Certain qualities are essential to the good newsman: a capacity for accurate and detailed research; a feeling for the “human angle”; and just that touch of precognition (all right, call it hunch—or even extrapolation) that tells him where to turn for the next story.

Arthur Clarke, somehow, has never been a newsman: physicist, mathematician, astronomer, inventor, skin-diver, treasure-hunter, lecturer and teacher, he has been editor, author, journalist, encyclopaedist, and (most recently) scenarist. (By the time you read this, the two-way Clarke-(Strangelove) Kubrick collaboration, 2001: A Space Odyssey, should be in print in book form, and ready for release on film.)

Clarke is a curiously free man. There is a detachment about him which seems less a traditional “British reserve” than a sort of disassociation from the gravity-ridden surface world—as if his true home were in free-fall space, or perhaps in free-floating oceanic deeps. He approaches his multiple interests with a sort of visitor-on-Earth enthusiasm: I have seen him display, with equal delight, gold coins from a treasure-hunt diving trip; a new press release on the Kubrick collaboration; a hotel-window view of New York’s skyline through his new Questar telescope; and the plastic-label-maker with which he was turning out stick-ups for his one-man campaign: HELP STAMP OUT POP ART!

He is, generally, a vigorous man with an opinion. In an article in Playboy last year, “The Meddlers,” he wrote: “A certain amount of meddling is an excellent thing. It laid the foundations of experimental science and modern technology. But the intelligent meddler must abide by a few commonsense rules, of which the most important are: (1) Do not attempt the unforseeable; (2) do not commit the irrevocable.”

“Intelligent meddler” is probably as good a description of “experimental scientist” as any other. And certain qualities are necessary for the job: a capacity for detailed research; a faculty for accurate extrapolation (or hunch, or precognition); and (for intelligent meddling) a recognition of the human values involved.

In a survey conducted by the fan magazine Double Bill, Clarke gave as his reason for writing science fiction: “Because most other literature isn’t concerned with reality.”

And of course it is also true that certain qualities are essential to the good science-fiction writer; the ability to project future hunches (or precognitions, or extrapolations) must rest on a capacity for detailed, accurate research; and it cannot be good fiction of any sort unless the author has a deep awareness of the human (or other) elements involved.

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