Excerpts: McAleer on Clarke - Bradbury Foreword

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

THIS PAGE: Foreword by Ray Bradbury

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

Return to introductory page

Foreword to the U.S. edition by Ray Bradbury

[We are grateful to Ray Bradbury for his specific permission to make this available to online readers. – Neil McAleer and John C. Sherwood]

The most vivid memory I have of Arthur C. Clarke is an afternoon some seven or eight years ago when I was walking through Beverly Hills and heard someone shouting at me from across the street.

I glanced over and there was Arthur in front of a computer shop, waving both arms.

At right: Ray Bradbury

“Ray!” he shouted, “Come here! You must come over!”

I crossed over to have my hand wrung off at the wrist and feel myself hustled into the computer shop by the greatest salesman in the world for toys of all sizes and shapes.

“Look here!” cried Arthur, carny barker for Tom Swift. “And here, and here!” he added.

The thing he pointed at first, of course, was the brand-spanking-new lap computer. I had never seen one before. Arthur, hearing this, launched into a spiel that would have done the president of Apple proud.

“Think,” he urged. “Traveling across the world by jet, to have this incredible machine on your lap, giving you research and you giving it articles, stories, or a piece of a novel. Think!”

“I am thinking,” I said.

I was not at that time the world’s greatest flyboy. In later years, when I discovered I feared only myself and not flying, I was to jet the Concorde back and forth to Paris six times in a single summer.

Only later in life could I imagine myself with Arthur’s lapdog nestled on my knees barking metaphors at my slightest touch.

But, for now anyway, here was Arthur, taking over the shop, grabbing my elbow, steering me from table to table, saying “And if you think that was wonderful, here’s another, and yet another!”

“Arthur,” I finally said, “Christmas at your house …?”

“Yes?” he said.

“What must it have been like?”

“This!” he said. “Only this is better. Today, at last, I can buy most of these toys and carry them home, two under my arms and one between my legs if I have to!”

The next afternoon Arthur invited me up to his hotel apartment where his siamese twin, the new lap beast, was permanently stuck to his fingers; an operation might be needed to separate man and machine. I don’t think any encounter in my life has given me so much pleasure. The unabashed love for toys that changed the world, radiating from him, made me feel as if I were on holiday.

Of course, that has always been true. Long before my bright hour with Arthur, he had influenced the world in the best way possible. Schweitzer told us, did he not, to set a good example, someone might clone it? Arthur’s ideas have sent silent engines into space to speak in tongues. His fabulous communications satellite ricocheted about in his head long before it leaped over the mountains and flatlands of the earth. Since then it has taught the world, in many languages, mainly the wild joy of playing with something that, in the main, has improved, not wounded, the nations it has shadowed and lit as it passed.

Further, I am reminded of the immense fact that Arthur C. Clarke and his demon-photographer-become-director friend Stanley Kubrick changed the aesthetics of cinema history almost single-handedly in 1968. How so?

Let me take you back to a scene in 1931. In that year, at the Regina Theater at Wilshire and La Cienega, cinesasts were exercising their taste, need, and legs by lining up twenty-four hours a day to see Dracula and Frankenstein. The theater operated all day and all night for more than a year. Fantasy fanatics were arriving at 3:00 A.M. and staggering out at dawn. Why? There was nowhere else to go. Hollywood, in its sublime ignorance, refused to see the bloody writing on the cinema wall. They ignored the fantasy form frightening or science fiction form enlightening, thus ignoring the hungers of young men and women everywhere who had grown up on H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and others. These children and their hungry parents found that, save for minor exceptions (Things to Come in 1936, The Mysterious Island way back in 1929) their sci-fi heroes and their concepts hid in the balcony, where all minorities tried to survive.

There were breakthroughs in the early 1950s – The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing, and It Came from Outer Space. But there was no grand flurry of production activity, no wide-screen Future, until Kubrick and Clarke threw us a bone, which turned into a spacecraft, which crossed the universe and hyperventilated our lives forever. I was there at the 2001 premiere with Arthur in Hollywood. The film was a trifle long that night (it was trimmed the next week) but none of us realized we had seen something phenomenal. It not only changed history, but brought tons of money to beer halls around the world where the young clustered, babbling far into the night about what it all meant.

Another remembrance:

In the early 1970s, with the Viking mission to Mars ready for the grand leap, Cal Tech invited Arthur, Walter Sullivan from the New York Times, Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, then head of JPL, and myself to do a Mars seminar. Said seminar turned out to be wilder than we imagined. That team of boy mechanics sparked each other so furiously that the exchange turned into a book even as the stuff poured from our mouths. We discovered, first off, that all of us had been led through space toward Mars by one author, Edgar Rice Burroughs. We made no attempt to disguise our youthful tastes. The simple fact was that we had to start somewhere with short legs, and Burroughs ran us in fevers toward Lowell Observatory photos and Schiaparelli sketches later in life.

We had a rollicking good time, with Arthur leading the team or goading us on to a shared creativity. When we saw a typescript of what we had said, we recognized we had written a book on the auditorium air. All we had to do was seize it down into type. I wrote a preface and an afterword and added a few poems before anyone could stop me. The memory of sharing such an afternoon with Arthur and the others will stay with me for the rest of my years.

Bruce Murray, our collaborated on Mars and the Mind of Man, came to visit me a few weeks ago. He announced that some sort of library on Mars was being planned and he asked permission to send a copy of my Martian Chronicles up along with copies of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars yarns and book to be selected from among his many by Arthur C. Clarke.

Would I mind going along on such a journey even though the Cal Tech students and faculty often speak of me as the man who put an atmosphere on Mars?

Would I mind?! I cried. My God, with Burroughs on my right and Clarke on my left? What a trip. What a forever journey!

Finally, I am reminded of the Egyptian myth that, in the hour of death, when a person begs entrance to the Beyond, the keeper of the gate asks, “In life, did you show enthusiasm?” Do I need to tell you what Arthur’s shouted response will be? The gates will be knocked down and the heavens disheveled with this trumpet.

Would that I might be there to hear it.

Ray Bradbury
Paris, July 1992

© 1992 by Ray Bradbury

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