Out of This World : Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey Didn’t End With 2001--His New Dream Is Gardening on Mars

Barefoot and clad in a navy-blue sarong, Arthur C. Clarke isn’t really in the mood for visitors. It’s getting toward noon, the hour his physical therapist shows up for 60 minutes of daily renovation on his wracked body.

But if the legendary science-fiction writer’s hands shake and he hobbles across the room, his mind is still devastatingly lucid after 74 years of dreaming and thinking.

And if he seems a bit distracted at the moment, well, it’s only because his mind is on Mars. Gardening on Mars, to be precise. It is Clarke’s latest personal odyssey and obsession, and with it comes a clear message:

Forget “2001: A Space Odyssey”--please. Think Mars.

“Mars is the next frontier, what the Wild West was, what America was 500 years ago,” Clarke declares without a trace of doubt. “It’s time to strike out anew. . . . Mars is where the action is going to be in the next thousand years.”

The father of HAL, the Jupiter mission and the black monoliths really is far too busy on the red planet these days to contemplate humankind’s march toward the real 2001, a landmark year that he left behind long ago.

Actually, Clarke is gardening on Mars. Just he and his computer, a Commodore Amiga 3000. And together they are, as usual, dabbling with reality a few light-years beyond the contemporary, spending their days and nights “farming” and “colonizing” inside Mt. Olympus, the largest known volcano in the solar system.

Eventually, Clarke explains, the project will result in a book entitled “The Snows of Mt. Olympus: A Garden on Mars.”

“That’s what it’s about. Gardening on Mars, you see,” he says cheerily, his voice gaining in strength in an accent that alternates between his native British and an adopted American twang. “It’s really farming on Mars, although that doesn’t sound quite so romantic. But the main thrust of the book is the absolutely gorgeous artwork, which my computer is generating night and day.”

Surging with ‘60s-style passion now, he charges on: “I’ll show you a little bit of this, and it’ll blow your mind. In fact, it’s a program developed in (San Luis Obispo) California by Virtual Reality Laboratories, which they sent me, and I realized, ‘My God, there’s a book here.’ ”

Clarke then dazzles his visitors with a fistful of color prints taken from computerized projections of Mt. Olympus, at about 90,000 feet, three times the height of Mt. Everest (“There it is, we’ve planted some crops on it”; “There’s a view from the summit when we’ve planted pine trees”; “And here it is, 1,000 years hence, when we’ve put an ocean around it”).

“You see, what this program does,” Clarke continues, almost shaking with excitement, “it’s NASA digital information with the maps of Mars, giving us the profiles in millions of zeroes and ones. . . . And then the computer does millions of calculations. . . . A crater on Mars, you see, it’s an enormous valley. You could put the Grand Canyon into this sideways. And these enormous volcanoes. . . .”

Translation: Clarke has stored the actual maps of Mars taken by NASA’s Viking probe in his computer and ordered the machine to photographically transform, piece by piece, the bleak, lifeless Martian landscape into forests, oceans, farms and condominiums.

So, are these the ramblings of a genius gone mad from island fever and, perhaps, his own mortality?

Hardly.

The greening of Mars is but the latest in a succession of Clarke projects and achievements since the book and film that influenced a generation. In all, his resume lists no fewer than 40 major literary awards and academic honors and more than 70 written works--many bestowed or completed long after “2001: A Space Odyssey” burst to prominence in the mid-1960s.

In fact, were it not for a nearly finished project--this one not involving Mars--the on-again, off-again literary recluse probably would not have opened his modern wood-and-glass home on this island off the southern coast of India for one of his few major interviews in years.

The forthcoming nonfiction work, a history of telecommunications due from Bantam Books in July, is expansively titled “How the World Was One: The Global Family of Man.” And how to explain its premise?

“For God’s sake, I just can’t tell you, I’m just, uh, I mean, it’s just made us one family, whether we like it or not,” Clarke says. “Don’t give me any profound questions. I’m just too stupid at the moment. I’m just sort of--I’m on Mars, anyway.”

Well, mostly. Seated in an office cluttered with souvenirs and dozens of remote-control devices for computers and televisions, Clarke is still earthbound enough that he has prepared a single sheet of paper with five one-word subjects hand-scrawled on it for this interview.

First, somewhat surprisingly for this man of the future, is an enduring image from the past: HAL, the incarnation of evil artificial intelligence in “2001.”

“I don’t really know why you’ve come, but I’ve been getting so many phone calls now,” he begins. “(This month), you see, is HAL’s birthday. Did you know that? Well, I had no idea until somebody wrote me and said, ‘Did you know that when HAL was lobotomized at the end of the film, HAL says that he became operational on Jan. 12, 1992?”

“But the strange thing is that in the book it’s 1997--not 1992--and I have no idea now when the change occurred, whether Stanley (Kubrick, the director) changed it in the screenplay (co-authored by Clarke) or the actor flubbed his line.”

Clarke’s volunteering the trivia of HAL’s birthday--which brought him a torrent of birthday cards from the strange to the sublime--is symbolic of the love-hate relationship he has with the year he cannot seem to shake. It is a contradiction that becomes clear when Clarke shrugs off the importance of the work while sitting before a bookshelf of translations of “2001.”

“He has an uneasy relationship” with the year, Nalaka Gunawardene, a Sri Lankan science writer who is Clarke’s personal secretary, explains in an interview. “He’s worried that some of the things he wanted to be in place by 2001 may not be there. And every year on Jan. 1 he tells me, ‘My God, we’re getting closer.’ ”

Clarke acknowledges, “We’re not going to have space stations like the Orbiter Hilton and the shuttle, even less a moon base in 2001. That (film) was made, remember, between 1964 and ‘68, before the Apollo landings. There was a general euphoria then. NASA had planned to be on Mars in (the ‘90s). It’s hard to realize that now. They’ve changed course.

“But in other ways, (the hiatus is) just a glitch, and history won’t even notice it.”

Back to his list, Clarke crosses out HAL and turns to the next item.

“I don’t know if you’ve seen the current Playboy, but they have the last chapters of my most important book, like I say, the book which will make me famous,” Clarke says, only half-joking in reference to “How the World Was One.”

“It’s the whole history of telecommunications, ending up with CNN live, everything. You know, it’s the bicentennial of telecommunications.”

(It’s a subject Clarke ought to know, because his authorship of an extraordinary article in the October, 1945, issue of Wireless World magazine helped lay the foundation for modern telecommunications. In the piece, he explained his theory of how a fixed satellite 14,000 miles above Earth could instantly connect every point on the globe. Clarke never patented the device, but scientists later used it as the blueprint for the dozens of communications satellites that form a necklace around the globe.)

Turning back to his interview agenda, Clarke also reports on a new brochure that is reprinting his Wireless World article, on his imminent conclusion of a three-part science-fiction series known as “the Rama trilogy,” on plans in his birthplace of Minehead, England, for an elaborate 75th birthday exhibition next December.

Finally, he ends up mumbling, “So you see, there’s an awful lot of things happening.”

In spite of his cornucopia of projects, Clarke himself is largely responsible for the hiatus in attention in recent decades.

First, there was his decision more than 30 years ago to make his permanent home in isolated Sri Lanka, a decision based largely on his love of the sea. Indeed, so deep is Clarke’s commitment to the sea--a near-weightless environment filled with strange, wonderful creatures that he believes is the closest man can come to duplicating outer space on Earth--that he also started a side business called Underwater Safaris.

In the mid-1980s, his reclusiveness deepened when his health began to fail. At first Clarke was told he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which doctors said gave him just a few years to live. His depression increased--and his production decreased--until he traveled to the United States in 1988 for an additional medical opinion. At Johns Hopkins University he received a different diagnosis: post-polio syndrome, the result of a bout with polio-like symptoms in late 1959 that left him paralyzed for two months.

“So, instead of having already used up most of an ALS victim’s two to five years of survival,” he wrote to friends at the time, “I’ve a pretty good chance of seeing 2001, even if from a wheelchair.”

Still, he began to sequester himself further not only from the media but also from his fans. In a form letter distributed by his staff in 1990, he declared: “To all those enthusiasts who send me pet theories, inventions and plans for saving the world--sorry, but I don’t have the time or qualifications to discuss them.”

He added curtly in a section titled “Advice to Authors”: “There is no substitute for living.”

These days, the “living” is harder and harder for Clarke, who walks only with difficulty and tires early in the day. But with his computer doing most of the hard “gardening” anyway, Clarke’s mind still works overtime, redesigning the red planet in his own image.

When a visitor asks again why his current interest has focused so intently on Mars, Clarke’s eyes sparkle for the first time in the interview.

“What’s going to happen there? Everything,” he declares. “There’s a big argument at the moment. The moon is closer, and we’ve got to go back there some time, but whether it will ever be on a large scale is the question. But Mars--there’s no doubt about it, because Mars is a relatively benign environment. It has everything you need, unlike the moon, which probably doesn’t have any water.”

The Mars mania is getting out of control when a visitor reminds Clarke that America’s space program, rather than expanding, is more or less on hold. But Clarke brushes that aside with a wave of the hand.

“The characteristic of human nature, and perhaps our simian branch of the family, is curiosity and exploration,” he says. “When we stop doing that, we won’t be human anymore. I’ve seen far more in my lifetime than I ever dreamed. Many of our problems on Earth can only be solved by space technology. . . . The next step is in space. It’s inevitable.”

The suggestion leads to the ultimate question for Clarke: predict the future for humankind.

“No one can predict the future now,” he replies, his tone turning from boastful confidence to respectful reticence. “No one can make any long-range plans. The best we can hope for, to quote the British poet Robert Bridges, is ‘the masterful administration of the unforeseen’ and to make it as masterful as possible.

“Ride the whirlwind,” he advises, as he painfully eases his body from behind the computer and slowly walks toward the spartan bedroom where his physical therapist is waiting. “That’s the most we can do.”