Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) was a knighted British science fiction writer who lived in Sri Lanka for much of his life. He also wrote nonfiction, worked as an inventor, and served as the host of the Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World TV series. Clarke won many Hugo and Nebula Awards and still has a large readership today. He cowrote the screenplay for the iconic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and both the Arthur C. Clarke Award, for the best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom, and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, bear his name.
From a very early age, Clarke was a member of the British Interplanetary Society, supporting the idea of space travel as not just fiction but emerging fact. A 1940s satellite communication system proposed by Clarke won him the Franklin Institute’s Stuart Ballantine Medal (1963). He was the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society from 1946 to ’47 and again from 1951 to ’53, right before he moved to Sri Lanka.
Clarke’s work is largely optimistic, especially in its view of science as enabling space exploration. Often, his futures are utopian settings in which advanced technology works to enhance both the natural world and human society. Scientific breakthroughs form the core, or engine, of much of his early published fiction. However, it is to Clarke’s credit that he could work in a less utopian mode as well. Today, Clarke’s less optimistic work seems most relevant to readers and retains its symbolic power, especially in the context of growing scarcity and threats due to global warming. Throughout his career, though, whether upbeat or downbeat, Clarke had the rare ability to infuse hard science fiction concepts with emotion, bringing them down to the human level.
One of his best, and most pessimistic, short stories, “The Star,” was first published in Infinity Science Fiction in 1955 and awarded the Hugo in 1956. Later it was adapted for television as a holiday-season episode of The Twilight Zone. Although it shares the same title as the H. G. Wells story in this anthology, there is no other relationship between the two stories.
“The Star” tells of a spaceship expedition that encounters the remains of an alien civilization and blends the religious with the scientific in a way that many readers have interpreted as a reconciliation of the numinous and the empirical. Clarke’s story is powerful not just because of the juxtaposition of life and death, but also because it mercilessly interrogates human ideas of meaning about the universe—it is very much about the human need to create narrative out of what we observe around us so that we can make sense of the unknown.
It is also telling that the priest narrator points out that his “order has long been famous for its scientific works” even as the scientists on board the spaceship dismiss him despite his science bona fides. “It amused them to have a Jesuit as chief astrophysicist[; they] could never get over it.” Whether intended by Clarke or not, there’s an indictment in that dismissal, that lack of an attempt to understand another’s point of view. That dismissal is especially ironic given that the need to create narrative and purpose is prevalent even in seemingly objective scientific endeavors and experiments.