Nilanjana S Roy: A new odyssey

Perhaps one of the extraterrestrials Clarke hoped existed will find the space capsule with his DNA some day and clone him into immortality.

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering." As a young boy, Arthur C Clarke grew up in the golden age of science fiction pulp fiction, and perhaps he never really stopped looking outwards. American magazines were bought by the kilo by ships crossing the Atlantic to use as ballast; in England, they were sold at threepence apiece, and the young Clarke became an avid reader and fan.

At the time of his death from respiratory problems last week, he was most famous for two enduring concepts: the image of the monolith that was immortalised in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and his insight in 1945 that geostationary satellites might be used as telecommunications relays.

2001 cast a long shadow over his work; if you told all the but most devout Arthur C Clarke fans that he had written some 34 novels and a dozen collections of short stories as well as the essays, they would be surprised. 2001 was based on Clarke's haunting 1948 story, The Sentinel, where he introduces the disturbing idea that perhaps we are being watched, that extraterrestrial life, if it existed, might wish to keep a wary eye on mankind.

Clarke and Kubrick collaborated on the film script, which evolved into one of the most memorable science fiction movies of all time. Many were disturbed by the Clarke-and-Kubrick vision of a sentient computer""HAL""whose artificial intelligence matches and threatens our own, but whose demise in the film is emotionally harrowing for the viewer. As often happened with Clarke's seed ideas, they laid the ground for another four decades worth of debate over artificial intelligence, the morality of an AI "being", and the implications of the possibility that there might be extraterrestrial life in the universe.

It wasn't bad going for a man who'd begun his career as an auditor in the British Civil Service. World War II set his feet on a different path""he worked as a radar specialist in the Royal Air Force, and in the post-war years, was finally able to afford the university education he had so wanted, at King's College, London. He'd tried his hand at writing from 1937 onwards, but it was only in 1946 that he finally sold a story to Astounding Science Fiction. John Campbell's legendary science fiction magazine would nurture many of the giants of science fiction, from Isaac Asimov to A E Van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein""for Clarke to make a sale to Astounding was a turning point in his life. By 1956, he had a respectable writing career, and had moved to Sri Lanka where he would live for the rest of his life in a house near Colombo that was described as a "technological oasis".

I was not always a fan of Clarke's writing, but his ideas were impossible to ignore. His writing was shaped by the pulp fiction norms he'd cut his teeth on, and could sometimes be stark or too schematic. But in almost every one of his books, and a great many of the short stories, the power of the mind behind the stories was evident. Like the two other writers who were said to make up the 'A,B,C' of science fiction""Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Clarke""he had the ability to unleash the reader's imagination, to look beyond humanity's small troubles at the vast, unexplored universe beyond. He was also one of the great "technological" writers""though he might sometimes struggle to explain an elaborate concept that was clear as daylight in his own mind, you would be hard put to find bad science in any of his work.

Some of his work was as gripping and as intelligently frightening as 2001. The novel that Kubrick had initially wanted to film was the 1953 Childhood's End, which is still a compelling read. Humanity's nightmares, our visions of demons and monsters, actually come from a premonition that there are emissaries out there whose job it is to bring the messier parts of our civilisation to an end. In the book, an entity called the Overmind discovers that humanity has reached a dangerous turning point in its history; children are spared, as they become part of the Overmind one by one, but the rest of the world as we know it must die.

By the 1970s, Clarke had perfected a kind of intricate writing about technology and its possibilities""this came out best in the Rendezvous with Rama series, still considered one of the classics of nuts-and-bolts science fiction writing. Rama is the name of an artifact coming towards Earth, a kind of "space ark" that contains frozen seas and worlds within worlds. What many fans found fascinating about the Ramans is that Clarke refused to make them any less alien: he set himself the task of presenting the reader with a genuinely alien world that may have been beyond comprehension, but not beyond description. The rest of the series was co-authored by Gentry Lee, and in some critics' opinions, pales in comparison to the first book.

Perhaps his death will rekindle interest in his short stories, which contain some of the finest examples of his work. A personal favourite is The Nine Billion Names of God, which probably contains one of the finest last lines ever written in science fiction: "...Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out." Some were frankly terrible, such as Hate, a mawkish story about a Hungarian who hates Russians taking a delayed revenge on an astronaut who turns out to be a beautiful woman, much to his horror. Others, like the now-dated Sunjammer and Songs of Distant Earth found a second life in Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells albums. (Oldfield was also inspired by The Sentinel; it's not my kind of music, but it is possible that some Clarke fans will see this as a tribute.)

By the end of his life, Clarke had been wheelchair-bound with post-polio syndrome for years, but was still working on a collaborative novel with science fiction writer Fred Pohl. He had survived and repudiated accusations of paedophilia in Sri Lanka, and he had enjoyed a final session of deep-sea diving in the 1980s, before his illness took over. He still hadn't made up his mind whether there were ETs out there, but in his last interview, he said he definitely hoped so.

Perhaps they will find him. In an early, slightly goofy experiment, a spacecraft company had come up with the idea of launching a space capsule with DNA from eminent people loaded on board. Clarke donated one of the hairs from his head towards the project. It sounds too much like one of his worse stories, but it's not unpleasant to imagine, centuries later, an extraterrestrial discovering the capsule and cloning Sir Arthur C Clarke into immortality.