History Creator / ArthurCClarke

Has [[UsefulNotes/ArthurCClarkeAward an award]] named after him.

* ''Literature/AFallOfMoondust'' (Hugo winner)

* StraightGay: According to Creator/MichaelMoorcock. Others placed him as AmbiguouslyGay; he himself, when asked whether or not he was gay, said, "no, merely [[HaveAGayOldTime mildly cheerful]]."

* SeinfeldIsUnfunny: "Rescue Party" has a TwistEnding which reveals that humans managed to get off the doomed Earth after all, by means of [[HomeworldEvacuation the entire population boarding rockets]] and [[GenerationShip heading for the nearest star at slower-than-light speed]]. This shocks the aliens who had tried to rescue them, since rockets are AwesomeButImpractical and no previous civilization reached the stars without significantly more advanced technology than this. The story was written in 1946, at a time when no rocket was big enough to carry one human, let alone a whole group, and when rockets only had use as weapons of war. So the contemporary audience was without a doubt supposed to agree with the aliens' sentiment and think that [[HumansAreSpecial only humans could think outside the box]]. But reading from a time when all real manned space exploration has used rockets to get there, and no other form of propulsion is even being planned, causes the subtext that HumanityIsInsane to be lost.

* ''The Deep Range''
* ''A Fall of Moondust'' (Hugo winner)
* ''The Ghost from the Grand Banks''
* ''Imperial Earth''
* ''Islands in the Sky''
* ''The Last Theorem'' (with Creator/FrederikPohl)
* ''Prelude to Space''

# When [[TheProfessor a distinguished but elderly scientist]] [[LectureAsExposition states that something is possible]], he is [[ChekhovsClassroom almost certainly right]]. When he states that [[WeirdnessCensor something is impossible]], he is [[ArbitrarySkepticism very probably wrong]].

* ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey''
** Literature/TheSpaceOdysseySeries

** In a somewhat sad example, rarely do love interests work out for the good. A common phrase used in his collections of short stories is "married another man." In the Space Odyssey series, Heywood Floyd is divorced twice with the second being on his way to Jupiter. In 3001 the first woman Poole falls for ends up horrified due to his 'mutilation' (non-medical circumcision having ceased to be a thing by the 31st century) and the second relationship falls apart romantically 15 years after they get married and have kids.

** Bisexuality also shows up quite often in his stories in an approving manner, which doesn't help the [[AmbiguouslyBi theories]] [[AmbiguouslyGay surrounding]] his sexuality.

* StraightGay: According to Creator/MichaelMoorcock. Others placed him as AmbiguouslyGay; he himself, when asked whether or not he was gay, said, "no, merely [[ExactWords mildly]] [[HaveAGayOldTime cheerful]]."

** "Loophole" has Martians telling Earth to stop rocketry research, or else. Earth stops researching rockets. [[spoiler: Instead, they perfect matter transportation and bomb the Martians out of existence without launching a single rocket.]]

* MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness: Clarke's works, for the most part, lie firmly on the "hard" side of this sliding scale. Hardly surprising, given that he had been a radar operator in UsefulNotes/WorldWarII and that training was in mathematics and physics. In ''The Songs of Distant Earth'', for example, he had to invoke the rather speculative possibility of zero-point energy just so he'd have a power source for a ''slower''-than-light starship.
** "Jupiter Five" was dedicated to Professor G. C. [=McVitte=] as writing the story involved having twenty to thirty pages of orbital calculations drawn up.

* TheGreatPoliticsMessUp: Soviet Russia in stories set after 1990 -- including ''2010: Odyssey 2''.

* Uplifted Animal: 'Superchimps' or 'simps' (an in-universe misnomer - they're uplifted monkeys, not apes) appear in some of his works, including ''Literature/RendezvousWithRama'' and "A Meeting with Medusa". Clarke also used this theme with respect to humanity itself in ''[[Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey 2001]]''. The {{Sufficiently Advanced Alien}}s took a tribe of apes and manipulated their intelligence, planting the seeds of modern man. They then [[spoiler:took a modern man, and uplifted him to create a Star Child]].

* FuturePrimitives: In "History Lesson", the ice age has caused the collapse of human civilization, and by the time the glacier close over the equator the last living humans are stone-age primitives.

** "The Nine Billion Names of God" is about a religious sect which hires a computer and two technicians to print out all the names of God, which they believe is the purpose of the universe. [[spoiler:The technicians decide to cut and run before the program is finished to avoid the monks' anger and disappointment when the world fails to end. The final line has them looking up and seeing that [[TheStarsAreGoingOut "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."]]]]

** In the short story "History Lesson", Venusian reptiles discover a few relics of now-extinct humanity. One of them is a canister containing a reel of film, which the Venusians view and attempt to interpret for clues about human civilization -- an effort that will lead to nothing but confusing false conclusions:

** The DistantEpilogue of ''The Fountains of Paradise'', set fifteen centuries after the rest of the story, describes the fog of historical knowledge:

* LoopholeAbuse: There's a reason why Clarke named one of his short stories "Loophole". See the TwistEnding entry below for details.

** "Who's There" has a fluffy TomatoSurprise. [[spoiler:The reader is lead to believe by the character that something is trying to get into his spacesuit, or that the spacesuit is about to fail because it was repaired after a previous fatal accident. Instead, the astronaut is simply hearing the muffled noises and scratchings of three [[CuteKitten kittens 'nesting' in the space suit and were born to the station mascot.]]]]

** "Breaking Strain" is a story about Grant (ship captain), and [=McNeil=] (engineer) who become [[ColdEquation trapped on a wrecked ship with only enough air to last one of them]]. The twist is [[spoiler: that Grant has badly misjudged [=McNeil=] and Grant eventual accepts his own death to allow [=McNeil=] to survive]].

** [[BiTheWay Bisexuality]] also shows up quite often in his stories in an approving manner, which doesn't help the [[AmbiguouslyBi theories]] [[AmbiguouslyGay surrounding]] his sexuality.

* LivingGasbag: "Meeting with Medusa" featured the discovery of a miles-long jellyfish-like creature floating in the atmosphere of Jupiter. (In biology, ''medusa'' is a term applied to certain forms of jellyfish.)

One of the world's most famous science fiction writers, Arthur Charles Clarke (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008) is responsible for works such as: ''Literature/ChildhoodsEnd'', the ''Literature/TheSpaceOdysseySeries'', ''Literature/RendezvousWithRama'' and ''Literature/TheSongsOfDistantEarth''. Has influenced almost all the science fiction that has arrived in his wake, from ''Franchise/{{Stargate|Verse}}'' to ''Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion''. Much of his fiction features Creator/OHenry style {{twist ending}}s at the end of each story or chapter. He is considered one of the "Big Three" of ScienceFiction along with Creator/IsaacAsimov and Creator/RobertAHeinlein. He was the last of the Big Three to leave us, after Heinlein and Asimov, in that order.

* ''The Ghost from Grand Banks''

* NoSmoking: In-universe in ''The Ghost from Grand Banks''. One of the characters has a job digitally removing smoking scenes from old films. Anti-smoking sentiment has grown so strong that people won't watch them otherwise.

[[index]]
* ''Literature/TheLightOfOtherDays'' (with Creator/StephenBaxter)
[[/index]]

One of the world's most famous science fiction writers, Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) is responsible for works such as: ''Literature/ChildhoodsEnd'', the ''Literature/TheSpaceOdysseySeries'', ''Literature/RendezvousWithRama'' and ''Literature/TheSongsOfDistantEarth''. Has influenced almost all the science fiction that has arrived in his wake, from ''Franchise/{{Stargate|Verse}}'' to ''Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion''. Much of his fiction features Creator/OHenry style {{twist ending}}s at the end of each story or chapter. He is considered one of the "Big Three" of ScienceFiction along with Creator/IsaacAsimov and Creator/RobertAHeinlein. He was the last of the Big Three to leave us, after Heinlein and Asimov, in that order.

* ReclusiveArtist: Was famously hard to access in his later years.

* TechnologyMarchesOn:
** If you read his collected short stories, many of his '50s stories involve his AuthorAppeal communications satellites. The difference between his stories and the eventual reality? His stories always feature ''manned'' Space Stations as the communication/broadcast satellites.
** Stories involving manned planetary/lunar expeditions/colonies.
** The British having anything to do with the above lunar expeditions.