Arthur C Clarke

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy seven, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Arthur C Clarke0:32

On our desert island this week is a writer of books on science and also one of the best known writers of science fiction. It's Arthur C. Clarke.

Arthur C Clarke0:41

Mr. Clark, does music mean a lot to you?

Presenter0:43

Yes, it always has. I used to spend much of my youth

Presenter0:47

listening to a crystal set I built myself. I used to go to sleep with the earphones on and I heard a lot of music that way. And I collected quite a few records before the war. I lost most of them. They're dispersed during the war. Now I have a very large record collection. On the island you have this meagre ration of eight. What's the first one you've chosen?

Presenter1:07

Well, the first piece of music, uh classical or semi-classical, I ever got to know and love was the Grieg Piano Concerto.

Presenter1:16

And I used to be able to go through that in my head on long bus journeys and the sort of train journeys you did in the blackout during the war. And it's still one of my favourites.

Arthur C Clarke2:22

The opening of the Grieg Piano Concerto, Solomon with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Herbert Menges. What part of England do you come from?

Arthur C Clarke2:30

Yeah.

Presenter2:30

I was born in Minehead, the west of England, Somerset, a little seaside town. It was little in those days, it's quite large now.

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What was the first branch of science to interest you?

Presenter2:41

Originally, I think paleontology. I collected fossils and had a small collection of um

Presenter2:48

Well, I had a mammoth tooth, which is quite a large mona. A friend of mine who was an archaeologist gave it to me. I also had a lot of flints, but through this mammoth tooth I got interested in the dinosaurs who still fascinate me. And then for some reason which I don't quite recall, I switched quite suddenly to astronomy, and then I realized I had found my Métier. Were you bright at science at school? Oh, I was a horrible little swat. I was always good at science and mathematics. When did you start writing?

Presenter3:17

I started writing, in fact, for the school magazine when I was fourteen or fifteen, and my first uh pieces were published in the Hewish magazine, my Hewish Grammar School in Taunton, and some of them have been revived lately, and I'm rather depressed to see the small signs of improvement.

Presenter3:35

What was your first job when you were left school? I went straight into the civil service, into the Exchequer and Audit Department, and came to London and worked first in Whitehall in fact first at the old Board of Education and then went to the Post Office and then the war began and we were evacuated. I was then with the Ministry of Food evacuated to North Wales.

Presenter3:55

Then I went from there into the Air Force. So that got you out of the Civil Service, at any rate? After about five years, I must say I quite enjoyed it, and I had plenty of time, long lunch hours walking through St. James's Park, and I did much of my early writing in Civil Service time. Splendid.

Presenter4:10

Let's have your sacred record.

Presenter4:13

Well, the second record is the Elgar Violin Concerto, which was perhaps with the Greek one of the first pieces of music I ever got to know and love. And of course there are two classic recordings of this, both by Hudi Menuin, one as a boy and one as a man. And I think for sentimental and historic reasons we should play the one Vehi with Elgar himself.

Arthur C Clarke5:36

The young Yehudi Menoun in an excerpt from the first movement of the Elgar Violin Concerto with the composer conducting.

Arthur C Clarke5:44

Right, so you went into the Air Force. In 1945, while still in uniform, you wrote a piece about communication satellites.

Presenter5:52

Yes, this was the paper which started the ComSat business. I wrote it early in nineteen forty five, and it was published in Wireless World in October, in fact, just after the war had ended.

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And it laid down the principles which now determine the world's communication system, the idea that you would have satellites poised at such a height above the earth that they remained stationary in the sky, the so-called synchronous or geostationary orbit. Did anybody take your idea up and get excited about it? Well, a few people got excited about it. I know the Ameri the Americans did first, and I have reason to believe that this is one of the stimuli which started the American satellite program of. What happened to you when you left the Royal Air Force?

Presenter6:35

I decided not to go back to the civil service but to take a degree and I went to King's College London and I took my degree in physics and pure and applied maths and some postgraduate work in astronomy. So now you ought to be not merely an imaginative science writer but a qualified one. Yes, I had a BSc and I became then a science editor and worked at the Institute of Electrical Engineers as editor of Science Abstracts, the chief scientific abstracting journal.

Presenter7:07

I think it's time for a third record. What's that? Well, this is another English composer, Vaughan Williams, the Antarctic Symphony. And I love this piece because it has the mood of space as well as the remoteness of the Antarctic. And in fact, when Stanley Kubrick and I were working on 2001, this was a piece I recommended as mood music. We used to play it to ourselves, listen to it, have it on in the background when we were discussing 2001. And in fact, we might very well have used it for part of the film, though in fact it worked out otherwise.

Presenter7:42

But the Vaughan Williams say the Antarctic Symphony appeals to me because I guess I'm also interested in exploration myself.

Arthur C Clarke8:47

The opening of the Vaughan Williams Sinfonia Antarctica, Sir Adrian Bolt conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Who were the pioneers of science fiction? HD Wells, of course.

Presenter8:59

And Jules Verne.

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And in this country, particularly Olaf Stapledon, who wrote a magnificent history of the future called Last and First Men, which I discovered soon after it was published in nineteen thirty, and this book

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History of the next two thousand million years.

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had more influence on me than anything else I'd ever read. It opened my mind to the possibilities of time and space, and directly influenced, in fact, many of my early books.

Presenter9:28

With progress, scientific progress, moving so fast, it must be a job keeping in advance of the real thing. Well, it's almost impossible, of course. And many of the things that I described have become history.

Presenter9:39

Um

Presenter9:41

Not in the way that I said, because I wrote a book about the first landing on the moon, which I put in

Presenter9:47

1978. I wrote the book in 1948, and I thought it was ridiculous putting it only 30 years in the future, but in fact, it beat my deadline. You commentated for American television on some of the Apollo missions, including the moon landing. Yes, I was actually at Cape Kennedy for the launch of several of the missions, including the historic Apollo LEM, the first landing on the moon, and I was at Walter Cronkite doing the commentary. And that, of course, was an unforgettable experience. I'd met about half of the American astronauts and quite a new of the Russian cosmonauts. Record number four, please.

Presenter10:23

I I I'm a bit of a sucker for piano concertos, and here's another one, Rachmaninoff's third. I had great difficulty in deciding which of the Rachmaninoff piano concertos to play, but I think the third, which is here in fact played by Rachmaninoff himself, is the one with most meat to it.

Arthur C Clarke11:40

The opening of the Rachmaninoff third piano concerto with the composer as soloist. How many fictional works have you written?

Arthur C Clarke11:50

Well the better.

Presenter11:50

A hundred short stories, all of which have been collected in I think six volumes now, and oh I guess about twenty novels of various lengths.

Arthur C Clarke11:59

One of my favourites of yours is is the men on the first moon landing who insist on staying up there a full six months as it makes a difference to their income tax liability.

Presenter12:08

Yes, well needs to say there's some personal wish fulfillment behind this. In fact, uh

Arthur C Clarke12:09

Needless to say,

Presenter12:13

I've done even better than this because the Sri Lanka Government recently passed an Act which is usually known by my name so I can now live in Sri Lanka without paying any income tax at all.

Arthur C Clarke12:22

Yeah.

Presenter12:22

Well, you've been living in Sri Lanka for a long time. Well, I've been living there much of the time for the last twenty years, but I couldn't become a resident until a few years ago until they passed this Act, otherwise I'd have been paying British, American and Sri Lanka income tax and would have been instantly bankrupt.

Arthur C Clarke12:37

Of your own Act of Parliament.

Arthur C Clarke12:39

Your most celebrated work, of course, is the is the one that you you mentioned just now, uh two thousand and one, A Space Odyssey, the story of of the film. How did that project start?

Presenter12:50

It started with a letter that Stanley Kubrick wrote to me soon after Doctor Strangelove had been released saying that I'd been interested in

Presenter12:58

doing the proverbial good science fiction movie, and do you have any ideas on the subject?

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And I did have one or two ideas, and we got into correspondence, and it so happened that I was coming to New York

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I had worked for a time life on a book about space and I met Stanley.

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Uh and uh I moonlighted or moonlit with Stanley while I was working at Time Live.

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And uh when that job finished I went over full time with Stanley and uh 2001 the novel was written actually in New York. Yes, you just kicked ideas around until you got the right one. We batted ideas back and forth to such an extent now that I can't remember who thought of which first. In fact, I've written a book about the making of the film describing this fascinating and often exhausting process.

Presenter13:44

What's that called? I haven't read that blog. Um The Lost Worlds of two thousand and one. It's a diary of the film with many of the alternative ideas that we might have used and which might still make another good film.

Presenter13:55

And you're

Arthur C Clarke13:56

Her latest book is Imperial Earth.

Arthur C Clarke13:58

Now, this is about uh well, you you tell us what it's about.

Presenter14:02

Well, the title is a little ironic. I tried to project in the future uh a slightly decadent but humane world. Um I put it exactly three hundred years

Presenter14:14

head of last year. So it was the quincentennial of the American Revolution, tw twenty two seventy six, and it takes place in Washington. And um my hero comes from one of the

Presenter14:25

moons of the outer planets, Titan, the giant moon of Saturn, and goes to Washington for the centennial celebrations and addresses the joint houses of Congress. And I was in Washington about two years ago and I had to address the

Presenter14:40

House of Representatives Space Committee, and I actually read to them part of my hero's speech from the novel. So I have now some quotations in the Congressional Record for 1976, from the Congressional Record for 2276, which may confuse people one day.

Arthur C Clarke14:57

My knowledge of science is minimal, but I found Imperial Earth completely convincing.

Arthur C Clarke15:02

What's on the stocks? What's your next one? How far away?

Presenter15:04

Well I'm working on what

Arthur C Clarke15:05

But

Presenter15:05

Uh

Arthur C Clarke15:05

I really hope we'll be

Presenter15:06

Be my last novel.

Arthur C Clarke15:08

Why your last one? What do you want to devote your time to?

Presenter15:10

It'll be my sixtieth birthday present to myself.

Presenter15:15

And I just want to enjoy Sri Lanka, my skin diving, my books, my records, my pet monkey and uh a lot of other things. That's an impressive list. Let's have record number five.

Presenter15:26

Well, this of course is the famous opening. They've also sprucked Zarathustra. Everybody forgets now that it was a tone by Richard Strauss, and they say it's the theme music from 2001. And Stanley Stanley Kubic discovered this. It was not my suggestion. And now, of course, one can't imagine any other music fitting this role. And no matter how often you hear it, it never wears out. It's incredible how it always gives me the same thrill when I hear these opening bars.

Arthur C Clarke16:55

The opening music to two thousand and one, a space odyssey, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. You've always done a great deal of travelling. You've liked jetting about the earth.

Presenter17:07

I used to, and I had to do a great deal, uh, when I was lecturing in the States and of course when I went to Australia for my first underwater expedition and to Ceylon for my second.

Presenter17:19

And though frankly one of the real reasons I did so much jetting in the last uh decade was because I couldn't reside in one place too long because of this tax pro

Presenter17:29

So I I made a virtue of a necessity and did a great deal of lecturing in the United States, which I thoroughly enjoyed and it did get me there for the great days of the space program. But now I travel as little as possible.

Arthur C Clarke17:40

Come on.

Presenter17:40

About your underwater exploration. What what your

Arthur C Clarke17:43

A project, sir.

Presenter17:44

Well, we uh did a lot of underwater photography uh for books and movies, and we discovered a reef ten miles off the coast of south coast of Ceylon. One day we were working on this reef and it was too dirty for photography, so we swam much further than normal, near we'd never explored before.

Presenter18:04

I wasn't on this trip, but my partner at the time did this. It was American boys, quite young boys. He was filming for a boys' adventure, and they suddenly saw literally silver gleaming on the seabed. It was Indian rupees glittering there from a wreck which went down in 1702 or three. That's the date of the coins. And there probably a ton or more of silver there and cannon and everything. And we've we filmed this for the b made a T V film for the BBC and read a couple of books about it.

Arthur C Clarke18:30

Have you identified the vessel?

Presenter18:32

No. We've searched the records in The Hague rather perfunctorily.

Presenter18:37

Um I'm sure that a radio detailed search might identify her, but we've never had time to do that. We've never been back to the wreck, although this was back in nineteen sixty three.

Presenter18:46

Go on to record number six. What's that? Well

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In many ways, my favourite symphony, and perhaps the first great symphony I ever got to know. Well, Siberia's the second. And uh.

Presenter18:58

The great theme at the end of that last moment is really one of the most glorious themes in music. It sort of gets hold of you and it shakes you like a dog shaking a rat and you can't escape from it.

Arthur C Clarke20:06

A theme from the last movement of the Sibelia's Second Symphony, Carrion conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra. Now your underwater experiences should be useful in some ways on a desert island, even without equipment.

Presenter20:19

No, I'd be very lost in the water. In fact, I won't even go in the swimming pool without wearing a face mask. I hate getting water in my eyes. It's as simple as that. Are you a handy man? Could you put up huts and that sort of thing? I'm reasonably handy, and I could probably put up some kind of hut that wouldn't fall down for a night or two. Would you try to escape?

Presenter20:37

Well, it depended on the circumstances, of course, and also how far away the other land was.

Presenter20:42

Record number seven.

Presenter20:44

Obviously, one has to have some Beethoven, and I had a bit of a problem deciding which.

Presenter20:50

But I think the

Presenter20:51

Greatest is the Ninth Symphony, the Choral Symphony.

Arthur C Clarke21:57

An excerpt from the last movement of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony carry on conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

Presenter22:03

Uh

Presenter22:03

Yeah.

Arthur C Clarke22:03

What's your last record? Yeah.

Presenter22:05

Uh

Presenter22:06

My last record is I think perhaps the greatest single piece of music that I know, and it's the Bach, Dakarta and Fug in D minor. I I love this piece for many reasons and um I have worked it into what I think is my best short story, a story called Transit of Earth, which takes place on Mars and the story ends with the playing of this piece of music.

Arthur C Clarke22:40

Yeah.

Arthur C Clarke23:23

Leopold Stokovsky conducting his own transcription of the Bach to Carter and Fugue in D minor.

Arthur C Clarke23:29

If you could take just one disk out of that eight you've chosen, which would it be?

Arthur C Clarke23:33

I think it would be the Elgar.

Presenter23:35

One luxury to take to the island with you. Oh, undoubtedly a solar powered short wave radio, so at least I could tell what was happening in the rest of the world.

Presenter23:43

Yeah.

Arthur C Clarke23:43

And one book putting aside that familiar little list of the Bible and Shakespeare and big encyclopedias.

Arthur C Clarke23:49

Yep.

Presenter23:49

to get more mileage.

Presenter23:51

To the meter from poetry than from prose. So it would have to be a book of poetry. And probably the best bargain is Palgrave's Golden Treasury, latest edition. Right. And thank you, Arthur C. Clarke, for letting us hear your Desert Island disc. Well, thank you, Roy, and I'm happy to say that I'm going back now to my far-from-desert island, Sri Lanka. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 324:21

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.