Clarke’s persona

Among the prominent ‘space personas’, including those discussed in this issue, Clarke’s case stands out for several reasons. Most notably, he was not an engineer, scientist, astronaut or space programme manager. Rather, he was a writer and advocate for space technologies who had his futures promoted via numerous media channels and partnerships with a wide variety of organizations. He was not a just space professional who became famous; his entire career was explicitly founded on a carefully constructed ‘prophetic’ persona which affirmed his authority. His persona was his career.

A key aspect of Clarke’s persona was his common designation as a ‘prophet of the Space Age’, although he was not the first to obtain this title. Wernher von Braun was described as such in the 1950s, for example.Footnote ¹⁶ The genealogy of ascribing the moniker ‘prophet’ to scientists was explored by Lynda Walsh, who argues that ‘the prophetic ethos is a role that a polity – a group of people who must work together to stay together – authorizes to manufacture certainty for them’.Footnote ¹⁷ Considering the challenge of promoting space travel when it was still largely imaginary, the certainty produced by popularizers like Braun and Clarke (that such imaginings were actually possible) was of great value to communities of like-minded individuals, such as members of the national rocket societies in which both started their careers. Walsh further suggests that the ‘prophetic ethos’ is granted to individuals who can ‘demonstrate privileged access to knowledge beyond the public ken’.Footnote ¹⁸ Clarke’s ‘prophetic’ persona was indeed founded on his reputation for having a privileged personal connection to space technology, particularly satellites.

In many respects the foundation for Clarke’s reputation as a ‘prophet’ can be found in his parallel title as the ‘father of satellites’, which was based on his 1945 publication on geostationary communication satellites. While this article received little attention at first, the years following the launch of Sputnik saw it become a prominent form of evidence for his prophetic persona.Footnote ¹⁹ An analysis of Clarke’s career advocating for satellite technologies shows that he actively encouraged his frequent introductions as the ‘father’ or ‘inventor’ of communication satellites, later even self-fashioning the supposedly more modest title ‘Godfather’ (because he did not actually design or build anything).Footnote ²⁰

In fact, Clarke is unique in that he achieved a role as prophet, or ambassador, for space, without being himself involved in any space programme or scientific endeavour: even Carl Sagan combined his public role with an academic career. There are equivalents in other fields, however, such as Jacques Cousteau or David Attenborough. Through his many documentaries, Cousteau became an authority on the ocean, without claiming to be a scientific oceanographer. Like Clarke, he also promoted a techno-optimistic view of our relation to the oceans, combining it with visions of exploration, exploitation and (later) environmentalism. And Cousteau’s authority, like Clarke’s, was founded on an early technological insight that proved crucial to opening a new frontier for human exploration: his co-invention of the aqualung.Footnote ²¹ In turn, as Gouyon argues, Attenborough’s credibility was based not on scientific authority, but on his ‘telenaturalist’ persona, an on-screen performance of personal intimacy with the natural world.Footnote ²² Similarly, Clarke’s trustworthiness was based on his perceived up-close-and-personal connection to the future, particularly in the ways in which space flight would change life on Earth. In these cases, the lack of formal scientific credentials or leadership positions did not negatively impact their authority.

Another notable difference between Clarke and other space personas was that he was not directly connected to any specific space programme or nation. As exemplified by the other ‘fathers’ discussed in this issue (Vikram Sarabhai of India, Arnaldo Tamayo of Cuba, Qian Xuesen of China, Sigmund Jähn and Ulf Merbold of East and West Germany respectively), space personas are most often created in national contexts.Footnote ²³ Clarke was a lifelong British citizen, but the space programmes with which he was most closely involved were in the US and India. The only nation he ever officially represented was Sri Lanka, which had no space programme. We will investigate how this national ambiguity enabled his persona to become a global production, receiving inputs from and addressing audiences across national, ideological, economic and linguistic barriers.

While Clarke did play an active role in the making of his own persona, there was a broad range of global organizations, from NASA to the Indian Space Programme, INTERKOSMOS, INTELSAT, AT&T, CBS, the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation and the BBC, who were all involved in shaping his public presentation. As we show, Clarke lent his voice to those in power. Politicians, space programme leaders and commercial companies, among others, utilized his global fame and the authority of his words for their own ends, in turn contributing to the acceptance of its authenticity. This multitude of actors makes his persona a rich focal point to investigate global space politics and astroculture. Finally, this richness is reinforced by the fact that Clarke’s career spans the entire traditional Space Age. He played a public role in space promotion from the 1940s until his death in 2008, and his image and name are still in circulation today. Thus, as an object of study, Clarke’s persona offers a novel lens for reassessing the scope and scale of the Space Age, due to its enduring presence and uniquely global interconnectivity.

A prophet of the space age

Clarke’s ascension to Space Age prophet can be traced back to his involvement in the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) in the years preceding the dawn of the space race. The BIS was a group of rocket and space enthusiasts who embraced an optimistic, almost utopian, view of space technology, inspired by interwar techno-optimists such as H.G. Wells.Footnote ²⁴ It became a platform for popular-science writers in which Clarke thrived. He joined the BIS in 1936, at the age of nineteen, shortly before serving in the Second World War, during which he gained experience in radar and communication technologies.Footnote ²⁵

Towards the end of the war, he and his fellow BIS members began to discuss how they could legitimize rocket development. As he later recalled of this time,

This public-relations effort to demilitarize rockets led to the now famous article in Wireless World, wherein Clarke suggested that the V-2 rocket could be used to launch three ‘artificial satellites’ which together could relay television signals to any location on Earth. From the very beginning of his career, Clarke was in the business of selling space, particularly for the benefit of those on Earth. Following the war, he began publishing popular-science books as well as science fiction, while studying physics and astronomy at King’s College (he would complete a bachelor’s degree and one year of graduate studies). By 1949, writing became his full-time vocation.Footnote ²⁷ Clarke became deeply affiliated with space in the British imagination, serving as the chairman of the BIS from 1946 to 1947 and from 1950 to 1953. According to Dunnett, Clarke’s early science fiction was an expression of the scientific narratives of the BIS, contributing to the creation of a national culture of ‘British outer space’ which saw space as the ultimate destiny of humanity.Footnote ²⁸

The intention of Clarke’s public and literary endeavours, in partnership with the BIS, was to shape public attitudes on the viability of space travel by focusing on futures that were in reach within a generation.Footnote ²⁹ Obtaining collective buy-in to this vision required a fairly high degree of scientific prowess and credibility, which the BIS helped grant Clarke. In his first examination of ‘space personae’, Geppert identified the formation of a ‘space international’ persona within early rocket societies like the BIS, predicated upon a cultivated image of scientific credibility and connectivity to an international community of experts.Footnote ³⁰ Clarke was a contributor to and recipient of this credibility.

In 1951, his popular-science book The Exploration of Space was selected by the Book of the Month Club in the US, receiving a number of glowing reviews on the front pages of prominent newspapers like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.Footnote ³¹ This marked his expansion into the American market, a significant boon to his promotional efforts and public recognition as a space authority. As a result, the US government allowed Clarke to write a popular insider account of Project Vanguard, the American effort to launch their first satellite.Footnote ³² The massive expansion of his popularity and the global reach of his audiences, however, did not occur until the years following his relocation from Britain to Sri Lanka in 1956.

From sea to space in Sri Lanka

Initially, Clarke’s shift was not related to space, but rather to scuba diving, which according to him offered an experience of ‘weightlessness’ akin to space flight.Footnote ³³ It was also entrepreneurial. In 1954, during a pit stop in Sri Lanka en route to dive in Australia, Clarke and his friend, aspiring (underwater) film-maker Mike Wilson, met Sinhalese diver Rodney Jonklaas, who took them diving in the local waters.Footnote ³⁴ This experience inspired Clarke and Wilson to relocate to Sri Lanka to explore the pristine waters and build a business around these ventures – focusing on underwater surveying, film-making and, most notably, tourism.Footnote ³⁵

In 1948, after a century and a half of British colonial rule, Sri Lanka gained independence as a dominion within the British Commonwealth.Footnote ³⁶ Many vestiges of colonial rule remained intact, however, including the use of English.Footnote ³⁷ The combination of Sri Lanka’s exotic tropical locales, affordable lifestyle and postcolonial infrastructure allowed Wilson and Clarke to quickly establish themselves financially – largely on account of the income stream made available by the growth of tourism within the Commonwealth.Footnote ³⁸ As Malcolm Crick argues in his account of international tourism in Sri Lanka, ‘tourism can so often seem like the return of their erstwhile rulers, only this time on vacation’.Footnote ³⁹ Furthermore, in postcolonial Sri Lanka, ‘tourism was a collaboration between the local ruling elite and overseas capitalists who required local partners to set up their enterprises’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Clarke followed this pattern, while – due to strict double-taxation laws – residing in the country for only six out of every twelve months.Footnote ⁴¹ The rest of the time was spent lecturing around the world, especially in the United States and Europe, but also India, wherein his experiences in Sri Lanka became material for reference.Footnote ⁴² Importantly, this semi-exile facilitated an expansion and cross-pollination of Clarke’s global audiences and raised their awareness of his presence on the island.

Drawing attention in this way was a core goal of Clarke’s prophet business, and he utilized an assortment of media channels to boost his businesses, commodify his image and promote his ideas. Such media exploits often required sponsors with their own specific audiences and goals in mind. For example, Clarke and Wilson’s 1958 diving documentary, Beneath the Seas of Ceylon, was sponsored by the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board, an organization that sought to stimulate trade within the Commonwealth.Footnote ⁴³ Very soon after his move, Clarke became an important cog in an economic, and later scientific, network between Britain and its former colony.

Over the next few years, Clarke and Wilson made more films, and Clarke wrote both fiction and non-fiction books centred in Sri Lanka, each portraying the island as an exotic paradise and an exciting tourist destination.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Treasure of the Great Reef (1964) and Indian Ocean Treasure (1964) discussed their discovery of a shipwreck, filled with silver coins dated to 1702.Footnote ⁴⁵ Several historians have shown how these ocean-focused publications, particularly The Deep Range, combined colonial-style fantasies of adventure and exploration with visions of future, technology-driven internationalism, based on coordinated exploitation of the vast resources offered by the world’s oceans.Footnote ⁴⁶

Diving footage from this period also helped to shape Clarke’s public image. Where previous visual representations of Clarke portrayed a classic, well-dressed, spectacled British authority figure, the diving images presented him as an adventurer like Cousteau. Dressed in a space-suit-like scuba suit, Clarke appeared just one rocket ship away from navigating the stars himself (Figure 2). Several Western media outlets explicitly highlighted this connection between sea and space exploration. In 1963, British magazine Men Only interviewed him in a piece titled Prophet of the Space Age, claiming that he ‘turned to the sea because he was born too soon for space’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Figure 2.

Clarke diving, taken by Mike Wilson. Arthur C. Clarke, Indian Ocean Adventure, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961, p. 38.

While the majority of Clarke’s audience was still in the West, he also engaged with local Sinhalese audiences. In 1962, he co-founded a film production company alongside Wilson and Sri Lankan artist Shesha Palihakkara. They produced Ran Muthu Duwa, or Island of Treasure, the first full-length colour film in Sinhala. The film was a massive success, seen by over a million Sri Lankans in just a few months.Footnote ⁴⁸ Overall, Clarke’s literary and media efforts played a key role in endearing him to the Sri Lankan government. The chairman of the Ceylon Tourist Board, A.C.H. de Soysa, wrote in 1967 that Clarke’s works ‘involve Ceylon in the most appealing manner and without doubt would influence any reader to yearn to visit our shores’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Beyond diving, film and tourism, Clarke was also involved in several grass-roots space popularization projects in Sri Lanka, which immediately after independence lacked a national scientific research culture.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1959, he co-founded the Ceylon Astronomical Society, together with Herschel Gunawardena, and began publishing articles on space and science in local English newspapers.Footnote ⁵¹ A translation of his novel about a rescue attempt of Moon tourists, A Fall of Moondust (1961), became one of the first science fiction novels published in Sinhala.Footnote ⁵² A medical student named Buddhadasa Bodhinayake and Clarke co-authored the first Sinhala book on space in 1961, translated as Someone Like You Will Go to the Moon. In 1965, Clarke, Bodhinayake and engineer and artist H.R. Premaratne published a Sinhala book on the virtues of satellite technology.Footnote ⁵³ Premaratne would shortly thereafter join forces with Clarke and Kubrick in designing the iconic space station featured in 2001.Footnote ⁵⁴ For Bodhinayake, this was the start of a career in science communication. He became the editor of Vidya magazine, one of the first science magazines in the country, putting Clarke on the cover of the first issue in 1966, portraying him as the local authority on space (Figure 3).Footnote ⁵⁵

Figure 3.

Clarke adorning the cover of the inaugural issue of Vidya, June 1966. Personal collection of Nalaka Gunawardene, who served as Arthur C. Clarke’s personal research assistant for twenty-one years.

Gradually, Clarke’s reputation within and public association with Sri Lanka began expanding. Perhaps facilitated by his presence in the region, he was awarded the UNESCO–Kalinga Prize in 1961. The award, endowed by Indian statesman Biju Patnaik, was granted for communicating the international importance of science and technology, and its contributions to the improvement of public welfare.Footnote ⁵⁶ Such accolades illustrate Clarke’s increasing fame, the appeal of his messaging, and his growing association with development via space technology. By this time, he was sufficiently famous that international organizations began enlisting him as an ambassador for their own missions. For example, the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) invited him to speak at its annual meeting in 1961. Clarke’s speech described the globalized future that satellite technology would create, arguing that Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels would have been ineffective in an interconnected world where satellites ‘can expose lies and spread the truth’.Footnote ⁵⁷ As the IAF was founded in 1951 ‘to ensure a constant dialogue between the space nations, regardless of political turmoil’, the appeal of Clarke’s rhetoric is understandable.Footnote ⁵⁸

In the meantime, the Sri Lankan government, while welcoming Clarke’s international promotion of the island, did not share his sense of urgency to invest in space. In 1956, the year Clarke relocated to the island, a new socialist-leaning government was elected, led by S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike.Footnote ⁵⁹ Its nationalist policies, which included making Sinhala the official national language, fuelled the beginning of ethnic tensions with the Tamil, Hindu minority that would plague the country for decades. Following a number of ethnic riots, Bandaranaike was assassinated in 1959, and the ensuing years were marked by instability in the nation’s political and economic systems.Footnote ⁶⁰ In this context of political turmoil, the use of space technologies for development was clearly more important to Western actors than to Sri Lankan officials. For example, the Sri Lankan government approached Clarke in 1963 to compile a report on the feasibility of using the island as a site for a satellite tracking station. Clarke’s report emphasized the value of Sri Lanka’s equatorial location and the advantages the equipment and (especially) the training of locals would bring. Despite the government’s request (which speaks to their perception of Clarke’s reputation), and the encouraging response, the government turned down an offer from the Smithsonian to build a satellite tracking station in the country in 1967.Footnote ⁶¹ Sri Lanka also did not participate in the 1968 UN Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNISPACE) in Vienna, failing even to respond to the invitation.Footnote ⁶² This is all the more surprising considering that the conference chairman, Vikram Sarabhai of India, expressed a shared belief amongst conference participants that outer-space technologies could ‘be of immense benefit to developing nations wishing to advance economically and socially’.Footnote ⁶³

By the end of the 1960s, recognition of Clarke as a ‘space prophet’ had become widely established among Western audiences. In his own telling, he became the go-to spokesman for the future, being asked by Western media outlets to ‘write factual forecasts, rather than science fiction’.Footnote ⁶⁴ No events did more to entrench this prophetic persona, however, than the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, followed a year later by the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Invited by CBS to sit alongside Apollo 7 astronaut Wally Schirra and anchorman Walter Cronkite – ‘the most trusted man in America’ – for the live broadcast of the Moon landing on 20 July 1969, Clarke engaged in a dialogue about humanity’s future in space in front of a global audience numbering in the hundreds of millions.Footnote ⁶⁵ As Fahy argues, ‘the height of a celebrity’s stardom comes when their personality intersects with history’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Through these media spectacles, Clarke became a bona fide space celebrity, known far beyond networks of space specialists.

To this point, much of Clarke’s persona remained an embodiment of Western ideals of expansion and technological supremacy. Images of Clarke’s Sri Lankan diving mainly promoted the island’s exotic beauty to Western audiences. Within Sri Lanka and neighbouring India, Clarke’s reputation became known and was respected among pockets of political leadership and scientific communities, yet much of this work remained regionally siloed. In the decade to come, Clarke’s international, yet Western-focused, space persona and his Sri Lankan work gradually integrated into one overarching space-for-development narrative, adjusted to the realities of post-Apollo space flight, and finding appeal among a growing number of global audiences grappling with globalization.

Fabricating a global persona

In the post-Apollo period, robotic space exploration and satellite technology became the primary forms of space flight, with a heightened interest in utilizing space technologies for earthly needs.Footnote ⁶⁷ Clarke’s rhetoric, focusing on near-future goals and satellites, was highly suitable for this new context, with the global South obtaining a central role in these rhetorical adaptations. The combination of Clarke and Sri Lanka became an ideal image for repositioning the public debate surrounding space flight toward earthbound realities. Ideas about satellite-driven national development, ‘edsats’ (education satellites), the emergence of the proverbial ‘global village’ and an embrace of Sarabhai’s narrative of ‘leapfrogging’ technologies became the central messages represented and projected by Clarke’s persona, to the point where he came to personally embody these ideas.

Reference to Clarke’s physical presence in Sri Lanka was often used to underline his authority to speak on regional issues – specifically on the developmental benefits of satellite technology for what was then known as the ‘Third World’, and by extension on the power of communications technology in the dynamics of Cold War geopolitics. An early example can be seen in 1958, shortly after the founding of NASA, when the United States Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration invited fifty of ‘the most knowledgeable of today’s space authorities’ to elucidate ‘what discoveries and advances may be ahead in the new space age’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Explicitly introduced as a resident of Ceylon who offered ‘a very high degree of assurance’, Clarke’s testimony was the only one to explore Asia:

This message clearly puts Clarke’s space-for-development rhetoric in a Cold War context, using Western technology to win the ‘battle for the hearts and minds’ of Asia and Africa. Clarke’s connection to Sri Lanka offered him an authoritative position as a spokesman for this perspective, which NASA and its supporters in Congress used to help justify their new space programme.

The television satellite future that Clarke projected in his 1958 testimony became achievable just a decade later in yet another example of how his authority on the future was continually reaffirmed. In the late 1960s, he was enlisted as a prominent lobbyist for a project to use NASA’s planned Applications Technology Satellite F (ATS-6) to broadcast educational television programmes directly to some five thousand Indian villages. This became the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE), a joint American–Indian project.Footnote ⁷⁰ Even though it was not his idea, and he was not involved in its actual execution, Clarke became so strongly associated with the project that the ATS-6 satellite itself was later nicknamed ‘Arthur C. Clarke’s Star’ by NASA.Footnote ⁷¹ Previous communication satellites had been used in low-earth orbits, from which only about three per cent of the globe could be reached. In contrast, the ATS satellites would be placed into the geostationary ‘Clarke orbit’, allowing 45 percent coverage of the planet.Footnote ⁷² ATS-6 was a realization of the very technology which Clarke had long advocated, offering the ability to provide direct television broadcasting into the homes of the developing world. NASA’s utilization of Clarke as its cheerleader was a mutually beneficial arrangement.

On 27 January 1972, Representative William R. Anderson (D-TN) read Clarke’s promotional essay on SITE, ‘Satellites and saris’ (later reprinted as ‘Schoolmaster satellite’) into the US Congressional Record as a moral justification for the post-Apollo space programme. In the essay, Clarke both positioned himself as an expert on the region, and connected his message directly to Cold War rhetoric: ‘The emerging countries of what is called the Third World may need rockets and satellites much more desperately than the advanced nations which built them. Swords into ploughshares is an obsolete metaphor: we can now turn missiles into blackboards.’Footnote ⁷³ In his accompanying statement, Rep. Anderson made clear why he chose to highlight Clarke’s message:

SITE was the brainchild of Vikram Sarabhai, who sought to use the project to showcase how satellite technologies can help developing countries ‘leapfrog’ their way into modernity.Footnote ⁷⁵ Clarke met Sarabhai several times, including while filming in India for the documentary The Promise of Space in early 1971.Footnote ⁷⁶ Although their personal relationship was cut short by Sarabhai’s untimely death later that year, Clarke adopted Sarabhai’s ‘leapfrogging’ rhetoric as the primary articulation for promoting Third World development through (Western) space technology.

In the same year, the US State Department invited Clarke to speak at the signing of the INTELSAT agreement, which had been formed to encourage the development of a single global commercial telecommunications satellite system.Footnote ⁷⁷ While touted by US officials as a means to facilitate peaceful global interconnectivity, recent scholarship has shown that the production and promotion of INTELSAT intentionally catered to Western expansionary ambitions.Footnote ⁷⁸ Clarke’s speech, which connected INTELSAT’s mission with Sarabhai’s leapfrogging rhetoric, fed directly into that agenda: ‘We are now about to witness an interesting situation in which many countries – particularly in Asia and Africa – are going to leapfrog a whole era of communications technology and go straight into the Space Age’.Footnote ⁷⁹

NASA’s final report on ATS-6 featured a reprint of ‘Satellites and saris’, and included a cartoon featuring Indian villagers viewing a SITE broadcast outside a seemingly run-down building equipped with a satellite dish. Underneath the drawing is a quote taken from Clarke’s essay: ‘but a new generation of APUS will be watching, wide-eyed when the science of a later age draws down pictures from the sky – and opens up for all … a window on the world’. ‘APUS’ is a reference to a little boy named Apu from Satyajit Ray’s 1955 film Pather Panchali, who first hears music from newly installed telegraph wires.Footnote ⁸⁰ The borrowing of an Indian cultural reference by Clarke, and through him by NASA, is representative of his interconnected position as a propagator of developmental ideals. It also emphasizes another Western formulation of Sarabhai’s leapfrogging rhetoric, centring on the technology rather than the state, with Clarke being used by NASA as a medium for making a moral case for Western technological expansion.

Embodying the global village

SITE marked a turning point in Clarke’s ‘prophet’ persona, changing his image from someone who envisioned the globally interconnected satellite future to someone who embodied it. During the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan had coined the term ‘global village’ to represent the interconnectedness to come from communication technologies.Footnote ⁸¹ Similar to the embrace of ‘leapfrogging’, the ‘global village’ became Clarke’s rhetorical characterization for the interconnected globalized world that satellite technology would support, and which he himself was living.

In 1974, Clarke’s long-time friend Wernher von Braun, who at the time worked at Fairchild Industries (the company that built ATS-6), suggested obtaining for Clarke a private satellite Earth receiving station so he could tune into the SITE programming. In a letter to Clarke, Braun claimed, ‘I think they [India] will agree with us that they could not possibly deprive the inventor of the geosynchronous satellite of the fruits of his own labors!’Footnote ⁸² Braun reached out to Dr. Satish Dhawan, the head of the Indian Space Programme, and by April 1975, several months before SITE began, the government of India gifted Clarke a full Earth station for ‘demonstration purposes’.Footnote ⁸³ While the gift was framed as a mark of appreciation for his imaginings, NASA, the Indian Space Programme and Fairchild Industries were likely well aware of the positive global publicity Clarke would generate. Moreover, Evans and Lundgren have argued that the emergence of INTELSAT (and INTERSPUTNIK in the USSR) in the 1970s saw the construction of new Earth stations, particularly in the developing world, as a proxy Cold War battleground for global network supremacy, and thus as something that needed to be actively promoted to national governments and telecom companies.Footnote ⁸⁴ In this sense, images of Clarke’s Earth station in Sri Lanka soon became a piece of that promotional material.

The installation of the Earth station at his Colombo home meant that Clarke possessed the world’s first private receiving station, and the first receiving station of any kind in Sri Lanka. This strongly reinforced Clarke’s public association with satellite technology and its globalizing nature, as well as elevating his reputation with Sri Lankan leadership. He hosted public displays of the technology for high-ranking Sri Lankan officials, including Prime Minister J.R. Jayewardene and President William Gopallawa.Footnote ⁸⁵ Clarke also actively used the Earth station in his self-fashioning abroad. He shared images of the station during testimony he provided to the US House of Representatives Space Committee on 24 July 1975, as well as during his participation in the Nobel Institute Space Symposium that took place in Norway later that year.Footnote ⁸⁶ Within Sri Lanka and abroad, newspapers reported on Clarke’s Earth station with articles that emphasized his role in making connections with foreign space endeavours.Footnote ⁸⁷ On 5 May 1976, Sri Lanka became officially connected to the INTELSAT network through the installation of the Padukka Station outside Colombo.Footnote ⁸⁸ Asked to comment at the station’s opening, Clarke reiterated that ‘the opening of Padukka is of particular satisfaction to me because I hope to spend the rest of my life here – and now there will be no problem maintaining contact with all my friends, throughout the world, without ever leaving Sri Lanka’.Footnote ⁸⁹ He was thus able himself to embody the way in which satellite technology enabled comfortable living in a globally interconnected world.

By the mid-1970s, Clarke’s space persona was commercially valuable, particularly in the realm of global telecommunications, and his connection to Sri Lanka had become a key component of its value. In commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the telephone, American telecommunications giant AT&T featured him in a series of six prime-time television commercials first aired on 17 January 1977. In the first commercial, Clarke was introduced as ‘the man who predicted telecommunications via satellite’, showing him standing in his own backyard in Colombo with his private Earth station in view. In the subsequent commercials, he is depicted emphasizing the virtues of communication, information and education for the global future, all while standing in Sri Lankan vistas. The commercials were viewed in over 25 million American homes.Footnote ⁹⁰ Such exposure not only quite explicitly globalized Clarke’s public image, but also served to portray AT&T as an active participant in the project of ‘modernizing’ the ‘developing world’. At this time, AT&T remained a communications monopoly in the US (it would be broken up in 1982), and was building subsidiary companies around the world while investing heavily in commercializing satellite telecommunications.Footnote ⁹¹ Featuring Clarke was good press for AT&T, allowing them to focus attention on the benevolent components of their endeavours, while simultaneously reinforcing Clarke’s role at the forefront of globalizing Western technological leadership.

Claiming Clarke

After 1979, Clarke seldom left Sri Lanka. He was in his sixties at this point and in poor health due to complications from post-polio syndrome. He had also become the first recipient of the ‘resident guest’ status in Sri Lanka, allowing permanent residence through what was popularly known as the ‘Clarke Act’.Footnote ⁹² In the last three decades of his life, portrayals of Clarke showed him almost exclusively living in exotic Sri Lanka, often wearing locale attire, while still able to actively communicate with the rest of the world via the satellite infrastructure at his home. Media outlets caught on to this component of his persona, with one newspaper labelling him in 1985 the ‘authentic citizen of the global village’.Footnote ⁹³

The cultural and political context of the global Space Age kept changing, however, with the late Cold War seeing the realities of space flight increasingly militarized and commercialized, alongside growing tensions in Sri Lanka. Considering that Clarke’s prophet business was in effect a promotional tool for space flight, the values and ideas underlying his persona had to change with the times. Clarke’s optimistic visions of space technology were used to counter growing narratives of space warfare, recasting ‘leapfrogging’ satellites as ‘weapons of peace’, reconnaissance satellites as ‘peacesats’, and arguing not for Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’, but for ‘Star Peace’.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the meantime, however, the situation in Sri Lanka was far from peaceful. Political instability and ethnic conflict had continued throughout the 1970s, culminating in an expansion of military and police powers to combat several insurgent Tamil separatist groups.Footnote ⁹⁵ By 1983, a civil war had erupted between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (commonly referred to as the Tamil Tigers), which would not end until the year after Clarke’s death. It is under these conditions that the Sri Lankan government began to more actively project an official affiliation with Clarke, both domestically and on the global stage.

In 1979, the year in which Clarke’s novel The Fountains of Paradise imagined a space elevator being built in Sri Lanka, he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by the University of Moratuwa in recognition of his ‘achievements and services’ to the country. President Jayewardene also made him chancellor of this university, the leading institute of technical training in the country.Footnote ⁹⁶ Around this same time, the Sri Lankan government and the University of Moratuwa proposed founding a ‘Sri Lanka Centre in honour of Mr. Arthur C. Clarke for the Study of Communication, Energy, and Space technologies with special reference to their applications to the developing world’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Clarke agreed to lend his name to what became the Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Modern Technologies, demonstrating his commitment by donating the $35,000 prize money from the Marconi Award he received in 1982.Footnote ⁹⁸ Shortly after its founding, the satellite receiving station at the institute was the first to receive television news broadcasts from outside the country.Footnote ⁹⁹ Furthermore, the institute took a leading role in designing an inexpensive satellite dish antenna for households – not unlike those developed in neighbouring India during SITE. Unfortunately, as time progressed, the institute became obsolete. Clarke privately expressed disappointment in the failures of the institute, but avoided public criticism in favour of an approach of ‘benign neglect’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Clearly, he valued an apolitical image.

Clarke also rarely publicly commented on the political situation in Sri Lanka. For example, in an extensive 1986 interview with Playboy, his comments on the civil war were confined to making this point:

In both cases – the underperforming institute bearing his name and the civil-warring nation where he lived – Clarke continued a long-standing trend of portraying Sri Lanka in a positive light. At the same time, this attitude also underlined his perceived position as still an outsider in Sri Lanka, physically present and possessing positions of authority, yet situated above everyday politics, and seemingly more attuned to affairs abroad. This is particularly evident in his rather paternalistic comments in Playboy. The Sri Lankan government clearly valued Clarke’s position, awarding him the Vidya Jyothi, or ‘Luminary of Science’, in 1986, the highest national honour for science.Footnote ¹⁰² Arguably, during this period, affixing Clarke’s name to prominent universities and scientific honours became a means for the Sri Lankan government to utilize Clarke’s celebrity to elevate its scientific reputability domestically and abroad, as an alternative perspective to the civil war.

Beyond its borders, the Sri Lankan government also began utilizing Clarke as its representative in the international space community. In 1981, he was sent to act as the Sri Lankan delegate to the UNESCO International Programme for the Development of Communication (IPDC) Council Meeting in Paris.Footnote ¹⁰³ This was the first time Clarke officially represented any nation. In his address, Clarke relayed familiar pro-space development messaging, though in a notably bleaker version than before, arguing that ‘unless major investments are made in space, millions are going to die, or eke out brief and miserable lives … in the Third World’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As Dunnett reiterates in reference to this speech, Clarke’s rhetoric unveils a ‘desire to use “Third World development” as a moral hook to encourage investment in space technologies’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Clarke was also sent as one of the Sri Lankan delegates to the Second UN Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNISPACE 82) in Vienna, where the prevention of an arms race in space was discussed.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In his speech, Clarke reiterated the ills of extending national borders into space, explicitly presenting himself as a veteran space prophet: ‘Back in 1948, in my first novel Prelude to Space, I coined a slogan that I’d like to leave with you tonight. Here it is – “We will take no frontiers into space”’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

While Clarke’s rhetoric of ‘space for peace and development’ was widely sought after for its positive spin on Western Cold War interests, Clarke himself was becoming viewed and used as a peace advocate and diplomat. Unique for an individual so affiliated with American space endeavours during the Cold War, Clarke was invited to the Soviet Union in 1982 – as a Sri Lankan visitor. The visit was possible because of Clarke’s connections with Ambassador Casie Chetty of the Sri Lankan embassy in Moscow and Vasilii Zakharchenko, editor of the Soviet science fiction magazine Tekhnika-Molodezhi (Technology for Youth).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The fact that the socialist-leaning Sri Lankan government was on good terms with the Soviets likely helped, but perhaps Clarke’s inclusion of Soviet space heroes in his newest novel, 2010: Odyssey Two, also encouraged the visit.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ For several days, Clarke’s visit to the USSR was filmed by a Soviet television crew and broadcast nationwide. They captured meetings between Clarke and several prominent Soviet officials, including the original inventor of the space elevator, Yuri Arsutanov. He also met Apollo–Soyuz cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, and was filmed telling him that 2010 took place aboard the spaceship Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. Notably, 2010 also featured the Chinese spaceship the Tsien, named after the ‘father of Chinese space flight’ Tsien Hsue-shen (Qian Xuesen). While Clarke’s intention for including socialist heroes in 2010 was to highlight a future where space rivals become allies, the USSR seized an opportunity for positive optics.Footnote ¹¹⁰

At this point in his career, associating Clarke with one’s space activities was seen as a positive boon to public perceptions, and this visit appeared to be an effort to publicly affiliate Clarke’s popular imaginings (particularly 2010 and the space elevator) as inspired by Soviet achievements. Throughout these official visits, aware of his position as a representative of Sri Lanka, Clarke was also able to request support for the proposed Arthur C. Clarke Centre.Footnote ¹¹¹ Using this connection with Sri Lanka, Clarke’s numerous public roles – space advocate, science fiction author, peace ambassador, Sri Lankan representative, sponsor of an academic institute – were increasingly intertwined on a global scale.

Additionally, as a high-profile representative of an idyllic space-globalized future, numerous nations were eager to claim his accolades. In 1989, Queen Elizabeth granted Clarke the ceremonial rank of Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for ‘services to British cultural interests in Sri Lanka’.Footnote ¹¹² The CBE is awarded to those who hold a ‘leading role in regional affairs through achievement or service to the community’.Footnote ¹¹³ Clearly, the Crown regarded him as British – or wanted to remind the world that he was one of their own. The imperialist title of the honour is also significant: not only was Clarke promoting a very Western form of globalism, but at this time the British were covertly backing the Sri Lankan government in the civil war, while trying to avoid both negative world opinion and a confrontation with India, who backed the Tamils.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The United States also staked a claim to Clarke via NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal – the highest award that a non-employee of NASA can receive – for his efforts educating the general public about the benefits of space technology.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Despite his nationality and his residency, Clarke was most directly involved with the American space programme, a relation that dated back to his early years of space advocacy, even before the founding of NASA.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The award ceremony featured a real-time demonstration of globalizing satellite technology, utilizing four satellites, seven Earth stations and a mix of fibre optic cables, microwave links, television studios and lecture theatres, all spanning fourteen time zones – again an example of how Clarke could embody global satellite interconnectivity (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

A visual representation of the network used for Clarke’s award ceremony. British Interplanetary Society, Space flight (October 1995) 37(10), p. 329.

In the final years before his death on 19 March 2008 at ninety years old, Sri Lanka enshrined Clarke in the highest echelons of its national narrative, awarding him the Sri Lankabhimanya, or the Pride of Lanka, in 2005, the highest civilian honour in the country.Footnote ¹¹⁷ A final, and somewhat controversial, honour was bestowed posthumously. A year after Clarke’s death, President Mahinda Rajapaksa announced plans to launch the first Sri Lankan satellite, and to name it after ‘space prophet Sir Arthur C. Clarke’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The controversial plan never came to fruition because of its high cost and its impractical nature, but the gesture was noteworthy.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The prophet business

Opening his 1962 collection of essays Profiles of the Future, Clarke wrote, ‘Before one attempts to set up in the business of being a prophet, it is instructive to see what success others have made of this dangerous occupation – and it is even more instructive to see where they have failed.’Footnote ¹²⁰ From the beginning, Clarke was quite literally in the business of building a persona as an authority on the future. His 1945 Wireless World paper provided the first building block for this prophetic persona, and Sri Lanka globalized it.

Decades later, Clarke highlighted one component of what made this prophetic persona so alluring: ‘No one can predict the future … The best we can hope for, to quote [poet Robert] Bridges, is “the masterful administration of the unforeseen.” Ride the whirlwind. That’s the most we can do. I think one should be optimistic. Then one has a better chance of self-fulfilling prophecy’.Footnote ¹²¹ This optimistic style, shaped by his background in the British Interplanetary Society, was packaged in a diverse array of media formats, and adapted with the times, by design. Its apparent success depended on the fact that a wide range of actors could use Clarke’s messaging for their own ends – from politicians and space managers to commercial companies and science fiction lovers around the globe.

Clarke often argued that he was not actually a ‘prophet’, but more like an ‘extrapolator’, seeking to communicate realistic possibilities that the public could strive toward within their lifetime.Footnote ¹²² Of course, countless others have embarked on similar endeavours. From Willy Ley and Isaac Asimov to Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, space personas utilized to promote space activities have been, and will continue to be, common astrocultural entities. What made Clarke’s persona unique was its deeply interconnected and long-standing association with both Sri Lanka and globalizing satellite technology, which strongly fed into one another. This facilitated a global facade, allowing for his persona’s underlying messaging to find relevance across geopolitical boundaries.

Clarke’s move to Sri Lanka marked a turn in his persona, globalizing it in a decidedly postcolonial way. His position as a ‘resident guest’ in a developing nation, calling it home while retaining his Western identity and perspective, could be regarded as a key ingredient in what became a status as the pre-eminent space celebrity of the Space Age. Initially, the connection to Sri Lanka complemented his intellectual reputation as an authority on space with a more direct image as an explorer and adventurer himself. It made him a big fish in a small pond, inviting engagement with the highest levels of government and encouraging an expansion of his networks. In the words of Poole, he became ‘a prophet in his own future’.Footnote ¹²³ Moreover, his physical connection to the region provided powerful rhetorical avenues for others to connect his advocacy to Cold War and Third World development narratives, which were often interconnected. Sri Lanka’s exotic image and status as a developing nation served to underline projected narratives of the practical, yet utopian, potential of space technology.

Particularly in the post-Apollo 1970s, socio-economic development via satellite was central to astrocultural debates, and Clarke’s Sri Lankan connection strengthened his authority to advocate this development. This authority found real-world appeal with NASA and the Indian Space Programme, who leveraged his image to promote their projects, and later the Sri Lankan government, who utilized him as their national representative. He became a rhetorical and visual tool and trusted figurehead for those trying to project a positive, peaceful and believable spin on the usage of and future for space technologies, with an adaptive narrative that often proactively changed alongside shifting geopolitical contexts.

At the same time, his persona remained Western-centric, despite allusions to the contrary. This ‘global-but-Western’ ambiguity made him a relatable spokesman for space organizations or companies with global ambitions, wooing Western audiences while also encouraging foreign engagement. Within Sri Lanka, Clarke was portrayed as an imported public intellectual, involved in tourism, film and scientific initiatives. He was hailed by the government as a great ambassador of the island, which by all measures he was, but his efforts to stimulate Sri Lankan space endeavours were hindered by the turbulent politics of the country, in which he did not publicly engage. Clarke’s failed attempts to get Sri Lanka involved in space further illustrates that perhaps the projection of urgency for space investment in developing nations was somewhat naive, or simply opportunistic.

As both Kilgore and Dunnett argued, and this article has shown, Clarke believed that Sri Lanka’s future was best determined by Western technology. In many respects, the values underlying his persona were no different. Clarke’s persona was largely curated by and for Western audiences to find commercial and moral justifications for space initiatives, with those in the global South serving as token beneficiaries. Sri Lanka’s exotic image served to reinforce rather than contradict this technocratic notion, underlining the necessity of spreading Western technology around the entire globe. That said, even if Sri Lanka did not develop its own space programme, Clarke’s persona helps show that the country and its culture were still engaged with and contributed to a global Space Age.