news - 05.10.05

1945: A Momentous Summer

by Sir Arthur C. Clarke

At the end of the 1930s, I was an executive officer in HM Exchequer and Audit Department – my last honest job. Although I worked in a reserved occupation, I suspected that this happy state of affairs would not last for long. So one day, I stole away from the office and volunteered for the Royal Air Force.

I was lucky enough to be posted to the Radar Training School at Yatesbury, Wiltshire, to learn about the latest developments in the new field of electronics. Soon after being commissioned, I was attached to the Ground Controlled Approach (GCA) radar team, headed by the brilliant American physicist Dr Luis Alvarez.

A budding science fiction writer couldn't have expected a more stimulating working environment. I was surrounded by what had been science fiction only a few years earlier, and for the first time in my life, I was working with real scientists and engineers. And as a radar instructor with the rank of Flight Lieutenant, I enjoyed being in a position to indoctrinate thousands of hapless airmen. For some strange reason, they gave me the nickname ‘Spaceship'. (I've written my memories of GCA in my 90% non-fiction novel Glide Path, 1963, which was dedicated to Alvarez).

The end of the War heralded a new beginning for me. After working on the then cutting edge technology of GCA, there was no point in going back to my old career of auditing government accounts. I was now able to focus on my real passions – astronomy and space travel. I started spending more time with the pioneering ‘space cadets' of the British Interplanetary Society. After being decommissioned in 1946, I also went back to school and obtained my degree on physics and mathematics from King's College, London .

The War changed our world – and my personal career path -- in many ways. For instance, the nature of science fiction was profoundly shaken by the events of 1945. In the course of a single momentous year, two main themes in science fiction – space travel and the ultimate weapon – had ceased to be playthings of the mind. Dreams had turned into realities, and into waking nightmares.

The global shock and horror of the first atomic bomb attacks had a profound effect on me, as it did on many others of my generation. In the weeks following Hiroshima and Nagasaki , I wrote one of my most important essays, “The Rocket and the Future of Warfare 1 ” which ended with these words:

“Upon us, the heirs to all the past and trustees of a future which our folly can slay before its birth, lies a responsibility no other age has ever known. If we fail in our generation those who come after us may be too few to rebuild the world when the dust of the cities has descended and the radiation of the rocks has died away.”

As the War in Europe was drawing to its inevitable end, I was busy adding the finishing touches to another paper that later became much better known. I am sure the GCA background partly inspired my idea of the geostationary communications satellite, which I explained in “Extra-terrestrial Relays”, published in Wireless World of October 1945.

But that, as they say, is another story.

About the author:

The world's best known writer of science fiction, Sir Arthur C Clarke has published over 100 books, and hosted a large number of TV programmes. He was the first to propose the communications satellite in 1945, and one of his short stories inspired the World Wide Web. Sir Arthur has lived in Sri Lanka since 1956.

1 It won the first prize in a competition organised by the Royal Air Force, and was printed in the RAF Quarterly , March 1946. It has since been reprinted in my Ascent to Orbit: A Scientific Autobiography (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1984).

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