Space Odyssey writer dies at 90 years old

Posted By Sara-Lise Haith on Wednesday Mar 19, 2008 @ 20:17 in Scuba

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Science fiction writer and avid diver Arthur C. Clarke has died this morning in Sri Lanka after suffering breathing problems. He was 90 years old. Clarke had been fighting post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and was sometimes seen using a wheelchair because his weakened condition made it difficult to walk.

Clarke was a promotor of ideas of interplanetary travel, the colonising by man of nearby planets and the urgent need for peaceful exploration of outer space. Obituaries from the press describe him as "a recluse, a nut who lives in a tree in India or someplace." Mr. Clarke moved to Sri Lanka because it helped him to a large extent neutralise the influence of western culture. As he approached 80, it seemed that he had done almost everything that was possible in a single 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.

Clarke was fascinated by American science-fiction magazines which reached Britain in bulk, probably as scrap-paper ballast in returning cargo ships. He was chairman of the British Interplanetary Society and collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the creation of 2001: Space Odyssey. He introduced the character of HAL the computer, and the concept of what lay behind the Star Gate. Clarke wrote an ending that had Bowman-the-Star-Child detonate nuclear weapons on Earth, but Kubrick chose to omit it as it was too similar to the Dr Strangelove finale. Having been installed in the Chelsea Hotel in New York through the rest of 1964, Clarke moved back to Sri Lanka early in 1965 to continue work, before arriving at MGM's Borehamwood studios in late summer as Kubrick geared up towards production. He delivered a final script to Kubrick in December 1965, who immediately complained it was much too wordy. (Kubrick later told a colleague that 2001 was "essentially a non-verbal experience".)

Clarke is responsible for the concept of communications satellites and geosychronous orbits which he conceptualized in 1945. He was a commentator on the U.S. Apollo moonshots with Walter Cronkite in the 1960s.

His non-fiction volumes on space travel and his explorations of the Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science, and in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.