The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [0]
Introduction: Of Sand and Stars
Rescue Party
Guardian Angel
Breaking Strain
The Sentinel
Jupiter V
Refugee
The Wind From the Sun
A Meeting with Medusa
The Songs of Distant Earth
Contributors
Introduction
OF SAND
AND STARS
FORTY MILES TO THE EAST, the sun has just climbed above the Sacred Mountain, which for so long has haunted my imagination. Another quarter turn of the planet, and it will bring a cold winter dawn to the English seaside town where I was born sixty-five years ago this morning.
So it is already a little late in the day to consider why I became an author, or to wonder if there was ever any real alternative; that may have been as genetically determined as the color of my eyes or the shape of my head. But the kind of author I became is another matter: here, I suspect, both chance and environment played decisive roles.
The fact that I was born half a mile from the sea—or at least an arm of the Bristol Channel, which to a child seemed positively oceanic—has certainly colored all my life. As usual, A. E. Housman expressed it perfectly, in the poem from which I took the title of my first novel:
Smooth between sea and land
Is laid the yellow sand,
And here through summer days
The seed of Adam plays.
Much of my youth was spent on the Minehead beach, exploring rock-pools and building wave-defying battlements. Even now, I feel completely relaxed only by the edge of the sea—or, better still, hovering weightless beneath it, over the populous and polychromatic landscape of my favorite reef.
So in an earlier age, I would probably have written stories about the sea. However, I was born at the time when men were first thinking seriously of escaping from their planetary cradle, and so my imagination was deflected into space.
Yet first I made a curious detour, which is obviously of great importance because it involves virtually the only memory I have of my father—a shadowy figure who has left no other mark, even though I was over thirteen when he died.
The date would have been around 1925; we were riding together in a small pony-cart near the Somerset farm into which First Lieutenant Charles Wright Clarke had sunk what was left of his army gratuity, after an earlier and still more disastrous adventure as a gentleman farmer. As he opened a pack of cigarettes, he handed me the card inside; it was one of a series illustrating prehistoric animals. From that moment, I became hooked on dinosaurs, collected all the cards I could on the subject, and used them in class to illustrate little adventure stories I told the other children in the village school. These must have been my first ventures into fiction—and the schoolmistress who encouraged them celebrated her birthday a week ago. Sorry I forgot to send a card, Maud Hanks—I’ll make a special point of it for your 95th . . .
There is a certain irony in the fact that the tobacco trade (one of the few professions where I consider the mandatory death penalty is justified) had such a decisive and indeed beneficial impact on my career. To this day I retain my fascination with dinosaurs, and eagerly look forward to the time when the genetic engineers will re-create Tyrannosaurus rex.
For a couple of years I collected fossils, and at one time even acquired a mammoth’s tooth, until the main focus of my interest shifted rather abruptly from the past to the future. Once again—significantly—I can recall exactly how this happened, though almost all the other events of my childhood seem irretrievably lost.
There were three separate crucial incidents, all of equal importance, and I can even date them with some precision. The earliest must have been in 1929, when at the age of twelve I saw my first science fiction magazine, the November 1928 Amazing Stories.
The cover is in front of me at the moment—and it really is amazing, for a reason which neither editor Hugo Gernsback nor artist Frank Paul could ever have guessed.
A spaceship looking like a farm silo with picture windows is disgorging its exuberant passengers onto a tropical beach, above which floats