Mystical magician

Arthur Charles Clarke, the man who dreamed the impossible for other scientists to make things possible, has passed away at the ripe old age of 90 at his seaside refuge in sunny Sri Lanka.

And what a wondrous life he led. He was a scientist and a mystic, with one characteristic feeding on and fuelling the other and, in turn, firing the imagination of millions of people who dared to dream and hoped to make it happen.

One of the last of the sci-fi greats of the 20th century, Clarke brilliantly bridged science and the arts by predicting solid scientific discoveries long before their time and then fascinating people the world over with almost 100 of his eminently readable scientific and science fiction books.

He exercised an uncanny ability to look into the future when he wrote his first technical paper, Extra Terrestrial Rays, in 1945. That paper ensured my enjoyment of the global satellite systems in use as I was growing up and still use today.

In 1948 Clarke wrote a short story called The Sentinel which was used as a launch pad by Stanley Kubrick to make the blockbuster movie 2001 – A Space Odyssey, in which his foreknowledge of a space station complete with videophones, laptops, e-mail and the HAL 9000 computer – a modern day supercomputer capable of feeling and perception – came through 11 years before a man was landed on the moon in 1969.

The movie was made in 1968, a fascinating year for a 10-year-old dreamer like me to launch into the spellbound world of time and space.

Nobody did it for me like Arthur Charles Clarke because although he was a visionary, his background in physics and mathematics kept him grounded in reality. Time and space have been good to him. As a budding author his first job in 1948 was as assistant editor of Physics Abstracts published by the Institute of Electrical Engineering where the world’s leading scientific journals landed on his desk. The rest is well-established history.

He had been living in Sri Lanka since 1956, satisfying his passion for underwater exploration, another vast unknown frontier.

Clarke, in his lifetime, had formulated three laws of prediction.

My favourite has always been: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" – and that’s how I’ll always remember him: the magician.

Nirmala Janssen
Editor@alnisrmedia.com

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