Arthur C. Clarke

Biography

Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) was the author of dozens of novels, short stories, and essays, most famously 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he adapted, with Stanley Kubrick, into a widely acclaimed film in 1968. Clarke is widely recognized as a father of modern science fiction and brought the genre into the popular imagination. His famous Three Laws, including “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” have become modern proverbs. A scientist as well as a writer, he proposed the idea of geostationary satellites in a 1945 paper published more than a decade before the first orbital rocket launch.

See Work

ESSAYS / Winter 1960

Shaw and the Sound Barrier

By Arthur C. Clarke

There seem very few subjects in which Shaw was not interested, and fewer still on which he was not prepared to express his opinion. Nevertheless, it may surprise most people to learn that towards the end of his life the ubiquitous...