SIR ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Dec. 16, 1917-March 19, 2008
By Joe Haldeman
Although he was not aware of it at the time, Arthur Clarke helped me choose a wife, forty-some years ago. Around our second date, the question ''What do you like to read?'' came up, and I found that she had never read any science fiction. I gave her a copy of Clarke's short story collection, Expedition to Earth. She loved it, and in a short time we were married. She tells people about that book and says that, at the time, she wasn't aware that it was a test.
I didn't know it either. But I guess it was.
I met Arthur many years later, after I was a science fiction writer myself, and told him the story. He was amused at the idea of one of his books being used as a tool of seduction.
That was the one time in my life I had reason to be glad I was addicted to tobacco. This was when Arthur had come over to the States to watch an Apollo launch. I think it was Apollo 17, the only night launch.
A lot of science fiction writers came to those launches, and the social focal point of them was the rambling manse of Joe Green, a science fiction writer who worked for NASA and lived only a few miles from the launch area. He put out a generous spread of food and drink for the dozens of visiting writers, but he had one rule: no smoking.
So periodically, Arthur and I were banished to the back stoop, to puff away and talk about space flight and the future, and the way the future used to be. It was mostly Arthur talking and me listening. It probably made little impression on him, but for me it was as memorable as the spectacular launch itself.
And Expedition to Earth is still one of my favorite books.
I was in Vietnam when 2001 came out, so for months after I came back, this was my claim to fame: I was the only science fiction fan anyone knew who hadn't seen Clarke's movie. (Some people thought it was Kubrick's movie. We knew better.)
I've always felt short-changed because of that. Everybody else remembered seeing that movie as one of the high spots of their life. I had to go see it in a second-run theater with stale popcorn, and try to recapture the experience in my imagination. It was still a great movie, and a wonderful expansion of Clarke's story, which I had read as a child. But for a while there, I was like the only guy in school who hadn't gotten laid, and everybody else was in possession of the mystery.
Clarke, 90, died of respiratory complications and heart failure at his home in Sri Lanka.
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