The Singularity of Arthur C. Clarke

Life under “Lockdown” – A London Diary #5

There was a moment, when I was about halfway through, when I realised that reading Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) whilst living alone during the lockdown might not have been such a good idea. Clarke’s writing is often sublime, but, I think it is particularly so in 2001. His descriptions of the solitude encountered in space are perhaps the most evocative of all science-fiction writers. He manages to capture all facets of solitude – the isolation balanced with the banality; the ‘aloneness’ balanced with the reassuring comforts of routine; stasis counterbalanced by imperceptible velocity; claustrophobia with the crushing vacuum of the infinite; and, of course, the paranoia which so easily overrides rationality. It’s not hard to see why so many people think 2001 is possibly the perfect science-fiction novel.

There are two elements to any novel or short story written by Clarke which frequently combine in such a uniquely, well-crafted way to make his work unlike that of any other writer. Firstly, as is widely known, his science writing is meticulously grounded in reality. Reading reissues of some of his earliest works is always interesting, as they usually come with a later introduction written by Clarke with his characteristic dry wit, explaining what he got wrong and why he got it wrong. But largely he got it right, and this was because he was so fascinated with real, verifiable facts. Yet even in the earlier texts you’ll still find the ‘so-far-as-we-know’ caveats – Clarke, it seems, was always ready to be proved wrong. And that was possibly his greatest strength, the very broad aperture of his open, but simultaneously focussed and exacting mind. Secondly, that openness of mind tended him towards something rather unusual in a purely scientific writer, and that was the fact he had a deeply curious spiritual side as well. Naturally, some critics have leapt upon this element of his writing and his imagination as Clarke’s Achilles’ heel. And I can well see why. For instance, vide: the final few chapters of his novel Childhood’s End (1953), with its bizarre tableaus of human beings swaying like sunflowers caught in a kind of rapture. But after you’ve read a few of Clarke’s novels and short stories you begin to see the uniformity of a pattern emerging. He writes in 2001: “The surface of this star was not formless chaos; there was a pattern here, as in everything that nature creates.” – And the pattern hard-wired into Clarke’s questing imagination seems to be a striving to marry science and philosophy. The mysticism of deep space-time merges David Bowman with the infinite, hence the vision of the baby in embryo, the star child, hanging over the Earth at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s film of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Stanley Kubrick, directing a scene on the film set of 2001

Kubrick’s film and Clarke’s book are two quite different, or diverging entities. In many ways it’s not enough to simply watch one or read the other if you really want to explore the deeper meanings or implications hinted at in each. I read one comment on 2001 which said: “Kubrick touched the Monolith, but Clarke goes inside it.” – This is very true, prose can articulate thoughts and ideas in a way which the eidetics of cinema perhaps can’t, and vice versa. 2001 was the result of a fascinating intellectual collaboration between Clarke and Kubrick, with the book and the film being written and made in tandem; the creativity of one simultaneously feeding off and back into the other.

Arthur C. Clarke, on the film set of 2001

For me, it is that marriage of mysticism and science which makes Clarke one of my favourite writers. I can lose myself in his books like no one else’s. Sometimes reading his novels or stories feels akin to inhaling air or drinking water – it’s effortless, natural, and refreshing. Generally, his words don’t hang around, the stories shift at a reasonable and reasoned pace, and his ideas set the cogs in the back of my mind whirring in a way which results in an unexpected teletype print-out spooling back, unwonted into my mind at a later point, usually when I least expect it. 

Looking back, I’m not sure what the first work of Clarke’s was that I read. It was either a short story about racing space ‘yachts’ using enormous sails which acted as solar-arrays in an English class at school. Or it was his novel The Fountains of Paradise (1979). Both of which I read at around the same time, when I was either 13 or 14. I was already reading John Christopher’s Tripods Trilogy and Isaac Asimov’s Lucky Starr novels, but Fountains of Paradise was a bit of graduated step-upwards in some senses. The grandeur of this story and its vast timespan was something I distinctly recall I found totally mind-blowing. It begins in 4^th Century Ceylon and ends aeons into the future when the Voyager space probe returns to Earth, but looking unrecognisable for all the bits of different alien technologies which have been bolted to it during its countless centuries of voyaging across space and time.

Clarke is often described as a visionary. In many senses this is the perfect word to describe what he does, but not who he was. I think describing science-fiction writers as ‘prophets’ who ‘predict’ the future is kind of lazy – it’s a bit too hocus-pocussy, and can be rather misleading. A good example is the claim that Clarke ‘invented’ the ipad. In 2001 – both the book and the film – he describes David Bowman “… settling down to breakfast and the morning’s radio-fax edition of the World Times. On Earth he never read the paper as carefully as he did now; even the smallest items of society gossip, the most fleeting political rumours, seemed of absorbing interest as it flashed across the screen.” – I’m not sure if it was Clarke himself who said something to the effect of: ‘if it can be imagined it will eventually get built.’ – After all, that is exactly the purpose of ‘envisaging’ things – planning, preparing, imagining scenarios, outcomes, contingencies, etc. These are exactly the cognitive processes the Monolith initiates, or more accurately 'helps-along', as it towers over the colony of proto-apes at the start of both the book and the film. It’s often said that humans are only limited by the scope of their imaginations – but even visionaries such as Clarke have their limitations. For instance, he may very famously have proposed the notion of orbital geostationary communications satellites in 1945, which are now a ubiquitous (if unseen) fact of our daily lives, but note the fact that in much of his early works of science-fiction set in the far future: men are scientists and explorers, whereas women are still usually secretaries and air-(or rather space)-hostesses.

On reflection, my first reading of 2001: A Space Odyssey during the Coronavirus lockdown was actually an inspired idea. I’m sure I’ve appreciated it in a manner which would have been all but impossible at any other point in time, or in the trajectory of my life. For I read it whilst I was stuck, limited, confined and alone, and, arguably to some degree, under existential threat. And even though I thought I already knew the story inside-out, having watched the movie version countless times over and over since I was a kid – Kubrick being one of my favourite directors, the book was sufficiently different and so well-written as to be wholly gripping. I often find myself engaged by books, but I rarely get engrossed in them. Early yesterday evening I sat down with a freshly made cup of tea under a reading lamp to read the chapters in which HAL becomes homicidal, and I read and read and read until I eventually re-emerged back into the room, where I now found myself sat cocooned under the lamp, the twilight had turned to proper evening, the room was otherwise totally dark, and my untouched cup of tea was still sitting on the table beside me, now stone cold. The only comparable occasion which I can readily recall was when the very dramatic denouement of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim made me miss my Tube stop by five more stations when I was in my early twenties.

Some people decry science-fiction as silly or simply escapist nonsense, and undoubtedly it is sometimes. But that’s no bad thing. It can be an unfortunate misinterpretation of science-fiction as a genre however, because (if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor) science-fiction is able to cover a lot of ground as it ranges through both space and time. In the best science-fiction you will find examined in great detail subjects as various and varied as: psychology, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, theology, theosophy, history, politics, geography, as well as the traditional sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology. For a long time I gave up reading science-fiction, not because I had gone off it – I was just busy with other things, and besides, the early X-Files TV series and the perpetual production line of major Hollywood movies provided enough of an output to satisfy my hankerings for science-fiction. But I began to find myself drawn back to science-fiction writings at the same time I was drawn back into academia. 

At first I thought this was because I was craving some form of light-relief as a counterbalance to the formality of my MA and then my PhD studies, and that may well have been the case. But in that escapism I found there was an unforeseen benefit. Science-fiction offers not simply an escape, but it enhances our vision by inviting us to look into a two-way mirror. In science-fiction we can see ourselves, but we can also see beyond ourselves as well. Science-fiction is more than a medium for mindless entertainment, the best science-fiction is a medium for the mind. As Clarke always knew best, scientific rationality needn’t rule out awe. The profundity of the unknown can be as equally awe-inspiring as reflecting on what is known or what is inferred from the limitations of what is known, and that can and should be the basis of any genuine sense of mysticism. David Bowman may well become one with God at the end of 2001, but, like the Monolith, who’s to say that God might not be something which we can ever properly or completely comprehend. Whatever we conclude, it’s perhaps best if those conclusions remain open as food for future thoughts …

Also on 'Waymarks'

 Cosmonauts - Birth of the Space Age

The Transit of Venus

To Infinity and Beyond

Apollo 11 - Arthur C. Clarke & Robert A. Heinlein 

interviewed by Walter Cronkite & Bill Stout

~ 20 July 1969 ~  

India - 5000 Years of Science

“India has a long and dynamic tradition of scientific thinking and technological innovation.” – A tradition that stretches back 5000 years, in fact, from today’s scientific space exploration missions to Mars to the first known use of the numeral zero. Illuminating India: 5000 Years of Science and Innovation, at the Science Museum in London (until 31 March 2018, free entrance), is an ambitious little exhibition which neatly distils a flavour of the great breadth and depth of an amazing human story. Divided into three themed sections: observation, calculation, and innovation, it takes us from the early city-building civilisation of the Indus Valley (c.3300-1300 BC), through the classical and medieval eras (c.1500 BC-c.1500 AD), the Mughal (1526-1857) and British (1757-1947) Empires, to the modern day Republic of India. Showing how over millennia the cultures and peoples of the Indian subcontinent have traded goods and knowledge – commodities, artworks, technology, ideas – with other civilisations, the ripples of which have spread across the globe and continue to reverberate today. In many ways, India has always been at the very forefront of science.

The roots of Indian cosmology begin in its many religious traditions, as symbolised by the ‘earth witness’ pose of the Buddha statue at the start of the exhibition. Modern science is so often divorced from its origins in people’s minds these days that it is interesting to see here the linking of modern science to systems of knowledge which were first developed in the traditions of folk culture as they became embodied and codified in religious and philosophical thinking. Restoring this link is probably no bad thing and is perhaps something which should be given far greater prominence and focus, particularly given the remarkable resurgence of creationist thinking and ‘flat-earthers’ in only the last few years. 

19th century photographs of solar flares and sunspots on the surface of the Sun

To my mind the early modern “Age of Enlightenment” in the 18^th century as a pivotal period of transition in the West, along with the richly deep traditions of cosmology underpinning scientific concepts first found in the East, are more than simply bridges from the eminent thinkers of the past to those of the present – they are a means towards a more holistic understanding of our worldview and more importantly the continuity of the enquiring mind which is endemic to all cultures. That drive to understand the world around us, from microcosm to macrocosm, is something shared by all peoples. Examining and thinking about the environment in which we live (indeed with which we are interdependent, despite the exponential impact which we are currently effecting upon it), and contemplating the vast wonders of the wider universe itself in all its enormity and our infinitesimally small existence within it, is the common thread running through all human cultures across time.

Jambūdvīpa, or ‘Jain Map of the World’, c.1817

Two very different but not dissimilar maps at the start of this exhibition put me in mind of two books which I bought while I was in Delhi last year: A History of Science in World Cultures: Voices of Knowledge by Scott L. Montgomery and Alok Kumar (Routledge, 2016), and Cosmology to Cartography: A Cultural Journey of Indian Maps by Dr Vivek Nanda and Dr Alexander Johnson (National Museum, 2015). The first of the two maps, the ‘Jambūdvīpa’, or ‘Jain Map of the World’ (c.1817), which shows the Jain concept of the universe – with the notional continent of Jambūdvīpa at its centre – but which also explains how to calculate vast numbers, including different types of infinity, is neatly contrasted by the ‘Index Chart to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India’ (1860) on the opposite wall. The GTS chart illustrates the prodigious efforts of British colonial officials to physically survey the subcontinent. Each triangle on the chart represents the sum of hundreds of distance and angle measurements made using heavy theodolites, cumbersome 100-feet measuring chains, and compensation bars – like those displayed alongside – which produced a map that at the time was unrivalled in both scale and accuracy. 

Index Chart to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, 1860

Cary-Lambton Theodolite, c.1802

Ramsden's 100-feet chain, c.1793

George Everest's compensation bar, c.1830 & Surveying 10-feet standard, c.1830

Having read Matthew Edney’s excellent Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (University of Chicago Press, 1997) I was particularly interested to see these items, as well as the colonial-era botanical sketches made by unnamed Indian artists for Nathaniel Wallich (a Danish surgeon and botanist employed by the British East India Company) shown nearby, which are contrasted nicely by similar Mughal-era artworks commissioned by the Emperor Janhangir (1569-1627).

Linking these artistic as well as scientific exhibits is a fascinating machine – an oscillating plate phytograph (early 1900s). Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937), often referred to as the father of modern science in India, was fascinated by how plants respond to stimuli. He developed this machine in order to measure the influence of light, temperature and gravity on plant growth, thereby inventing a device which, through enhanced magnification, speeded up the time it usually took to conduct such studies. Arguably it’s only by marrying these supposedly opposites – of art and ideas, faith and facts – that we can properly comprehend the natural evolution of our current understanding of a scientific cosmology as it was first seeded and how it has since grown in the collective human mind.

Nathaniel Wallich's botanical wattercolours, early 1800s

Oscillating plate phytograph, early 1900s

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937)

Painting of a Himalayan goat, 1807 & Painting of Akbar crossing the Ganges by elephant, c.1586-1589

As a centrpiece to the exhibition, there is an example of the cleanest and most pristine auto-rickshaw, or tuk-tuk, which you are ever likely to see! – But this iconic mode of transportation (both amusing and scary by equal measures to outsiders visiting India) makes a serious point about the practical applications of science and engineering to the day-to-day lives of ordinary Indians. India has always been a site of technological innovation – as is illustrated by a fascinating set of objects and images relating to the Tata steelworks.

Advanced metalworking has always been a key industry in India, exported to other countries long before the developments of mechanised mass-production in the colonial and modern eras. From the ‘lost wax’ technique used to cast bronze statues of religious deities to the advanced chemistry which refined India’s steelworks, producing personal arms and armour to tanks, battleships, and steam engines, such innovations in engineering have helped to advance globalisation in the modern era through industrialisation. 

Photograph of steelworkers in Jamshedpur by Sunil Janah, 1940s-1950s - opened in 1907 Jamshedpur was the first modern steelworks to open in India

Tata Steel advert from the Times of India, 1934-1935

Commemorative stamps for the 50th anniversary of India's steel industry, 1958

The railways – one of the characteristic modes of transportation for which India is best known – were key to developing networks of trade, communication, and control; regulating the routines of life and work for millions of Indians from the 19^th into the 21^st centuries. But these prodigious, practical applications of science to the everyday first originated in the innovations of the theoretical. To return to the Jain Jambūdvīpa map of the world, we see it juxtaposed again by perhaps the most remarkable pairing of theoretical works of pure mathematics – the ancient Bakhshali manuscript (c. 300-800), found in 1881, which contains the earliest example of the use of the numeral and the concept of zero, sits alongside the modern handwritten calculations of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920), and a handwritten letter from Satyendra Nath Bose sent to Albert Einstein in 1924. The digital revolution – based on a system of zeros and ones – has facilitated the development of computer technologies which have enabled India to advance and perfect its remarkable space exploration programme, reaching Mars on its first attempt – amazingly the only country in the world (so far) to do so.

The Bakhshali manuscript, c. 300-800

Selected papers from Ramanujan's work, 1914-1920

A second exhibition, Illuminating India: Photography 1857-2017, very ably charts the history of photography in India from the so-called Mutiny or Uprising of 1857, which resulted in the full colonisation of the subcontinent by the British, to the seventieth anniversary of India’s independence this year (visitors are not allowed to take photos in this exhibition, but you can click here to view a wide selection of the images on display). Here again the exhibition is grouped into three themes: performance and power, art and independence, and, modern and contemporary. The first two sections contain a wealth of historical treasures which I found truly fascinating – there are almost too many images presented here, such that I could very easily have spent several hours taking it all in had I had more time. The first section neatly contrasts the power of photography in terms of commemoration and demonstration through colonial propaganda images (from souvenir postcards to the early photojournalism of Felice Beato), and the contrived courtly projections of princely power by Indian royal families who embraced this new medium to show themselves off in all their regal finery. 

There are some remarkable examples of the pseudo-scientific anthropological studies of colonial photographers, such as Maurice Vidal Portman (1860-1935) who made a set of images of ethnographic “types” for the British Museum in 1890 of Andaman Islanders, expressly documenting the disappearing “primitive cultures” of such “noble savages,” noting their supposedly significant anthropometric distinctions. Another example is William Johnson, who set up a photographic studio in Mumbai around 1852, and later, working between 1868-1875, he compiled and published an ethnographic study entitled, The Oriental Races and Tribes and the People of India. A neat juxtaposition to these images are those of the Indian photographer, the Maharaja Sawai Rum II (1834-1880), who made a number of self-portraits of himself dressed up in the different garbs of various Indian castes and classes. It is interesting to contrast these indigenous “types” with those presented in the images of James Waterhouse (1842-1922), which were published in his study, The People of India, in which it seems clearly apparent that one of his subjects, the Begum of Bhopal, was directing the proceedings – ensuring she was photographed in a number of guises which variously showed her as a royal personage, a stateswoman, as well as a proud mother and grandmother. These sets of images thereby invite us to rethink the agency at work behind such photographic forms of representation and classification as commonly practiced during this particular period of time.

Miniature charkha, or spinning wheel, 2017

There are also equally fascinating and arguably more moving and emotive images from the end of the colonial era on display in the second section of the exhibition – particularly those of Margaret Bourke-White and Henri Cartier-Bresson – which document the last days in the life of Mahatma Gandhi, his funeral and the immediate aftermath of his assassination in January 1948. These images made me think back to a small charkha, a hand-operated spinning wheel, representing the kind of technology of personal empowerment and of resistance through national self-sufficiency, the use of which Gandhi promoted in the cause for Indian independence, which is included in the 5000 Years of Science and Innovation exhibition next door. This was also a nice parallel for me, linking these two exhibitions to the India and the World: A History in Nine Stories exhibition which I worked on last month at the CSMVS in Mumbai – which also includes a much larger charkha, one which Gandhi himself may even have used.

Six Defining Moments from India and Photography

The charkha spinning wheel which was key to Gandhi’s anti-colonial struggle is more than simply a piece of technology to be utilised; its functionality has a deeper conceptualisation if we think of it as a physical representation of the Ashoka chakra, the ‘eternal wheel of the law.’ That conceptual link and the continuity of such systems of thought and knowledge, of knowledge and power, of self-determination and justice, of balance and harmony, lives on in perpetuity – symbolised by the wheel at the centre of the national flag of India. Like the cosmological wheel at the heart of the Indian religious world view, the Ashoka chakra, the infinite mandala, or the wheel of the dharma, sacred to Jains, Buddhists and Hindus alike, is perhaps also a representation of the scientific soul of India and all its peoples.

National flag of the Republic of India, with the Ashoka chakra at its centre, 2017

If, like me, you are interested in the history of science, colonialism, and photography, then these are certainly two very excellent exhibitions not to be missed.

Illuminating India: 5000 Years of Science and Innovation & Photography, 1857-2017

at

The Science Museum, London – until 31 March 2018