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Science | A CONVERSATION WITH/ARTHUR C. CLARKE

A CONVERSATION WITH/ARTHUR C. CLARKE; An Author's Space Odyssey and His Stay at the Chelsea

By CLAUDIA DREIFUSOCT. 26, 1999

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On a recent autumn morning in a suite at his beloved Chelsea Hotel, legendary New York City home of hipsters and artists, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, 81, the author of more than a hundred books of essays and science fiction, co-writer with Stanley Kubrick of the film, ''2001: A Space Odyssey,'' and the dreamer who in 1945 came up with the idea of the ''comsat,'' or communications satellite, held court in a wheelchair tended by his two Sri Lankan valets, Hector and Lenin.

The author, who lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, had stopped off to see old friends and admirers on his way home from a round of medical tests at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore.

Q. Is it true that you and Stanley Kubrick wrote the screenplay for ''2001: A Space Odyssey,'' right here at the Chelsea Hotel?

A. Absolutely. This place is my spiritual home. Everyone is surprised that I come to this hardly five-star hotel.

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In fact, the Sri Lankan ambassador was horrified. Before coming here, I had been at Johns Hopkins for more than a week.

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They took a nerve biopsy. I have some obscure neuropathy. All of a sudden, my legs get numb. Mainly, I have post-polio syndrome, which is why I can't walk anymore. I was told I had Lou Gehrig's disease, originally.

As far as I know, Stephen Hawking is the only man who's survived that for very long, so this (laughs) is a considerable improvement.

Q. We heard that the astronaut Buzz Aldrin made a visit to you at Hopkins.

A. Yes, he dropped in to see me in the hospital and he kept making the point: we've got to get NASA out of the space business. He believes it should be private enterprise. There are a lot of people now who are trying to develop relatively cheap nonbureaucratic access to space. How successful they'll be, I don't know. I think the rocket will end up doing for space travel what the balloon did for air travel: it got us there, but soon was superseded by something better.

Q. Are you as critical of NASA as Buzz Aldrin is?

A. I won't criticize NASA because it's the slave of Congress.

Actually, NASA has now set up an Institute for Advanced Concepts. It is looking at all sorts of crazy ideas, including my favorite one, the space elevator. It's such a delightfully simple idea: build an elevator from the Equator to a geostationary satellite. You move payloads up and down by electricity.

When I wrote my book ''The Fountains of Paradise'' in 1979, about the building of the space elevator from a country which is 90 percent Sri Lanka, the only material that could be strong enough to build a space elevator was diamond. And that, unfortunately was not available in the megaton qualities needed for such a project.

Interestingly, when I later recorded a 12-inch L.P. of ''The Fountains of Paradise,'' the cover notes and illustration were by Buckminster Fuller.

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And now, we have the material to make it: C-60 nanotubes, which are hundreds of times stronger than steel.

The Rice University scientists who were co-discoverers of C-60 have named it Buckminsterfullerene. If C-60 can be mass produced, it will revolutionize space travel, as well as everyday life. You could lift your car with one hand.

The point of the space elevator is that it makes space travel cost just pennies. The cost in electricity of lifting you to space is about $200. The cost for a round trip is about $40 because you get most of your energy back on the downward trip. I've said many times that the main cost of space travel in the future is going to be for catering and in flight movies, not for fuel.

And of course the considerable interest on the trillion or so that it costs to build the thing.

Q. One reason you advocate space travel is fear of asteroids?

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A. I'm always quoting the science fiction writer Larry Nivens that ''the dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.'' Yes, I think a serious asteroid impact is inevitable. In any case, even without them, we have all our eggs in one basket here. By the way, I'm an absentee landlord of a hundred square miles of some rather rugged territory near the orbit of Mars. I have an asteroid named after me. Isaac Asimov's got one too. It's smaller and more eccentric.

Q. In the news is word that the world's population has hit six billion. What do you feel when you see a headline like that?

A. Well, I feel rather depressed, but then there are so many times when I'm an optimist. I think we have a 51 percent chance of survival. I would say the next decade is perhaps one of the most crucial in human history, though many people have felt that in the past. But it's real now. There are so many things coming to a head simultaneously. The population. The environment. The energy crunch. And, of course, the dangers of nuclear warfare. I am often asked to predict things and I'm described as a prophet, but I deny that. I'm just an extrapolator. I can envision a whole spectrum of futures, very few of which are desirable.

But I do feel that we science-fiction writers do serve as an early warning system, by showing what may happen, what could happen, and simply what should happen. I've often said one reason why I'm an optimist is that then you have a chance of creating a self-fulfilling prophesy -- and ditto if you're a pessimist -- it's more cheerful.

Q. Can you think of something that you predicted might have happened that doesn't look like it will?

A. Well, there won't be a Hilton in orbit by 2001.

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Q. Was it your idea or Kubrick's to make a computer, HAL, the villain of film?

A. Villain? HAL's a nice guy. No, I cannot now say who did what. The only thing I'm completely sure of is that the idea of HAL lip reading, which I thought was rather unlikely, was Stanley's. Now, of course, they've succeeded in getting a fair degree of accuracy with lip reading in computers. The way we wrote it, we just brainstormed. We sat in this apartment and brainstormed.

Stanley said, ''I want to do a good science-fiction film.'' So we went through all my short stories to see what would make a good film. We had about six. One by one, we threw away stories. Eventually, we just had two of them. One was ''The Sentinel,'' and the other was ''Encounter in the Dawn,'' in which a space ship lands before man existed and the travelers meet man-apes. We were originally going to call the film, ''How The Solar System Was Won.''

Q. One of the legends about you is that you came up with the idea for Comsat in an article you wrote in 1945 and that you never patented the idea.

A. Oh, so you want to ask me about how I lost a billion dollars in my spare time? Well, you see when I wrote my ''comsat'' paper, it was 1945. The war was still on. No one could even imagine what peace would be like. And I didn't think that satellites could be launched until the end of the century. So I didn't give the matter of a patent any thought at all. I just wrote this article and sent it off and got $:15 for it. Which was real money in 1945. I don't regret it because I think a patent would have expired anyway before the first comsats were launched. Until the technology reaches some level, you can't patent anything. Besides, who was it that said, ''The patent is merely a license to be sued?''

Q. Surely you must sometimes fantasize about what your life would have been if you had?

A. O.K., what I should have done is to try to copyright the word ''comsat.'' If I'd done that. . . .

Q. You've written somewhere near 100 books of science fact and fiction. How fast do you write, and think?

A. Not as fast as I used to. I have difficulty remembering names. But I feel as long as I can spell ''Alzheimer,'' I'm in good shape. I don't know if I've ever written more than 3,000 words a day. Isaac Asimov could do that in a minute and a half. And mostly on a manual typewriter, too.

Q. There are plaques mounted in front of the Chelsea Hotel dedicated to deceased artists who once lived here: Thomas Wolfe, Brendan Behan, Virgil Thomson. Will there be one for you one day?

A. Oh, I hope so, but not for a long time. However, I don't mind if they put one up right now.

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