An Interview with Arthur C. Clarke

Posted on March 19, 2008

I am headed to Sri Lanka next week and asked a mutual friend of mine and the late Arthur C. Clarke if it would be possible to see him. “I’ll try, but he is very weak”, was the reply. Clarke, of course, passed away yesterday. I spent a day in 1994 exploring the sandbox that is his mind while working on a documentary on the future of travel. I brought a copy of the first 3d Studio, a then-primitive 3d design program, on an ancient laptop. After muddling through a thousand page manual, I proudly created a ball rolling down a ramp. A job at ILM was not in my future. Like a couple of little kids, I showed him mine and he showed me his, a digital re-landscaping of Mars, of the way it would look in thousands of years once Smith and Hawken established its first branch there.

I have met few people like Clarke, with an ability to dance from subject to subject, making sense — common sense — of subjects ranging from space elevators to sumo wrestling, often with childlike excitement and tearful emotion. He also loved animals. His back yard has a pet cemetery with gravestones marking his beloved companions. He introduced me to Pepsi, a chihuahua he named Pepi, but his staff called Pepsi, so he changed the name.

I exchanged messages with Clarke a few times, but never got back to Colombo. I had always longed to return to recharge my brain batteries…not to mention share a few hearty laughs.

We sat down in his garden one morning and talked about subjects ranging from virtual reality, to tourism’s effects on environments and cultures to Gandhi’s views on capitalism. I left a camera running an pulled a few clips.