even more horrible. It was truly a nightmare age from which this other exile had come - no wonder that he had fled from it!

Trevindor then realises that far from fleeing the carnage, the Master was trying to carry on what he had started in his own past, prompting the philosopher to kill the madman through sheer mind power, so that he indeed becomes the very last human alive on the desert planet Earth.

Ever the optimist, at least as far as mankind was concerned, Clarke imagines a future in which humans have civilised themselves away from the violence and warfare so prevalent in the present day - and one where natural evolution is still the primary influence that decides what humankind will be like in that distant future.

But with recent advances in the study and application of genetics, it seems ever more likely that humans in the future will be bio-genetically engineered rather than having evolved organically as we have done over millions of years.

Indeed, if humans are ever to live in galactic space, it won't be organic and short-lived humans that make the initial space-ship journeys out there. Perhaps we will need to send in our place, (sentient) robotic entities, along with samples of our own genetic material - once at journeys' end, hundreds or thousands of years later, the organic human material will be unfrozen and fertilised back into life, giving birth to humans whose first generations will probably have to be brought up by robot parents and assorted sibling software.

Whether those humans will be of the same bellicose persuasions as their ancestors is something that might need to be addressed - there's probably not much point in scattering humanity across the galaxy if everyone's going to wipe each other out sooner rather than later - conversely, it might be argued that human conflict has also given birth to some of our greatest inventions, from a cultural as well as technical perspective.

However, despite Clarke's prophetic thoughts on the future of humankind, it would appear that for the foreseeable future, we will continue to dwell on Earth - writing back in the 1960s, it must have seemed to many that it was almost inevitable that by this first decade of the 21st century, there would be a constant - if limited - human presence on the Moon, and probably Mars as well. Instead, our manned missions are limited to the Shuttle and the Space Station, whilst robotic missions zip here and there throughout the solar system - NASA spending on Mars projects is set to be drastically cut, with the date and details of any future manned mission to the Moon still the subject of little more than occasional debate.

Which means that for the time being, we will have to carry on where Arthur C. Clarke left us - imagining our future in a sea of stars, whilst still marooned on Island Earth - but thanks to great writers such as Clarke, at least we have plenty of good books and stories to read as we while away the waiting time.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke Foundation