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In 1949 he published his first book, Interplanetary Flight, describing with remarkable prescience the space age that was dawning. Me won the permanent allegiance of science-fictioneers in 1953 with Childhood End, a novel about the transformation of man after he encounters benign but grotesque visitors from outer space. In 1963, Profiles of the Future illustrated his growing confidence in his gift for technological prophecy. He predicted that man would contact intelligent extraterrestrials by 2030, create artificial life by 2060 and achieve immortality by 2090.
In his latest nonfiction book, The Promise of Space, Clarke foresees the ultimate magic of travel to the stars. "It is not difficult," he explains, "if one is in no particular hurry." For flights that will last from decades to hundreds of years, he has worked out a method that will avoid dooming travelers to spend most of their lives in space. Simply send egg and sperm cells on the trip, he says, and have computers mate them some 20 years before the voyage is to end. After that, he suggests, "carry the embryos through to birth by techniques already foreshadowed in today's labs—and bring up the babies under the tutelage of cybernetic nurses who would teach them their inheritance and their destiny."
Ageless Wisdom. In the film 2001, Clarke's contribution as co-author and technical adviser to Producer-Director Stanley Kubrick is evident in such items as a weird but technologically probable talking computer that is more human than the astronauts. The film's ending, however, is almost pure Kubrick. A surviving spaceman is plunked into a Louis XVI bedroom after a psychedelic zoom through time and space that is mystifying to most moviegoers. But Clarke's novel version of 2001 explains all. As the survivor approached a huge monolith on lapetus, one of Saturn's ten moons, the astronaut entered a "stargate" into a different dimension, dominated by a godlike superintelligence. He is first returned to childhood, then transmuted into pure intellect and transported back to earth, carrying with him all the wisdom of the universe.
In the future, Clarke plans to concentrate on science fiction. But he has one unfulfilled goal: a flight of fact. Although he believes regularly scheduled trips to the moon will not begin until after the turn of the century, he hopes to be included on one of the early flights, "some time in the '80s."