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Abstract
Arthur C. Clarke’s 1946 essay on ‘The Challenge of the Spaceship’ was one of the founding manifestoes of the Space Age, and helped to establish him as the West’s leading techno-prophet. Restating his ideas in subsequent factual and fictional works, Clarke successfully propagated the belief that man’s destiny lay in space and that the process was already underway. On the surface Clarke’s oeuvre offers a classic astrofuturist model of progress as technology-driven, but on closer examination it also incorporates a more pessimistic, historically based strand of philosophy, British rather than American. This essay traces the genesis of Clarke’s early work and the influence upon him of the historian Arnold J. Toynbee and the moral philosophers Olaf Stapledon and C.S. Lewis. Toynbee was essentially a Christian pessimist who believed that western civilization was on the way out; his long historical perspectives were an important source of inspiration for Clarke, leading him to a cyclical rather than a simply progressive model of history which contemplated both the beginning and the end of civilizations. The concerns of Stapledon and Lewis with grand narratives of decline and redemption were also influences on Clarke. All this needs to be understood in relation to both the European experience of World War I and to the coming of the atomic bomb, the latter a profound influence on Clarke’s generation. Such perspectives gave European astroculture a more modulated vision of the human future in space than the technologically based astrofuturism which dominated in the USA.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Thore Bjørnvig, Alexander Geppert and Ray Macauley for comments on an earlier version of this article.
Notes
1. Clarke, ‘Challenge of the Spaceship,’ 66.
2. Clarke, ‘Memoirs of an Armchair Astronaut (retired),’ 413.
3. Winter, The Rocket Societies, 87–97; Geppert, ‘Space Personae;’ Spufford, The Backroom Boys, ch. 1, ‘Flying Spitfires to Other Planets;’ Willhite, ‘The British Interplanetary Society;’ Neufeld, Wernher von Braun, 474; Piszkiewicz, Wernher von Braun, 127; Clarke, Astounding Days, 160–63.
4. Clarke, ‘V-2 for Ionosphere Research?’ and ‘Extraterrestrial Relays’
5. Clarke, ‘The Rocket and the Future of Warfare,’ 69; McAleer, Arthur C. Clarke, chs 5–6. Clarke’s principal essays are collected in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! There is a useful collection of material in the Arthur C. Clarke biographical files, ref. 000330-1, in the Historical Reference Collection, NASA History Office, Washington, DC.
6. Clarke’s short stories, variously anthologized, are all in The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke. London: Gollancz, 2001.
7. Clarke, Prelude to Space. Effectively Clarke’s first novel, Prelude to Space was published in New York in 1951 and London in 1953 and went through many editions.
8. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination, ch. 2; McAleer, Arthur C. Clarke, 78 and ch. 6; Spufford, The Backroom Boys, ch. 1, ‘Flying Spitfires to Other Planets;’ Macauley, ‘Crafting the Future.’
9. Clarke, Promise of Space, 11.
10. Kubrick Archive, University of the Arts, London; CBS, 10:56:20PM 7/20/69: The Historic Conquest of the Moon.
11. The actual dates were 1959 and 1969, although the Moon was reached without atomic rockets.
12. Clarke, ‘Challenge of the Spaceship,’ 72–73.
13. Ibid., 74–76.
14. Clarke consistently pressed this point, as in the foreword to a popular 1972 book: ‘Before the reality, there must be the dream to provide inspiration.’ Clarke, foreword to Moore, Challenge of the Stars, 5.
15. C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943: Voyager edn, 2001), e.g. ch. 6, quotation at 251. See also Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, chs 4 and 20.
16. Clarke-Lewis correspondence, fols 8--10, December 1946.
17. There are interesting parallels here with the British MAUD Committee which (as Gowing notes) combined a ‘synthesis of theory and practical programming’ with a tone of urgency in its 1941 report on the feasibility of the atomic bomb, putting Britain (on paper at least) briefly in the lead in its field: Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 85.
18. Bowler, Invention of Progress, 21–22.
19. Corfield, Time and the Shape of History, 96–103 and ch. 6.
20. Launius, ‘Perfect Worlds, Perfect Societies,’ 339.
21. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Pyschoanalysis, 319–20; Overy, The Morbid Age, ch. 4.
22. Clarke, ‘Challenge of the Spaceship,’ 72–73.
23. Shapley, Of Stars and Men, ch. 7.
24. Dark, ‘Reclaiming the Future;’ Geppert, ‘Flights of Fancy;’ Poole, Earthrise, ch. 2; Geppert, Imagining Outer Space.
25. McCurdy and Launius, Imagining Space; Launius, ‘Compelling Rationales for Spaceflight.’
26. Turner, Re-reading Frederick Jackson Turner; Siddiqi, ‘Competing Technologies, National(ist) Narratives, and Universal Claims;’ Bush, Science the Endless Frontier, ch. 1; Geppert, ‘Flights of Fancy,’ 595–96; Kleinman and Solovey, ‘Hot Science/Cold War,’ 112–17.
27. Williamson, ‘Outer Space as Frontier;’ Launius, ‘Perceptions of Apollo,’ 130–32; Launius, ‘Compelling Rationales for Spaceflight;’ Dark, ‘Reclaiming the Future.’
28. von Braun, ‘Crossing the Last Frontier,’ 74; Bjørnvig, ‘Transcendence of Gravity,’ 127–29.
29. Clarke, Interplanetary Flight (May 1950), reprinted in part in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! 103–04.
30. Clarke, Astounding Days, 99, 181.
31. Kilgore, Astrofuturism, chs 1 and 4.
32. Clarke, Prelude to Space, ch. 13.
33. Kilgore, Astrofuturism, 111–26.
34. Clarke, Prelude to Space, chs 33 and 13.
35. Clarke, ‘Space Flight and the Spirit of Man,’ 3.
36. Toynbee, ‘Unification of the World.’ Kilgore (Astrofuturism, 116), follows Clarke in misdating the lecture to early 1946.
37. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 162–63; Millar, ‘Arnold J. Toynbee;’ Clarke, ‘Rocket to the Renaissance,’ 103.
38. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 163–66.
39. Ibid., 96–102.
40. Overy, The Morbid Age, ch. 1. There are echoes here of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (1942–53). Set in a dying galactic empire in the far future, Asimov’s saga dealt with the attempt of a far-sighted ‘psycho-historian’ to limit the scope of the ensuing dark ages and preserve the core of civilization through to the next cycle. I am grateful to Alastair Reid for sight of his unpublished paper, ‘Isaac Asimov’s Foundation.’
41. Clarke, ‘Rocket to the Renaissance,’ 103.
42. Clarke, Prelude to Space, ‘Post-Apollo Preface’ (August 4, 1969).
43. Ibid., chs 2 and 12 (pp. 17 and 65).
44. Ibid., ch. 6 (35).
45. Ibid., ch. 2 (13–14).
46. Ibid., Epilogue (173–76); Clark, ‘Jupiter Five,’ in If: Worlds of Science Fiction 1, 2 (1953): 4–5.
47. Toynbee, ‘The Unification of the World and the Change in Historical Perspective,’ History (February 1948): 1–28, also reprinted in Toynbee, Civilization on Trial, 63–96.
48. Toynbee Papers, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, boxes 19–24, 93–94.
49. Toynbee, ‘Unification of the World,’ 62–63, 83–84.
50. Ibid., 63–64.
51. Ibid., 90–91.
52. Ibid., 64–65.
53. Clarke, ‘Space Flight and the Spirit of Man’ (1961/1966): 3–4, and similar rhetoric in ‘Interplanetary Flight’ (1950), ‘Rocket to the Renaissance’ (1960), Exploration of Space (1951), 195, and Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! 102–07.
54. Kubrick to Clarke, March 14, 1966, Kubrick Archive SK/12/8/1/12.
55. Toynbee, ‘My View of History,’ in Civilization on Trial, 3–15.
56. Ibid., 7–9.
57. Toynbee, ‘How the Book Took Shape,’ in Montagu, Toynbee and History, 8–11.
58. Arnold, ‘The Social Progress of States,’ 503, 522.
59. MacLeish, ‘The Image of Victory;’ Poole, Earthrise, 4–8, 40–42.
60. Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History.
61. Bowler, Invention of Progress, 8–9, 51.
62. Ibid., 56–57.
63. Toynbee, A Study of History, 247–54.
64. Toynbee, ‘Unification of the World,’ 94.
65. Bowler, Invention of Progress, 192–95; Brooke, Science and Religion, chs 7–8.
66. Toynbee, A Study of History, 247–48.
67. Smith, A Peril and a Hope; Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light; Weart, Nuclear Fear; Wittner, One World or None?; Masters and Way, One World or None. Bjørnvig discusses the correspondences between millenarianism and astrofuturism in ‘Transcendence of Gravity,’ 129–33.
68. Toynbee, A Study of History, 553.
69. Toynbee, ‘Unification of the World,’ 64.
70. Clarke, ‘Challenge of the Spaceship,’ 76–77.
71. Clarke, Childhood’s End, 157.
72. Ibid., 51.
73. Ibid., 118, 122, 80.
74. Clarke, ‘Space Travel In Fact and Fiction,’ a lecture delivered to the BIS in 1950, in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!, 85.
75. A.E. Slater to Olaf Stapledon, September 26, 1946. Stapledon Archive H6.A.1, Foundation Collection, University of Liverpool library. Clarke left the task of introduction to A.E. Slater, editor of the BIS Journal, who was an old boy of Abbotsholme, Stapledon’s own public (that is, private) school.
76. Crossley, Olaf Stapledon, 363–65; Stapledon, ‘Interplanetary Man?’
77. Clarke, ‘Voyages to the Moon’ (1948), in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!, 61; Clarke, comment on jacket of Crossley, Olaf Stapledon; Clarke, ‘Last and First Man of Vision;’ Aldiss, ‘In Orbit with the Star Maker;’ Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, 211; Doris Lessing, ‘Afterword;’ Stapledon, Star Maker, XV.
78. Stapledon, The Opening of the Eyes, 43. ‘He was a better Christian than he knew’ commented his friend E.V. Rieu in his introduction, vii–ix.
79. Stapledon, Last and First Men, sections II.1 and II.3 (pagination varies between editions). Afterwards China and America divide the world between them the Chinese suffer a plague of insanity which they call ‘the American madness,’ in which ‘huge mobs, demented and starving, staggered about the country devouring every kind of vegetable matter and arguing over the flesh of their own dead.’
80. McNeill, Arnold Toynbee, chs 7 and 9; Crossley, Olaf Stapledon, 10–20, 36–81.
81. Stapledon, Star Maker, Preface, viii.
82. Stapledon to Shapley, ca 1949, Stapledon Archive H.3.13.1.
83. Stapledon, Darkness and the Light, 162.
84. Shapley, ‘It’s an Old Story with the Stars,’ in Dexter and Masters, One World or None?, 7–10; Shapley, Of Stars and Men, 1–3, 152–55.
85. Adams, ‘Last Judgment,’ 487.
86. Toynbee began writing up his notes for A Study of History in the year Last and First Men was published: McNeill, Arnold Toynbee, 159.
87. Stapledon, Last and First Men, XIII.1.
88. Ibid., II.3.
89. Ibid., IV.2–V.2.
90. Ibid., XII.1.
91. Ibid., XIII.1.
92. Ibid., V.2 (104): XV.3.
93. This is a hard charge that requires justification outside the main scope of this essay. The concepts of race and eugenics structure his whole understanding of human evolution, going beyond incidental cultural colouring. In the section on ‘The Culture of the First World State’ (IV.4) we read that even in the far future ‘The Jews … were still outcasts … . In them, intelligence had become utterly subservient to tribalism. There was thus some excuse for the universal hate and even physical repulsion with which they were regarded.’ ‘Thanks to misplaced humanitarianism, natural selection has ceased to eliminate the ‘unwholesome’: ‘since these unfortunates were incapable alike of prudence and social responsibility, they procreated without restraint, and threatened to infect the whole species with their rottenness. During the zenith of Western Civilization, therefore, the subnormal were sterilized’ (IV, 4). Even after the human race has re-evolved seventeen times the Last Men still carry ‘hints of the long-extinct Mongol, Negro, Nordic, and Semitic’ (XV.1), but their success is based upon the achievement of a state where ‘in each mind of man or woman the racial purpose presides absolutely; and hence it is the unquestioned motive of all social policy’ (XV.3).
94. Stapledon, ‘Interplanetary Man?,’ 213–15; notes for ‘Mankind at the Crossroads,’ Stapledon Archive D.I.10.6–7; Stapledon, Darkness and the Light, 7–33.
95. Stapledon, ‘Interplanetary Man?,’ 215–20.
96. Crossley, Olaf Stapledon, 358–63.
97. Stapledon, ‘Interplanetary Man?,’ 230–32.
98. Ward, Planet Narnia; Lewis, ‘Unreal estates,’ conversation with Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss in 1962, in Lewis, Of Other Worlds, 87.
99. Bjørnvig, ‘Transcendence of Gravity,’ 133–39.
100. C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943: Voyager edn, 2001), ch. 6, quotation at 251. See also Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1938: Voyager paperback, 2001), chs 4 and 20.
101. Clarke–Lewis correspondence, fols 8–14, December 1943 and September--October 1946.
102. Clarke, Prelude to Space, 70. Clarke-Lewis correspondence, fols 16--18, February 1953.
103. Clarke-Lewis correspondence, fols 19--20, 22 December 1953.
104. Clarke–Lewis correspondence, fols 21--22, January 1954.
105. Clarke, ‘Memoirs of an Armchair Astronaut (retired),’ 412; Clarke, Coming of the Space Age, 271–301; Veldman, Fantasy, the Bomb and the Greening of Britain, 60–69; Geppert, ‘Space Personae,’ 283–84.
106. Clarke, ed., The Coming of the Space Age, 273–301 (section on ‘Space and the Spirit’). There is a further circular story here: Clarke admired Haldane, who like Clarke was an atheist who settled in the Indian sub-continent, while Lewis abhorred Haldane’s views and modeled the deranged scientist Weston in the Venus trilogy on him. Haldane recognized himself and wrote a reply, and Lewis a rejoinder. Haldane’s ‘Last Judgement,’ with its vast view of human history narrated from the point of view of an inhabitant of Neptune 40 million years in the future, inspired Stapledon’s Last and First Men. Stapledon, mentioning Possible Worlds, also described the idea that mankind would either blow itself up or go into space as Haldane’s ‘law of nature,’ although it is not explicitly stated there. Ironically Haldane himself placed space travel several million years in the future. Haldane, ‘The Last Judgment,’ in Possible Worlds; Haldane, ‘Auld Hornie, FRS;’ Lewis, ‘A Reply to Prof Haldane;’ Moskowitz, ‘Space, God and Science fiction,’ 282–83; Clarke, ‘Haldane & Space;’ Adams, ‘Last Judgment;’ Hughes, ‘Back to the Future.’
107. Poole, Earthrise, chs 1–2.
108. Roland, A Spacefaring People, 68–77, 137–43.
109. Toynbee, A Study of History, 360–61; Toynbee, ‘Moon or Man?,’ Miami Herald, January 5, 1969. From London Observer.
110. Clarke, Challenge of the Spaceship, 1.
111. Clarke, Imperial Earth, 268.
112. Clarke, ‘The best is yet to come,’ Time, July 16, 1979, quoted in McAleer, Arthur C. Clarke, 287.