Cumbrian Sky

Very sad news: the acclaimed science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died, aged 90. As the BBC reports, Sir Arthur C Clarke was the author of more than 100 books, was credited with the invention of satellites, and achieved worldwide fame when his short story, "The Sentinel", was filmed by Stanley Kubrick as "2001 A Space Odyssey".

I'm sure many of the internet's scientists and space enthusiasts were introduced to science fiction through Arthur C Clarke's books, and have him to thank for our lifelong passion for space exploration. The first science fiction book I ever read, as a kid at school, was a collection of his short stories, borrowed from the library and read again and again and again. It's no exaggeration to say that it literally changed my life; I'd always been "into" space, ever since my first days at school when I found a whole shelf of books about space in the luibrary, but reading those stories of his opened my mind to the science in science fiction and showed me that it wasn't just about death rays, drooling aliens and good and evil. One of his short stories, "A Transit of Earth", helped shape my lifelong fascination with and passion for the manned exploration of Mars.

I was lucky enough to correspond with him a couple of times via email - a couple of years ago, when he was still well enough to do that; recently he was too poorly to use the internet much - and also got to speak to him once, not face to face but over a live telephone link in Edinburgh. He was the "absent guest of honour" at a science day thingy, and agreed to take questions from people in the audience. I asked him if he was for or against terraforming... if Mars wasn't a beautiful enough planet already without covering it with trees and lakes... and he replied, tactfully, and with a laugh, that he thought it would be a beautiful world whether it was left red or turned green.

In fact, one of Sir Arthur's books dealt with just that topic - the terraforming of Mars. I have it here on my table as I write this. Published in 1994, "The Snows of Olympus" is a slim hardback crammed full of then-revolutionary images of a terraformed Mars, courtesy of the then-revolutionary computer package "Vistapro". Compared to the amazingly detailed and lifelike "renders" we enjoy drooling over now, the images in that book look incredibly crude and dated now. Showing a future Mars at various stages along the terraforming process - lots of spiky green fir trees, clumsily-rendered cliffs and coastlines, garish false colours etc - they look primitive and almost childish, but at the time they were state of the art, the first time we could conceive of what a future green Mars might look like. And Clarke was obviously giddy with excitement as he saw images of a terraformed Mars appearing - very slowly! - on his computer; every page of the book is full of expressions of wonderment and glee. As a passionate "Red" - an anti-terraformer - even then, the thought of covering Red Mars with spikey fir trees and filling its calderas and craters with powder paint blue water was ghastly to me, but it is such a passionately written book that even I found myself swept along with it. If you haven't read it, track it down in your local library, you'll be glad you did.

Sir Arthur was also known for his popular 1970s TV series "Arthur c Clarke's Mysterious World", and many of you reading this blog will, I'm sure, have that image of a finely carved crystal skull burned into your mind. It was an iconic image, almost as iconic as the black monolith from "2001", a film which helped shape modern science fiction cinema. Often parodied, but never bettered, it's a film you either love or hate, you either think is a load of pompous twaddle or a work of genius. No doubt it will be on TV again, wherever you live, in the next few days, as a "tribute" to the man behind its original story.

It's often said when people die that their passing "marks the end of an era", but in this case it's actually true. AC Clarke's contributions to science fiction, science, and the history of mankind were literally huge. He helped carve, and shape, our modern satellite-dominated world. We all owe him a lot. I probably owe him my interest in and passion for space exploration and travel.

How he will be honoured now remains to be seen. Perhaps a major feature on a planet or moon will be named after him, I don't know. But I do know one thing: whenever they are born, the children of the first settlers on Mars will borrow - or more likely, download a copy of - one of Clarke's books from their school library, take it home to their hab module, read it in a quiet corner, and feel the same sense of wonder that I did.

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