Latter-Day Jules Verne

Across the U.S., a superior science-fiction movie called 2001: A Space Odyssey is playing to packed houses. An engrossing novel expanded from the movie's screenplay and a new nonfiction book called The Promise of Space are selling briskly in bookstores. Some 22,000 miles above the equator, communications satellites are relaying TV pictures and telephone calls between the continents. The movie, the books and the satellites all have something in common: they are the brainchildren of Arthur C. Clarke, a tall, springy and remarkably imaginative Englishman whose writing bridges the gap between the far reaches of science fiction and the intricate realities of scientific fact.

Science-fiction connoisseurs see the precise Clarke as a latter-day Jules Verne. Space scientists who invited him to address the international conference on bioastronautics and space exploration three weeks ago obviously regard him as a peer. That broad acceptance testifies to the validity of the three premises of which Clarke bases all his writing, fiction and nonfiction alike:

>When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, is almost certainly right. When he States that something is impossible, he 'is very probably wrong."

> "The only way to define the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible."

> "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

By mining the magic of the impossible, Clarke has uncovered the material for 40 volumes that have sold more than 5,000,000 copies--to say nothing of hundreds of articles in Sunday supplements and magazines ranging from LIFE to Playboy. His energy is impressive. In Colombo, Ceylon, where he has lived for the past twelve years, the author taught himself to be an expert skindiver. He has explored many tropical roofs, and charted and searched sunken wrecks in the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Inevitably, he has also written extensively about underwater exploration.

Wireless World. Clarke, now 50, traces his interest in science to the time he built a telescope while he was still a schoolboy in England. But exposure to such U.S. science-fiction magazines as Astounding Stories and Amazing Stories in the early 1930s really ignited his imagination, led him to study physics and electrical engineering, and turned him toward the typewriter.

In 1945, during a five-year stint as a radar instructor in the R.A.F., Clarke wrote an article called "Extraterrestrial Relays" for the magazine Wireless World. Heart of the piece was a detailed proposal for a synchronous communications satellite. Almost 20 years later, the device became a reality as Syncom 2. After the war, Clarke went to Kinks College in London, graduated with honors in physics and math, soon turned to writing full time.

In 1949 he published his first book, Interplanetary Flight, describing with remarkable prescience the space age that was dawning. Me won the permanent allegiance of science-fictioneers in 1953 with Childhood End, a novel about the transformation of man after he encounters benign but grotesque visitors from outer space. In 1963, Profiles of the Future illustrated his growing confidence in his gift for technological prophecy. He predicted that man would contact intelligent extraterrestrials by 2030, create artificial life by 2060 and achieve immortality by 2090.

In his latest nonfiction book, The Promise of Space, Clarke foresees the ultimate magic of travel to the stars. "It is not difficult," he explains, "if one is in no particular hurry." For flights that will last from decades to hundreds of years, he has worked out a method that will avoid dooming travelers to spend most of their lives in space. Simply send egg and sperm cells on the trip, he says, and have computers mate them some 20 years before the voyage is to end. After that, he suggests, "carry the embryos through to birth by techniques already foreshadowed in today's labs--and bring up the babies under the tutelage of cybernetic nurses who would teach them their inheritance and their destiny."

Ageless Wisdom. In the film 2001, Clarke's contribution as co-author and technical adviser to Producer-Director Stanley Kubrick is evident in such items as a weird but technologically probable talking computer that is more human than the astronauts. The film's ending, however, is almost pure Kubrick. A surviving spaceman is plunked into a Louis XVI bedroom after a psychedelic zoom through time and space that is mystifying to most moviegoers. But Clarke's novel version of 2001 explains all. As the survivor approached a huge monolith on lapetus, one of Saturn's ten moons, the astronaut entered a "stargate" into a different dimension, dominated by a godlike superintelligence. He is first returned to childhood, then transmuted into pure intellect and transported back to earth, carrying with him all the wisdom of the universe.

In the future, Clarke plans to concentrate on science fiction. But he has one unfulfilled goal: a flight of fact. Although he believes regularly scheduled trips to the moon will not begin until after the turn of the century, he hopes to be included on one of the early flights, "some time in the '80s."

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