Candy Hunt :

'Star' of Sci Fi

Anuradha Malalasekara

I respect Dr Arthur C Clarke because he was not only a great science fiction writer and a 'star' class predictor but because he was a proud Sri Lankan. Sri Lanka was known to the west mostly as Lipton's Tea Garden but we would really proud of as it was also called 'Clarke's Villa' by eager futuristic people.

I came to notice one big built white man clad in a Batik sarong pretty much every Saturday I used to get swimming lessons at Otter's Club back in mid eighties.

I was just ten years old and, my uncle, who accompanied me to swimming asked whether I know who that was, but I failed.

Dr Arthur C Clark

But when he mentioned that was Dr Clarke, at ten years, I knew he is someone special related to space and satellites.

It is so pathetic that my ten year old never has heard of Dr Clarke, though she takes every advantage of the concepts which he introduced to the world. IPods, Wii consoles, Nintendo DSs and endless types of electronic gadgets reign in their world and they do not have a slightest sense how this real information super highway was created in the first place.

In a 1974 taped interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the interviewer asked Clark how he believed the computer would change the future for the everyday person, and what life would be like around the year 2001. Responding to a question about how the interviewer's son's life would be different, Clark responded: "He will have, in his own house, not a computer as big as this, [points to nearby computer], but at least, a console through which he can talk, through his local computer and get all the information he needs, for his everyday life, like his bank statements, his theater reservations, all the information you need in the course of living in our complex modern society, this will be in a compact form in his own house ... and he will take it as much for granted as we take the telephone."

Among a vast number of fictions by Dr Clarke, my all time favorite is 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As a child I enjoyed every bit of the novel as it was my first science fiction experience (worth to mention Mr. S.M Banduseela's translation) and, surprisingly my imagination grew sky high to picture the futuristic concepts. How bad my kids would not ever be able to do so as they experience that technology in daily basis.

Back to '2001', it seems to me more of a philosophical plot hidden in a high tech sci fi. Basically it talks about the perils of technology when HAL, the main computer of the spaceship takes over the control from humans. As a kid I was fascinated how Dr Clarke created a novel perspective on human evolution. Even today, whenever I hear of a UFO sighting, my minds reminds me 2001, and I cannot help thinking whether they have arrived for a progress review trip on somewhere they sowed intelligence several million years back.

Clarke describes, "And because, in all the galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere.

They became farmers in the field of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed."

Isn't this an ideal rendezvous for science and Buddhism? 'There is nothing precious than mind' reminds me Lo Weda Sangarawa's 'hitha misa kaya nathi bamba lowa satharaki' (four superior worlds with men who only have minds but no bodies).

Dr Clarke talks about such one, creating a breathtaking adventure back on a date when even Man had not yet set foot on the moon.