Dead, Not Forgotten

Famed author and thinker Arthur C. Clarke died March 19, 2008, at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka after experiencing breathing problems. He was 90 years old. He had suffered from post-polio syndrome since 1988.

Clarke’s impact on science, literature and popular culture cannot be underestimated. He always seemed to go places no one had gone before and it is easy to see how he would get there if you consider his well known three laws.

1. “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
2. “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
3. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Arthur C. Clarke was born December 16, 1917 in Minehead, Somerset, United Kingdom and earned a first-class degree in mathematics and physics at King’s College London. Though he is best known for his works of fiction, he also impacted real science with more than just his thinking. During WWII he served in the Royal Air Force as a radar specialist and was involved in the early warning radar defense system which contributed to the RAF’s success during the Battle of Britain. After the war he served as the Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society. He is credited as the first person to promote the idea that geostationary satellites would be ideal for communication purposes.

Clarke’s most famous work of literature is “A Space Odyssey.” It is based upon his 1948 work, “The Sentinel,” which he wrote for a BBC competition. The work was not accepted for the competition but the stage was set for a primary theme of Clarke’s work, an advanced but clueless mankind is shocked into growth by its interaction with a superior alien intelligence. Of course, the book was made into the famous science fiction move, “2001: A Space Odyssey” directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Arthur C. Clarke moved to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1956. In Sri Lanka is was able to persu one of his greatest loves, scuba diving. Sri Lanka also inspired the locale for his novel The Fountains of Paradise, in which he first described a space elevator. This, he believes, will be his ultimate legacy, more so than geostationary satellites, once space elevators make space shuttles obsolete.

A space elevator is described as “… a tether, usually in the form of a cable or ribbon, spanning from the surface near the equator to a point beyond geosynchronous orbit. As the planet rotates, the inertia at the end of the tether counteracts gravity, and also keeps the cable taut. Vehicles can then climb the tether and reach orbit without the use of rocket propulsion. Such a structure could hypothetically permit delivery of cargo and people to orbit at a fraction of the cost of launching payloads by rocket.”

I think of Clarke when I hear people talk about the possibility of life other than on earth. He summed it up well when he said, “Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.”

We are a little more alone in the universe today having lost Arthur C. Clarke.

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Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, died April 13, 2007 at age 88. Described by Gerald Haslam as, “tough, bright and sweet,” McDaniel’s poetry relates the experiences of the Dust Bowl migrants who came to California’s San Joaquin Valley with a grit that comes both from the dust of the Great Depression and the fertile soil that fed the futures of the refugees described in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel was first published at age 56 and wrote about her experiences in the Great Depression and its aftermath when her family of sharecroppers from central Oklahoma were driven to Buttonwillow in Kern County California. Her poetry not only speaks to the residents of California’s central valley, but it speaks about them in a way that everyone can hear.

The lives of agricultural workers are transformed from the mundane to the universal in this excerpt from Living With the Land:

This will be a hard season
not another drop of rain
until November
she said

Not spoken bitterly
but as a mother knows
her own child’s weakness
and loves it anyway

Her own life was transformed by her writing, as she relates in Poets In Their Boats

When I arrived overland
at the bustling port
Proudwater

There were great harbormasters
on the pier
their names on fancy boats

I wobbled
when I looked at water
and feared all harbormasters

After many years
sea legs came to me
with courage

I can cross the raging river
in my silly paper boat

Since I know for certain
it is watertight
plugged with rejection slips

I will dip my pen in ink
and write with all
my words

In the weeks before her death she dictated Apparitions

“It was peach time August

And we worked so gladly

And the dim packing shed

Was full of the fragrance

Of thousands of ripe peaches

We stood at the packing tables

Gladly

I say because time had not erased

The Great Depression

I felt a crick in my neck

I tried to shake it away

I felt a presence

And there stood Our Lady

In our midst”

Though she only returned to Oklahoma twice her voice resonates in both Oklahoma and California, the bookends of the “Okie” experience in the Great Depression.

Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, who jotted her prose on paper bags and milk cartons, wrote 25 books of poetry and was featured in the film Down an Old Road, by Chris Simon. Her poems, the core of the film, are illuminated with images from the Dust Bowl and life in rural California today.

For more information:
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