The View from Serendip
The View from Serendip
By: Arthur C. Clarke
Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU
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This collection first published 1978 by Victor Gollancz Ltd
ISBN 0 330 2562s 4
To Nellie, for her 86th birthday
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Portions of this work have previously appeared in Astronautics & Aeronautics, Chicago Tribune Magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Penthouse, Playboy, Technology Review, and Vogue.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
D.A.C. News: ‘Servant Problem - Oriental Style’ and ‘How to Dig Space’ by Arthur C. Clarke. © D.A.C. News 1962,1964.
Daily Telegraph Colour Magazine: ‘Schoolmaster Satellite’ by Arthur C. Clarke. © 1971.
Doubleday and Company, Inc: The Frontiers of Knowledge: The Frank Nelson Doubleday Lectures at the Natural Museum of History and Technology at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. © Doubleday & Co Inc 1975.
Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc: Excerpts from The Making of a Moon, by Arthur C. Clarke. Rev. ed. © Arthur C. Clarke 1957,1958; excerpts from The Challenge of the Space Ship by Arthur C. Clarke. © Arthur C. Clarke 1959; ‘Whether or not there is life on Mars now, there will be by the end of this century’ by Arthur C. Clarke, from Mars and the Mind of Man by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, et al. © Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc 1973.
Little, Brown and Company: Excerpts from Shipwrecks and Archaeology: The Unharvested Sea by Peter Throckmorton. © Peter Throckmorton 1971; excerpts from First on the Moon: The Astronauts’ Own Story by Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr; Beyond Jupiter: The Worlds of Tomorrow by Chesley Bonestell and Arthur C. Clarke.
London Observer Colour Magazine: ‘The Sea of Sinbad’ by Arthur C. Clarke. © 1972.
The New York Times: ‘UFOs Explained’ and ‘The UFO Controversy in America’ by Arthur C. Clarke (27 July 1975). © The New York Times Company 1975; ‘The Times and Time’ by Arthur C. Clarke. © The New York Times Company 1969.
Time, The Weekly News Magazine: ‘Beyond The Moon: No End’ by Arthur C. Clarke. © Time, Inc 1969.
Courtesy Time-Life Books Inc: ‘Closing in on Life in Space’ by Arthur C. Clarke, from Nature/Science Annual, 1974 Edition.
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Contents
1 Concerning Serendipity
2 Dawn of the Space Age
3 Servant Problem - Oriental Style
4 The Scent of Treasure
5 The Stars in Their Courses
6 How to Dig Space
7 A Breath of Fresh Vacuum
8 The World of 2001
9 ‘And Now - Live from the Moon …’
10 Time and the Times
11 The Next Twenty Years
12 Satellites and Saris
13 The Sea of Sinbad
14 Willy and Chesley
15 Mars and the Mind of Man
16 The Snows of Olympus
17 Introducing Isaac Asimov
18 Life in Space
19 Last(?) Words on UFOs
20 When the Twerms Came
21 The Clarke Act
22 Technology and the Limits of Knowledge
23 To the Committee on Space Science
24 The Second Century of the Telephone
25 Ayu Bowan!
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1
Concerning Serendipity
For the last twenty years, my life has been dominated by three S’s - Space, Serendip, and the Sea.
Space came first, and indeed led to the others by a roundabout but now apparently inevitable route. In the late 1940s, I realized that the new techniques of free-diving, pioneered by Jacques Cousteau and Hans Hass, gave human beings a cheap and simple way of experiencing the ‘weightlessness’ of space travel - or something very close to it. So I purchased flippers and face mask, clawed my way down into the depths of the local swimming pool, closed my eyes, and tried to imagine that I was in orbit. It worked fairly well - though just how well I do not expect to know until I take my first ride in the space shuttle, sometime in the early 1980s (which will also be my own not-quite-so-early sixties).
I very quickly discovered that water could provide more than pseudo-weightlessness. In sufficiently large quantities, which were readily available over three-quarters of the earth’s surface, it could also supply adventure, beauty, strangeness, wonder - as well as an almost infinite menagerie of strange creatures, which even the most exotic planets might find it difficult to surpass. So I left the swimming pool and rediscovered the sea.
It was a rediscovery because I had been born within a few hundred metres of the sea (at Minehead, Somerset) and had spent much of my youth in or beside the Bristol Channel. Though I have always been under the impression that I was an extremely poor swimmer, this could hardly have been the case; I used to enjoy bathing in water so rough that spectators gathered along the sea wall, unable to decide whether I was waving or drowning. (Even in those days, I was a show-off, and it’s much too late to do anything about it now.)
In my late teens, however, I abandoned the sea when I moved to London and a life of gentlemanly leisure in the civil service, only slightly distracted by the rantings of Hitler. Yet geographical separation was not the only reason why, for almost ten years, I actually avoided the water; the fact that I could no longer see without spectacles was even more important. It was no fun splashing around in a saline haze; why, I might even lose my sense of direction, and start heading out towards the Welsh coast, fifteen kilometres away …
The invention of face masks changed all that; sea-going spectacles were now perfectly practical, and I could have twenty-twenty vision above and below water. In a remarkably short time, with considerable initial impetus from a disintegrating marriage, I was on my way to the mecca of all undersea explorers, the Australian Great Barrier Reef.
I can recommend the sea voyage from London to Sydney for anyone who wants both to read The Lord of the Rings and to write a novel of his/her own - though I cannot claim to have produced the whole of The City and the Stars aboard the P&O’s venerable Himalaya. A good deal of my time was spent at the bottom of the swimming pool, hoping to improve the capacity of my lungs, since there was no guarantee that underwater breathing equipment would be available in the remoter regions of the Reef. (It wasn’t.) Eventually I was able to stay submerged for almost four minutes, but then gave up out of consideration for the other passengers, who viewed my activities with increasing alarm.
It was, indeed, a foolish exercise, and I am perhaps lucky to have survived. Many divers have killed themselves by this trick of ‘hyperventilation’ - flushing out the CO2 in the lungs by taking deep, rapid breaths, thus inhibiting the normal breathing reflex and destroying, for several minutes, any further desire for oxygen. Hyperventilation can also produce permanent brain damage. My God, do you suppose …?
Anyway, in mid-December 1954 I arrived safely in Colombo, the largest city and main port of Ceylon. The Himalaya would be there for half a day, which allowed time for a fair amount of sightseeing. Fortunately, I had already made contact with two people who had promised to show me around.
One of them easily tops my list of ‘The Most Unforgettable Characters I’ve Ever Met.’ Major R. Raven-Hart, OBE, was then a tall, distinguished looking man of sixty-five with a straggly beard which gave him a distinct likeness to Conan Doyle’s Professor Summerlee, FRS. (And if you don’t know Professor Summerlee, gadfly and critic of the immortal Professor George Challenger, run - don’t walk - to The Lost World, which still remains the finest example of pure science-fiction adventure ever written, dammit.)
Raven-Hart had been in the British and French armies in the First World War, and in the Royal Air Force in the Second. In one of them (I’m not sure which) he had erected a radio station on top of the Great Pyramid. He had been given a medal by the Pope (‘I know you’re not a Christian, but it won’t do any harm,’ the pontiff had remarked) for rescuing a party of nuns in an enterprise that had also involved T. E. Lawrence.
He was a remarkable linguist, reading a dozen languages and speaking five, and had published translations, from Dutch, German, French, Swabian-German, and several Pacific tongues. Between the wars, he explored at least three continents by canoe, producing a series of books which were illustrated by his own drawings and photographs. He was also a sculptor, and once presented me with a small clay model of such embarrassing ambiguity that I was relieved when it mysteriously disappeared. Some idea of his range of interests may be gathered from the titles of his books: Canoe Errant on the Nile; Down the Mississippi; Ceylon: History in Stone; Canoe in Australia; Germans in Dutch Ceylon; The Pybus Embassy to Kandy 1762; Where the Buddha Trod. He also published a humorous book about the Royal Air Force: RAF’ing It.
In many ways, Raven-Hart reminded me of that much more famous traveller, Sir Richard Burton. He had similar linguistic abilities, coupled with a love of exotic places, cultures, and mores; the notorious scandal that terminated Burton’s Indian career would have fascinated him. And a later writer with whom he had much in common - including scientific interests - was Norman Douglas; if they ever met, which seems quite probable, they must have recognized each other as kindred souls.
Major Raven-Hart was over eighty when he died, but he was still translating and editing, having spent the last years of his life in Durban, exiled (apparently for financial reasons) from the land he loved. Certainl
y his fondness for Ceylon was apparent on that bright December afternoon in 1954, when we hired a cab and saw the sights of Colombo together. It was my first introduction to the fabulous East; the novelty has worn off, but the appeal remains unabated.
That same busy day I met my other Ceylon contact, zoologist-diver-artist Rodney Jonklaas, then assistant director of Colombo’s magnificent zoo. Rodney suggested that, if I survived the perils of the Great Barrier Reef, I should come back to explore the seas of Ceylon. At that time I was making no long-range plans; Jaws, perhaps fortunately, was still twenty-one years in the future, but I was acutely aware of the reputation of Australian sharks. Ironically, I met very few on the Reef; it was not until I got to Ceylon that I encountered these magnificent creatures face to face. So I made no promises, either to Rodney or to the major, when I sailed out of Colombo harbour, heading for the adventures I later recorded in The Coast of Coral, but by the time that volume was published, in 1956, I was already in the process of being Serendipidized.
It is curious how words that have always been around, lurking obscurely in the undergrowth, are suddenly discovered and become positively hackneyed. ‘Serendipity’ does not even appear in the excellent 1936 Longmans, Green edition of Roget’s Thesaurus which still serves me well; yet I have come across it recently in articles on engineering and astronomy by authors who would certainly not consider themselves to be literary stylists. However, though the word is usually employed in its correct meaning - of something useful or valuable discovered by a happy chance - I have found that very few people know its actual origin.
Serendip (or Serendib) is one of the many ancient names of Ceylon; it derives from the Muslim traders’ Sarandib. The Greeks and Romans called the island Taprobane; the indigenous name was Sri Lanka (‘the Resplendent Land’), and since 1972 this has been its official designation, though the national airline is still Air Ceylon, and no one ever talks of Sri Lankan tea.
So much for Serendip. Now Serendipity.
The word was invented, or at least put on paper, by the essayist Horace Walpole in 1754 - exactly two hundred years before I myself set foot in Serendip. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Walpole told one of his numerous correspondents that ‘he had formed it upon the title of the fairy-tale The Three Princes of Serendip, the heroes of which were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.’ (Note that Walpole, like Churchill, was not afraid of ending a sentence with a preposition.)
Whether The Three Princes is a genuine folk tale, or whether Walpole made it up, I do not know. But the exotically melodious word ‘serendipity’ obviously filled a gap in the English language, though it seems to have taken two centuries to get into general circulation. I doubt if I had ever heard of it, when my own life provided a perfect example of its application.
The Great Barrier Reef had been my objective when, almost by accident, I paused at Serendip for a single afternoon and saw it briefly through the eyes of two of its residents. Even when, a year later, I returned to write The Reefs of Taprobane (1957), I still did not know what I had discovered, for the excitements and distractions of the outside world (indeed, outside worlds) clouded my eyes. Though I became steadily more involved with the country, returning as a tourist at least once a year, it was not until the late sixties that I found it more and more painful to say good-bye, and felt completely happy nowhere else on earth.
Now, more than twenty years after I first set foot on the island, I have at last been able to arrange my life so that I need no longer leave. How I managed this - and, more important, why - is one of the themes of this book.
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2
Dawn of the Space Age
Towards the end of 1957, my love affair with Ceylon and its seas was interrupted by a persistent beeping at 20.005 megahertz.
There are some traumatic experiences that remain frozen in time, so that every man remembers to the end of his life exactly where he was when he heard, for example, of the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the attack on Pearl Harbor. In my case, I can add the dropping of the first A bomb and the orbiting of the first Sputnik.
In the small hours of 5 October, on the opening day of the Eighth International Astronautical Congress, I was awakened in my Barcelona hotel room by a phone call from London; the Daily Express wanted my comments on the new Russian satellite. Being as surprised as everyone else, I was hardly in a position to make any informed statement; after the initial exhilaration, I realized that I would have to hurry back to the typewriter. The previous month I had published The Making of a Moon: The Story of the Earth Satellite Program, and it was now obvious that the United States Navy’s Vanguard - to which my book had been largely devoted - was not going to be first into space.
Actually, it was not even second, since Dr Wernher von Braun’s Army team, which had been waiting impatiently in the wings, put the first American satellite into orbit within eighty days of getting the go-ahead. But those people who still refer to Vanguard as a failure do not know what they are talking about; launch vehicles derived from it - at a cost which now seems ludicrous - have been the workhorses of NASA’s scientific and applications programmes for almost twenty years. Vanguard was one of the best bargains the hard-pressed American taxpayers ever got.
As soon as I returned from Barcelona, I hastily (in three days!) revised The Making of a Moon in time for a new printing in January 1958. Meanwhile, Sputnik II, carrying the dog Laika, had gone into orbit. Not only was this satellite six times as large as Sputnik I, and three hundred times the weight of Vanguard I, but it also carried a living creature, a clear indication of Russian hopes. Yet not even the most optimistic could have dreamed that Yuri Gagarin’s flight was only four years ahead.
The Making of a Moon ended with these words:
The tiny, swiftly moving satellites of today are only a beginning; soon they will be joined by more sedately travelling companions, swinging on wider orbits round the Earth. Many of these will not merely be visible to the naked eye - they will be spectacular objects, far enough out in space to miss Earth’s shadow, and able to outshine many of the stars.
Our sister planets average more than three moons apiece; Earth is a freak in possessing only one. No one can guess how many satellites our world will have, or how large they will be, when this century draws to its close. Yet even if they are nothing more than plastic balloons covered with reflecting paint, they will change the pattern of the night sky.
This is an awe-inspiring thought, that should bring humility as well as pride. For when the story of our age comes to be told, we will be remembered as the first of all men to put their sign among the stars.
Those words were actually written a year before any satellites had been launched. Sputnik II was sailing silently through the constellations, brighter than all but a few of the stars, when I added this paragraph to the revised edition of The Making of a Moon.
For the first time in history, something man-made has become celestial, has passed beyond the realm of mundane affairs into a region which once seemed reserved for the gods. ‘Men come and go, but Earth abides.’ So it will be with these new creations of our minds and hands. Some of the fragile metal spheres now lying on laboratory benches in Washington and Moscow will still be orbiting this planet ages hence, when the nations which launched them are no more than faint and distant echoes in the memory of Man.
Only fourteen years later (see Chapter 14) I returned to this same thought. And by then, it was already both absurdly unimaginative and hopelessly geocentric.
So the Space Age, of which I had dreamed since childhood but had never really expected to see in my lifetime, had now well and truly begun, and the next twelve years were to climax in Neil Armstrong’s first footsteps on the moon. Since I had now put down more than tentative roots in Ceylon and was sharing a small house with a large stockpile of diving gear, this led to a somewhat schizophrenic existence. I tried to straighten matters with my essay, ‘Which Way Is Up?’ (The Challenge of the Spaceship, 1960; reprinted in Report on Planet Three, 1972). After pointing out the numerous parallels between the sea and space, I concluded: