Links to the works by Arthur C. Clarke covered in this section:
Books Short Stories
Commentary:
Arthur C. Clarke, along with Isaac Asimov, was one of the two grand masters of science fiction. Clarke had a soaring imagination but his stories were generally grounded in reality and stayed in the realm of possibility. There was a lyrical quality to his science-fiction stories, so he was rightfully called “the poet laureate of the Space Age.”
Clarke was also a visionary. Among other things, he was the first to propose the development of modern satellites in 1945, more than ten years before the launch of the world’s first artificial satellite. Clarke’s idea that satellites in geostationary orbits can be used for communications are the basis for most of the wireless digital communications used in the world today. (In his honor, this type of orbit is now named Clarke Orbit by the International Astronomical Union.) Clarke also popularized the idea of a space elevator as an energy-efficient alternative to rockets in his novel The Fountains of Paradise.
Clarke co-wrote, with director Stanley Kubrick, the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey, a landmark science-fiction film and one of the best films ever made. Clark concurrently wrote a novel of the same name and produced three other novels in the Odyssey series, with the first and last being the best. Among his other famous works are Childhood’s End, The City and the Stars and Rendezvous with Rama. He later wrote three sequels to the last novel jointly with Gentry Lee, but these are nowhere as good as his original Rama novel.
In some ways, Clarke’s Sci-Fi writing career paralleled Isaac Asimov’s, and the two were friendly rivals. Both started writing short stories in the 1930s, both gained popularity in the 1940s, and both started writing novels and became famous in the 1950s and beyond. Both had their own professional careers outside of writing science fiction (Clarke was an inventor and astronautics expert, while Asimov was a biochemist and professor), and both were recognized for their ability to foresee the possibilities of human innovation and explain them in clear terms to non-scientific readers.
However, there were many differences between the two in writing style, quantity and versatility. Asimov’s writing style was colloquial and often humorous, while Clarke’s was usually serious and often poetic. Asimov was also more prolific and versatile, turning out a large number of books and stories in a variety of genres (such as fantasy and mystery), while Clarke’s output was more limited and generally did not extend to other fiction genres. Despite their differences, I consider these two incredible writers to be in a league of their own in the area of science fiction.