Excerpts from
Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography
By Neil McAleer

THIS PAGE: Chapter 28 (Part One)

Permission to reprint these excerpts was granted to MysteryVisits in 2004 by Neil McAleer. MysteryVisits is proud to be able to make this material available online. For the full account about Sir Arthur, however, please obtain the complete book, published by Contemporary Books (Chicago USA) and Victor Gollancz Ltd. (London UK).


Foreword by Ray Bradbury
Foreword by Sir Patrick Moore
Preface by McAleer
Chapter 1: New Moon over Somerset
Chapter 28: 1984 [Part One]: This page
[Part Two]
Recent photos of Sir Arthur
Editorial reviews

Return to introductory page


Chapter 28: Nineteen Eighty-Four [Part One]

The only Big Brother in Arthur C. Clarke’s life as 1984 began was the large listening ear out on his terrace – the fifteen-foot satellite dish donated by Hero Communications. Because it was a receive-only antenna, there was no need to fear any invasion of his privacy as the character Winston did in George Orwell’s classic novel 1984.

His own personal Earth Station was perhaps the largest technological toy with which he’d ever had the pleasure of playing. The first program he received was a cricket match held in India, broadcast from a Russian satellite. In mid-January he wrote to Peter Hyams, “I feel very happy – after weeks of hunting I’ve located and identified eight of the twelve Comsats in my sky, though I can only get good TV from three (two Russian, one Indian). I’ve also been able to peek at Intelsat newsfeeds. No wonder I’ve had no time to think about writing … but doubtless my subconscious is bubbling away.”

Back in Hollywood, Hyams was frantically preparing to start shooting 2010: Odyssey Two in February. He had signed Roy Scheider (The French Connection, Jaws, and All that Jazz) for the lead role in late 1983. Other than that, however, things at the MGM/UA studios were in a state of creative chaos.

When Hyams sent Clarke the film script of 2010, Clarke responded with approval on the day shooting was to begin, although he couldn’t resist having a little fun: “I felt like playing a few tricks on you – like a message from my secretary saying that I was last seen heading for the airport carrying a gun. But being the day it is and the delicate condition you are in, I’ll say right away that it’s a splendid job and you have brilliantly chiseled out the basic elements of the novel, besides adding quite a few of your own. I laughed – and cried – in all the right places.”

Meanwhile, at the studio: “Federal and state inspectors are hovering around the Esther Williams tank … trying to determine if it is suitable for our dolphin,” Hyams transmitted to Clarke in January as he worked out the problems for the dolphin-in-domicile scene with Roy Scheider. “It turns out that you have to bring over three dolphins so that no one will get lonely.”

While Hyams and his MGM team struggled to capture the future on film, the future that Clarke had envisioned was unfolding before him. Less than two weeks before the shooting of 2010 began, President Ronald Reagan initiated the U.S. space station program during his State of the Union address on January 25. At the same time, space shuttle Challenger was orbiting the Earth with a crew of five.

“Do you realise,” Clarke wrote to Hyams at the beginning of February,” that during the next few days the shuttle crew will be performing, for the first time, what we showed in 2001 – a nontethered EVA [extravehicular activity]?”

On February 7 astronaut Bruce McCandless successfully completed the first untethered space walk, using the manned maneuvering unit (MMU) for the first time. He was a human satellite, orbiting planet Earth at more than seventeen thousand miles an hour. Many times Clarke had imagined and written about a variety of similar mind-boggling experiences in his fiction, where a character finds himself alone and isolated, floating above a planet or marooned on its surface. In fact one of Clarke’s favorite stories, “Transit of Earth,” tells of a lone survivor on a Mars expedition who is marooned on the red planet. The story’s narrator, Evans, is doomed, running out of oxygen to breathe, but he continues to collect scientific data on the Earth’s transit across the face of the sun before he dies.

On May 11, 1984, that rare astronomical event in “Transit of Earth” actually took place in the solar system. It was, Clarke wrote to his friends, “exactly as described – but without a human spectator. We’ll have to wait until 2084.” An observer on Mars who had the appropriate equipment and filters could have seen the Earth’s tiny disk move across the face of the sun just as it was described in the story.

While Hyams and crew struggled to create an illusion of the future in Hollywood, Clarke reveled in the future that he’d brought to Sri Lanka. As described by friend Elmer Gertz, a well-known Chicago attorney and champion of literary freedom and civil rights, who wrote a series of pieces about his world cruise for the Chicago Sun-Times, “Clarke’s residence is next door the the Iraqi Embassy. I don’t know which place is more elaborate – Clarke’s or the ambassador’s. The Clarke home is like Merlin’s castle – spacious, with every convenience, and a beautiful garden.

”He has just about every device that can bring the world to him instantaneously. In the space of moments, we watched a television program going on in Moscow, then other programs in every part of the world. We observed him communicating with the same dazzling speed with his associates in Hollywood in connection with his new film. …”

In April, Clarke took the first of two trips to the United States that he would make during that ominous year. He would pass the remaining months in what had become his usual pursuits – public speaking, lecturing, seeing friends, and writing. In New York, he attended the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he met, among others, Charles Pellegrino, colleague of Robert Ballard and the man who would become an important resource for Clarke’s 1990 novel about the Titanic, The Ghost from the Grand Banks. Also in the works during that trip was the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation of the U.S., dedicated to promoting and funding technical and academic training in the sciences in the Third World. Out of the association of people who helped establish the foundation – Joe Pelton, Naren Chitty, Fred Durant, John McLucas, Todd Hawley, Bob Richards, and Peter Diamandis – eventually grew the International Space University, whose mission was to educate people of all nations in the space sciences, emphasizing space ventures as international efforts.


September took Clarke to Rome to attend the Study Week “The Impact of Space Exploration on Mankind,” organized by the Pontifical Academy of Science, where he also had an audience with Pope John Paul II. Clarke memorialized the brief encounter by sending friend Father Lee Lubbers a sheet of mounted photos to which Clarke had added little balloons holding words supposedly spoken by the pope: “How nice to meet at last” on the photo of the two shaking hands and “What – another book?” on the shot of Clarke handing the pope a copy of Ascent to Orbit, his collected scientific articles. Says Lubbers: “This kind of thing amuses Arthur. At the same time he’s self-conscious about stuff like that.”

The main foci of 1984 for Clarke would be stardom – and Star Wars. Fame had attended Clarke for a number of years and had accrued to him as a result of many different facets of his productive, creative life. It was during this year, however, with the whole world waiting anxiously for the long-anticipated sequel to 2001, that Clarke’s renown seemed to blossom into stardom. With it came both privilege and pitfalls.

A photo session after Clarke’s spring telecommunications talk at George Washington University easily drew one hundred fans who were lined up with books (most were copies of his latest novel, 2010) for the author to autograph. he had dealt with most of the line but then suddenly felt woozy; he couldn’t go on.

“He was physically exhausted,” says Todd Hawley, “and had stomach pains. He almost fainted, but Fred Durant cut off the line and took him behind the stage curtain. The remaining people were terribly disappointed. One man in particular, a senior NASA person, had an early Clarke novel, The City and the Stars, which he had had for almost thirty years. This book, the man claimed, had changed his life and motivated him to a career in the space agency. But Arthur’s protectors firmly said no; he was too shaky to sign even one more book. It was a terrible disappointment for the man.”

In the heat of the 2010 publicity, the pressure on Clarke from publisher and agent to commit to future odyssey works was strong. Clarke submitted – but on his own terms.

“In an extraordinary show of faith in his publisher and in his forthcoming works,” read the Ballantine publicity release, “Clarke has asked for an advance of 10¢ on SONGS [The Songs of Distant Earth] and, in consideration of probably inflation, an advance of $1.00 for 20,001 [The Final Odyssey].

“Clarke further explained that he had originally intended to ask for 1¢ for the first book, but realized that the sum would not be easily divisible to enable him to pay the 10% commission to his agent, Scott Meredith. Clarke upped the advance to 10¢.:

“The token figure was agreed upon,” says Meredith, “because Arthur was reluctant to accept any money for 20,001, which he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually write. I persuaded Arthur that money had to pass hands on any book he might do, so that token initial payment (the total advances were well into the seven figures, of course) was agreed to. …

“What Arthur then ended up writing wasn’t the concluding book to the 2001 saga that del Rey had been expecting from 20,001, but rather another intermediate volume in 2061. Del Rey wanted and wants to have whatever moral suasion results from having 20,001 under contract, and a separate contract was then struck up for 2061 after delivery, for a seven-figure advance, so technically, the second half of that old two-book deal remains unfulfilled.”

“If I don’t deliver, of course,” Clarke wrote to Stanley Kubrick, “I’ll cheerfully refund the advances; if I do, some slightly larger amounts will be forthcoming. Meanwhile I’m proud to have brought back the dime novel. …”

For the moment, everyone was happy, especially Scott Meredith, who knew how much his penny would be worth in a few more years.

After signing the book contracts Clarke headed west but reached the MGM studios toward the end of the 2010 shooting, to late to see the main sets. “When Arthur came to visit the set of 2010,” says Peter Hyams, whom Clarke was meeting for the first time, “he was wonderful and I was like a great puppy.”

One of the more memorable events while on the West Coast was a lunch with several Apollo astronauts he knew (Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Alan Bean, and Charles “Pete” Conrad) arranged and hosted by his friend and onetime deputy administrator of NASA, George Mueller.

A few days later Clarke and the film crew were in Washington, where they were going to shoot a scene in front of the White House. Hyams had a surprise gift for Clarke: a cameo part! “I did a Hitchcock for 2010,” says Clarke.

“It was only a one-day shooting,” recalls Fred Durant. “They had the area cordoned off on the north part of the Ellipse. It was the scene where Roy Scheider, playing Floyd, is sitting on a bench in front of the White House explaining to the head of NASA, played by James McEachin, why they must go on the mission. Arthur was two benches away, feeding the pigeons. They were specially trained pigeons, by the way, brought in for the scene, and Pip and I provided the brown paper bag he used as a prop.”

One persistent rumor, officially denied by MGM’s publicity department, was that one of the lead actors made an “impolite gesture” with his body as President Reagan flew overhead in the presidential helicopter that was preparing to land. The rumor came from several here unidentified) sources and included claims that at least one camera was rolling at the time and that still photographs actually exist.

Says one source: “We had to stop shooting when Ronnie flew overhead in his helicopter and landed behind us. We knew it was going to happen while we were filming the park bench scene. I think there’s a memorandum from [the actor] to the publicity department saying, ‘You keep talking while I get out of town.’”

The slang word for the rumored body gesture is mooning. Clarke’s response to the story: “I was feeding pigeons and didn’t notice.”

Clarke left town too – but voluntarily. Back in Sri Lanka, he was able to shift his focus to domestic matters. While household problems arose as they do everywhere, Clarke obviously basked in the company of the family he had gathered around him. In a newsy letter sent to Tom Craven in July, Clarke said that all was well, “apart from the usual domestic crises (maid fired, cook’s sister vanished so he’s distraught and will probably poison us). The little girls are gorgeous – and we’ve also acquired a ridgeback and bull mastiff puppy to keep Ravi company. He’s cute, but already I have to fight for my breakfast. But we won’t need to buy a pony for Cherene when he grows up.”


When he returned to the United States in mid-November, he had almost a month to spend in the Los Angeles area before the long-awaited premiere of 2010. Quickly it became obvious that the three-and-a-half weeks would not be spent in leisure.

“When you’re in a production line of TV interviews, it’s very hard to stop them,” says Clarke about the 2010 promotional blitz. “These interviews are totally blurred together. I don’t think I can remember a single interview. I did thirty in one day.”

December 7 finally arrived. The premiere was held at the Village Theater in Westwood. The Ekanayake family – Hector, Valerie, Cherene, and Tamara – arrived in time for the event, and so did Fred and Pip Durant. Because of his frenzied schedule, Clarke himself doesn’t recall much about the event – with one exception: “I couldn’t believe how bald Sean Connery was,” he said, “when I saw him in the foyer.”

Connery was late and almost didn’t get in. Todd Hawley was with Arthur in the foyer before the film started.

“There was this person with his face pressed against the door glass tapping on it, and it was Sean Connery,” recalls Hawley. “I walked over and let Connery in, and Arthur was surprised to see him. Connery probably showed up out of courtesy to Hyams, because he had starred in Hyams’s Outland.”

Everyone enjoyed themselves, even the New York Times critic, Vincent Canby, who wrote that “’2010’ is a perfectly adequate – though not really comparable – sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s witty, mind-bending science-fiction classic, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ …”

Canby went on to say that the film, unlike most sequels, avoided the tacky, but never quite escaped the feel of something made by “clever copyists who … do their work well and efficiently though without the excitement of truly original inspiration and lunatic risk. …”

“Mr. Hyams and Mr. Clarke carefully avoid the sort of poetic and – to some – maddening ambiguities that forever separate the Kubrick film from all that came before and all that have come after.” It was a positive and fair review, and no one had cause for serious complaint.

The morning after the premiere Clarke invited Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch for breakfast, but Bloch couldn’t make it that early. He did arrive just before they finished, however, and the threesome left the hotel together and were photographed out front by the doorman. “Then Ray pedaled away,” recalls Bloch, “and Arthur said, ‘Come with me. I’ve got something to show you.’ So he popped me into a limo, and we went down to a place in Culver City, about a mile away from MGM. This was where all the special effects had been done for 2010. He, as always, was fascinated with the technology. We went through the whole place, and he showed me what they had done and how they had done it.

“What he wanted to show me particularly was the space child, the baby, operated by remote control, some kind of wind pressure. It was rubberized, a beautifully done thing, and he was fascinated by it, and he knew I would be too. I looked at it, and I said, ‘Arthur it looks just like you!’”

Any good story lends itself to screen adaptation, and Arthur C. Clarke has plenty of good stories. The fact that more of them have not been translated to film is related mainly to the high costs of the necessary special effects. Still, future moviegoers probably will be able to see Clarke’s works brought to film or television.

A couple of months before the 2010 premiere, Bob Swarthe and Susan Marie Phillips arrived in Colombo from Los Angeles to scout Sigiriya and Adam’s Peak, among other locations. As partners and coproducers, they held the film rights to The Fountains of Paradise. While that film adaptation has been in the gestation stages for several years, Swarthe hopes it will reach the screen by the mid-1990s.

Go to the CONCLUSION of Chapter 28.

© 1992 by Neil McAleer

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the above excerpt available to online readers. – John C. Sherwood

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