Towards the end of his life Clarke fell into the rut of producing myriad sequels to his earlier masterpieces rather than new work. Some of his short stories are marvellous but many read like five-finger exercises, often aiming at a humorousness that hasn’t aged well. He was an unshowy writer, his prose functional rather than beautiful, his characterisation rudimentary. The amazing final line of “Nine Billion Names” (I won’t spoil it, if you don’t know it), the expertly paced uncovering of the mystery of the alien “overlords” who place Earth under benign dictatorship in Childhood’s End and the wondrous uplift of 2001 – this is the genuine strong black coffee of science fiction. What all three works share is the ability to construe moments of astonishing transcendence out of the careful delineation of scientific or technological plausibility.
With “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953), Childhood’s End (1953) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) he has a fair claim to have produced the best short story, novel and screenplay in 20th-century SF. But most important was his science fiction. He was a prolific science writer and presenter, a rationalist and space flight advocate. He was, for a time, everywhere: his books thronging the shops, he himself popping up on telly to present Arthur C. Like many SF fans I grew up reading Clarke. But having survived a bout of polio in 1962, he found the disease returned as post-polio syndrome in the 1980s it eventually killed him in 2008.įor a while Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov constituted the “big three”, bestriding science fiction like colossi. B orn on 16 December 1917, Arthur C Clarke lived long enough to see the year he and Stanley Kubrick made cinematically famous with 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it seemed for a while as though he might see in his centenary too: he was physically active (he had a passion for scuba diving), non-smoking, teetotal and always interested in and curious about the world.
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