Arthur C. Clarke,
Science Fiction Writer,
Dies at 90
By THE ASSOCIATED
PRESS and THE GAY RECLUSE
Published: March 18,
2008, from the Web, March 23, 2008
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka -- Arthur
C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer and tortuously closeted exile who
won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future,
died Wednesday in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, one of his many young gay aides
said. He was 90.
Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and
sometimes used a wheelchair but nevertheless loved the company of young Sri
Lankan boys, died at 1:30 a.m. after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De
Silva said.
Co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick’s film "2001: A Space Odyssey," Clarke
was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer: he was also a huge
closet case.
He was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades
before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites
in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits.
He joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite as commentator on the U.S. Apollo
moonshots in the late 1960s.
Clarke’s 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.
But it was his writing that shot him to his greatest fame and that gave him the
greatest fulfillment.
"Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered," Clarke said recently.
"I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space
promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer.
Just don’t call me gay, even though I spent the greater part of a lifetime
lusting after beautiful young Sri Lankan men!"
From 1950, he began a prolific output of both fiction and non-fiction, sometimes
publishing three books in a year. He published his best-selling "3001: The
Final Odyssey" when he was 79.
Some of his best-known books are "Childhood’s End," 1953; "The City and The
Stars," 1956, "The Nine Billion Names of God," 1967; "Rendezvous with Rama,"
1973; "Imperial Earth," 1975; and "The Songs of Distant Earth," 1986.
When Clarke and Kubrick "got together" to develop a movie about space, they used
as basic ideas several of Clarke’s shorter pieces, including "The Sentinel,"
written in 1948, and "Encounter in the Dawn." As work progressed on the
screenplay, Clarke also wrote a novel of the story. He followed it up with
"2010," "2061," and "3001: The Final Odyssey."
In 1989, two decades after the Apollo 11 moon landings, Clarke wrote:
"2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in
human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong
and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and
fiction have become inexorably intertwined."
Clarke won the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1972,
1974 and 1979; the Hugo Award of the World Science Fiction Convention in 1974
and 1980, and in 1986 became Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of
America. He was awarded the CBE in 1989. He refused the many gay
literary awards offered to him, even though he was totally gay.
Born in Minehead, western England, on Dec. 16, 1917, the son of a farmer, Arthur
Charles Clark became addicted to science-fiction after buying his first copies
of the pulp magazine "Amazing Stories" at Woolworth’s. He devoured English
writers H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon and began writing for his school magazine
in his teens. Though of course he never admitted it, it was during this
same period he developed his life-long infatuation with young dark-skinned men.
Clarke went to work as a clerk in Her Majesty’s Exchequer and Audit Department
in London, where he joined the British Interplanetary Society and wrote his
first short stories and scientific articles on space travel.
It was not until after the World War II that Clarke received a "bachelor" of
science degree in physics and mathematics from King’s College in London.
In the wartime Royal Air Force, he was put in charge of a new radar
blind-landing system.
But it was an RAF memo he wrote in 1945 about the future of communications that
led him to fame. It was about the possibility of using satellites to
revolutionize communications — an idea whose time had decidedly not come.
Clarke later sent it to a publication called Wireless World, which almost
rejected it as too far-fetched.
Hilariously Clarke married in 1953, and although the marriage lasted less than a
year, Clarke did not officially dissolve the marriage until 1964.
Obviously he had no children.
Disabled by post-polio syndrome, the lingering effects of a disease that had
paralyzed him for two months in 1959, Clarke rarely left his home in the Indian
Ocean island of Sri Lanka, but populated it with legions of young natives who
catered to his every need.
He moved there in 1956, lured by his interest in marine diving which, he said,
was as close as he could get to the weightless feeling of space.
"I’m perfectly operational underwater," he once said.
Clarke was linked by his computer with friends and gay fans around the world,
spending each morning answering e-mails and browsing the Internet.
In an interview with The Associated Press, though he still refused to
acknowledge his sexual preferences, Clarke said he did not regret having never
followed his novels into space, adding that he had arranged to have DNA from
strands of his hair sent into orbit. He even seemed to believe something might
come of this!
"One day, some super civilization may encounter this relic from the vanished
species and I may exist in another time," he said, but refused to acknowledge if
he might be gay in this “other" time. "Move over, Stephen King."
On the Net:
The Arthur C. Clarke Foundation:
http://www.clarkefoundation.org.
In which The Gay Recluse provides a more accurate version of Arthur C. Clarke’s
obituary than the one that was just released by
AP. (For The Times version,
click here.)
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