And a long list of inventive gadgets, gizmos and ideas that pop up in the pages of his novels and short stories begins with ‘automatic control cars’ (driverless, we call them) and runs through the alphabet to zero ‘g’, a term, if not a concept, coined by Clarke.Ī Somerset farmer’s son, he was born in 1917 into a world in which sonar, crossword puzzles and bras were all relatively new-fangled inventions. For instance, his first novel, 1947’s Prelude to Space, accurately predicted the year of the first moon rocket in 1959.

In its prophesying prowess, it was far from unique among his many works of fiction. Towards the end of his life, Clarke cited 2001 as one of his most significant achievements. Elsewhere, he predicted everything from online banking to reusable spacecraft and the millennium bug. Just five years later, in an interview on BBC TV’s Horizon programme, he could be found contemplating telecommuting and even telemedicine. That essay was written back in 1959, and what he was essentially describing was the mobile phone. As a science writer, he conjured up the idea of a ‘personal transceiver’ small enough to be carried about, enabling contact with anyone in the world and also featuring global positioning, making getting lost a thing of the past. Terminology aside, Clarke arguably did more than any other author since HG Wells and Jules Verne to catapult his mind into the future, taking a vast global readership along with him for the invariably wild ride. The 1968 sci-fi that spookily predicted today The internet, 3D printers, email: he may have described them all long before they existed, but these were not predictions. And yet, when it came to imagining the future, he adamantly refused to take credit for any predictions. He referred to his office as his ‘ego chamber’ and bought an English manor house to accommodate his archives, aka the ‘Clarkives’. Arthur C Clarke was never one to hide his light under a bushel.

The secret by arthur clarke