Science fiction is replete with brilliant crackpots, some of whom are crammed full of cracked genius. A few only appear cracked because the broken lens of our mundane myopia distorts their image. Occasionally, an SF writer survives the near sighted negativity of various vested interests and ascends to prophetic status. Arthur C. Clarke is our contemporary, secular Elijah. Let's open the doors of our visionary perception, give him a seat at the table, and consider how he has wondered the Earth.

The world first began to wonder about this country boy from Somerset in southwest England in 1945. As an officer in the RAF during the War, he had already been involved in testing the first to be developed, radar talk-down equipment. The importance of aerial communications well established in his mind, he extrapolated a nobler use for the V2 rockets that rained down on Britain. Clarke reasoned that artificial satellites could be launched using slightly larger rockets, then parked in geostationary orbits high above the Earth. Such an arrangement would solve a basic problem in the use of radio signals, which propagate in a straight line. Instead of flying away from the curving Earth at a tangent, they could be reflected from orbiting satellites to receivers situated below the horizon.

His 1945 paper titled "Extra Terrestrial Relays" first proposed the underlying principles of our current satellite communications system. We now take for granted instantaneous, global coverage of politics, sports, military carnage, natural disasters, and cultural events. World wide telephone service uses the same system to bounce voice and computer data wherever required. The information revolution has invaded our homes, and lives, on the wings of Arthur Clarke's vision. He is the number one prophet of the postmodern age.

Having reached the age of thirty, discharged his military obligations, and established himself as an innovative genius, Clarke decided to have some fun. He focussed on writing science fiction and took up scuba diving.

His best known early SF work was the 1953 classic, Childhood's End. In this novel highly advanced extraterrestrials arrive on Earth like pied pipers from the Great Beyond. They prepare the children of the planet to leave their Earth bound elders behind and join an apparently transcendent Overmind. The kids go happily, grasping their golden opportunity to fulfil human destiny in space. Childhood's End was an immediate success: then, it was embraced by the youthful, counter culture of the 1960's and '70's many of whom also wanted to fly away.

But Clarke was not content merely with writing about escape. After "grokking" that complete submersion in water reproduces the weightlessness of free fall, he plunged straight into the depths and began an ecstatic exploration beneath the surface of the sea. He even moved to Sri Lanka in 1956 partly to take advantage of the splendid scuba diving around Serendip. Since then, Clarke has emerged from his passionate hobby chiefly for air, nourishment, and to record the latest of his prophetic speculations.

By far the best known of his speculations is the film he made in 1968 with Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The advanced aliens in this blockbuster epic actually make no physical appearance. They are represented by the mysterious, black slabs which they left behind eons ago presumably with some design. One of these calling cards teases the first sparks of intelligence out of the prehistoric primates who encounter it. Like recalcitrant asses, then, mankind evolves toward enlightenment in pursuit of rectangular carrots dangling on extraterrestrial strings.

The explosion of mystical pyrotechnics at the end of 2001 is problematic. It goes beyond merely giving the Devil his due as in Childhood's End, and may have been inspired by Kubrick's sense of what would appeal to a sixties audience. In those days knowledge was associated with a generalized expansion of awareness, even "blowing" the mind. To communicate anything, clearly, was somehow to violate the ethos of the decade, at least in the arts. The limitations of the black Monoliths are very clear in the novel version of 2001 and in the sequel, 2010. They do not symbolize omnipotence, omniscience, or omnipresence. Whatever happens to David Bowman in the end after getting zapped through the psychedelic stargate, he does not directly encounter God.

Rather, at the end of the rainbow, Bowman finds what the author hopes to find in place of God, a finite though vastly superior intelligence that welcomes humanity into cosmic fellowship. Genius is a lonely profession, and Clarke seems destined to look beyond Earth for kindred spirits. He has defined faith in a religious context as belief in a demonstrably false proposition. Yet, his emotional intensity on the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence, even though not demonstrable, suggests fundamentalist devotion. Intellectually, he retains the perspective of a trained scientist, but his heart is set on the Overmind and the Monolith beings.

This sentiment is salted generously throughout his nonfiction. For example, he writes in the forward to the novelized version of 2001 that "one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars." He concludes a discussion of the subject in Profiles of the Future with the flat statement, "Let me repeat that this is no fantasy." In The View from Serendip Clarke refers to the possibility that man may be the only extant intelligence as "a lonesome thought; better the hostile aliens of the old pulp magazines."

Comments of this kind might be dismissed as sci-fi sales promotion, but would he jive talk the Committee on Space Science of the US House of Representatives? He told them in July of 1975, "that they [rational beings] must exist somewhere in the universe is now doubted by very few scientists."

If Clarke's genius is deconstructed bit by bit, this faith in little green men-sas will be found as the central prop which supports the entire incredible edifice. It is the mainspring of his speculative energy, and though different from the anthropomorphic, tribal, patriarchal inspiration of the Old Testament prophets, quite comparable in function.

The super intelligent aliens in Rendezvous with Rama (1973) are also physically absent. They have sent a probe similar to the Monoliths of 2001, but it has been transformed into an egg and expanded to the size of a small asteroid. Rama arrives mysteriously in our solar system with the trajectory of a comet. The expedition sent from Earth to explore finds a cornucopia of mystifying, technological perfection inside, but no one is home. The plot hinges on the attempt of xenophobic militarists to destroy the intrusive, giant egg. They are foiled by scientists of good faith determined to protect it.

Rendezvous with Rama is the fullest fictional statement of Clarke's world view. It richly deserved all the major SF awards it won, but the author's own favorite work was published in 1978, Fountains of Paradise.

This one includes the same kind of technological representation of alien genius. The major difference between Starglider, as it is called here, and Rama is that this alien probe is equipped to enter into dialogue with humanity. For the most part, however, Starglider remains in the background like the Monoliths in 2001. Its main function, as in the better known work, is to provide motivation for the primary action of the novel.

The drama of building an orbital tower, or space elevator, structures the narrative action in Fountains of Paradise. The tower is to be a bridge, really, suspended between a satellite in geostationary orbit 35,000 kilometres above the equator and the highest available mountain at that latitude on Earth. Payloads and people could then be run up and down, to space and back, using electricity instead of rockets. Once in place, the system would make access to space much easier. It would save billions in cash and reduce pollution of the environment.

This vision of the future obsolescence of rockets did not originate with Clarke. Credit for the idea goes to a Leningrad engineer by the name of Yuri Artsutanov who outlined it in 1960. Clarke was one of the first to see the possibilities, though, and Fountains of Paradise is the best known and most complete picture of the challenges and rewards involved.

The prospect of developing better means for getting into space begs the question, however, why go there at all? Clarke argues very coherently that pure research generates practical, technological spin-offs. The argument may be valid, but it also may be largely rationalization. What Clarke most wants to find in space is alien intelligence. Unfortunately, to many this fascination with exploring gigantic eggs bearing inscrutable technology and chasing black carrots across the sky seems merely asinine.

Kurt Vonnegut, for example, who has also written some great SF, looks to outer space for nothing but "empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death." He uses aliens in his fiction as a literary technique to provide an estranged, global perspective on human foolishness. Both he and Clarke did commentary for CBS in 1969 during the first Apollo landing on the moon. Flanking Harry Reasoner, they took turns praising the historic event and sniggering, a sharp contrast between human expansionism and humanist cynicism.

No one is more cynical than Clarke himself, of course, about popular attempts to prove and commercially promote the existence of UFOs. He dismisses the various, fanatic and fantastic cults that exploit the gullible in this way. "They tell us absolutely nothing about intelligence elsewhere; but they do prove how rare it is on Earth."

Still, he is an enthusiastic supporter of SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) asserting that, "The galaxy must be an absolute Babel of conversation and it is surely only a matter of time before we can hear the neighbors." Clarke predicts that "first contact" will be made within the next hundred years by means of radio telescopic scanning of the stars for patterned alien emissions. This moment looms for him as the ultimate epistemological thrill, or cognitive shiver, to use Darko Suvin's poignant phrase.

First contact is the nearest the creator of 2001 can imagine to capital "T" truth. He flirts with the Ultimate by making this kind of tentative approach to the Absolutely god-like. But It is always squeezed out of the picture in accordance with Clarke's Third Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Another mind is revealed looming beyond what presently appears to be the Overmind. David Bowman may have thought he attained cosmic enlightenment at the end of 2001, but only because he failed to comprehend the incredible science and technology controlled by the Monolithians.

Given sufficient gigabytes of data and the applicable abstractions, anyone can join the secular circle in the sky made up of Monoliths, Rama, Starglider, et cetera. Such a perspective reduces all religions to more or less sophisticated cargo cults, mythopeoic extrapolations of parental protection, discipline, and love. Their various forms are inspired by the same failure in existential courage and cognitive resources.

"I don't believe in God," Arthur Clarke says, "but I am very interested in Him." This tantalizing paradox recalls William Blake's metaphor describing God, two hundred years ago, as the intellectual fountain of humanity. Heady wine spews from that fountain. There, Clarke imbibes a gushing geyser of data gleaned from the expanding universe. Pursuit of this outwardly bounding reality appears limited only by the speed of light.

For flesh and blood humanity such a limit may indeed be definitive, but Clarke anticipates the evolution of consciousness beyond biology. In fact, he welcomes it. He heralds the advent of the automated "Frankenstein" of popular culture as a kind of messiah. An extremely strange twist, because before the Terminator in the film of the same title, HAL of 2001 was the most popular postmodern image of this monster.

In 2010, however, HAL is rehabilitated, if not canonized. We learn that his homicidal paranoia in the first installment was actually caused by the nefarious cold war tactics of his CIA programmers. In 2010 the super beings of the Monolith use HAL to communicate with humanity. He is very good at this task because he is, himself, a prototype of what they have already become. The novel version of 2001 explains that the Monoliths represent flesh and blood beings, though non-human, who have evolved astronomically. At the end of 2010, like a perfectly rational Jesus Christ, HAL sacrifices his own existence to save the lives of the joint Russian and American crew.

The god for which Arthur Clarke searches, then, started out as little more than a bucket of bolts, like Robbie the robot in the 1950's SF classic, Forbidden Planet. It long ago evolved not only beyond the weaknesses of flesh (or meat, to use the postmodern term) but beyond organic life, itself. This futuristic extrapolation of massively quantified information and cognitive might operates on a galactic, or intergalactic, scale at least. That is, if the brains behind the Monoliths, Rama, and Starglider can be said to operate on any material scale.

The heroic expansion of intelligence into outer space is imagined coming to fruition in two stages. First, it escapes from the prison of flesh, human or not, to lodge in the silicon purity of HAL and his brethren. Then these patterns of energy are liberated from the encumbrance of any kind of material residence, or even reference. A scientist such as Clarke does not refer to the end result as spirit, of course. But if it walks like an angel, and flies like an angel, perhaps we should picture this entity as a little green men-sa with a halo.

"Will the circle be unbroken by and by, Lord, by and by? Better days are waiting, in the sky, Lord, in the sky."

The evangelical, echo of empire is no auditory hallucination, as the church militant, fortified by scientific imagination, hurls itself beyond our poor, punctured heaven. Worlds without number wait to be converted to information and digitally catalogued. The territorial imperative of this tradition was never intimidated by the shear size of any task or the speed of light.

No matter how many cubic parsecs of space are engulfed, though, nor how much data is amassed, the unknown remains lodged in between the bits and bytes. The grandiose challenge of space, the promise of "intellects among the stars as vast as worlds" should not distract us from more pressing mysteries closer to the bone.

The limits to penetration of the unknown are more obvious and intractable on the microscopic scale. The pioneer of subatomic physics and founder of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg, demonstrated in the 1920's that the measurement of any system disturbs it. This disturbance in turn alters the system causing some degree of imprecision in the result of the original measurement.

On any ordinary scale Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is not significant, but on the subatomic level, it renders the best research physicists, practically blind. Subatomic particles only leave traces. Their locations can be determined at a particular point in time past. But where they are now, and where they are going, can only be estimated. The answers to these basic questions are charted in so called "schedules" of probability.

The elementary building blocks of our world appear to be Ultimately elusive. Like mercury, they squirt away when scientists try to put their fingers on them. Albert Einstein hated the Uncertainty Principle claiming that, "God does not play dice," but he failed to disprove it. Arthur Clarke does not like this indeterminacy built into the structure of things any better than Einstein.

Chasing alien genius among the stars provides the illusion of more substantial results, the promise of more spectacular success. But the same subatomic uncertainty reaches into all corners of the cosmos. And the unknown imbedded in the smallest morsel of the mundane is less heroic, but equally mysterious. The same Absolutely god-like, cognitive shiver lurks many fold within the most humble molecule.

Because of the sheer power of his intellect, and the relentlessly outward direction of its thrust, Clarke is sometimes seen as a coldly rational elitist who cares more about hypothetical speculation than he does about people. This impression is understandable but not really fair. Even though the goal of his prophetic search is located somewhere in the vacuum of outer space, the benefits foreseen by its success are very down to Earth.

First contact is envisioned as a giant extra terrestrial relay, reflecting back a sparkling new image of the collective human family. The shock of such an event would probably have an effect on mundane communication at least as profound as that of comsats. Clarke believes it would serve the cause of world peace, as in the ending of 2010, that it might be just what human beings need to make us stop acting like savages.

God bless the space cadet from Somerset. May he find the little green men-sas of his dreams in the pulsing, stroboscopic heart of his long sought neutron star. When his time comes, may they swing low in their sweet chariot of fire and carry him off to glory.

There is only one Arthur C. Clarke, but everyone is searching for some version of god. Perhaps everyone is a prophet, too, of however meager inspiration. Clarke comments in one of his rare references to Heisenberg that, "a man is more than the sum of his atoms." He does understand that the Ultimate mystery is located just as certainly, or uncertainly, within each person as it is in the Great Beyond.

The postmodern Elijah is not limited by gravity to merely wandering the Earth in his search for the Peace that passeth understanding. And highly placed spiritual authorities have lent him their support. A man no less tested in this search than Pope Pius XII endorsed the exploration of space in its early days as a means toward the fulfillment of human potential. Clarke called the Pope's address on this subject "brilliant" and explained, "Any path to knowledge is a path to God--or to Reality, whichever word one prefers to use."