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Arthur Charles Clarke was born on December 16, 1917, in Minehead, Somerset, England, the son of Charles Wright Clarke, a farmer, and Nora Willis Clarke. In 1936 he moved to London to work in the British Civil Service as an auditor for His Majesty's Exchequer and Audit Department. During World War II he served as a radar instructor with the R.A.F. After the war he studied at Kings College, London, graduating with first-class honors in physics and mathematics in 1948. From 1949 to 1950 he worked as associate editor of Science Abstracts magazine; since 1951 he has written full-time. |
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Clarke's first published story, "Rescue Party," appeared in John W. Campbell's Astounding in 1946. In 1948 his first novel, Against the Fall of Night, was published in Startling Stories; it appeared as a book in 1953 and in 1956 was revised under the title The City and the Stars. Although Clarke continued to write and publish novels and short stories throughout the 1950s, probably his best-known works from that period are "The Sentinel" (1951) and Childhood's End (1953), the latter being considered by many to be a groundbreaking novel about contact with aliens and human transcendence. |
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By the 1960s Clarke had begun to focus more heavily on nonfiction. In 1962 he received UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for writing on scientific topics; in that same year he was honored by the Franklin Institute for having been the first to propose the concept of the communication satellite in a technical paper published in 1945. Meanwhile, Clarke moved to Ceylon (later Sri Lanka) in 1956 in order to pursue his interest in underwater research, and much of his writingfiction and nonfictioncame to focus on this other frontier of human exploration. |
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Nonetheless, Clarke is best known for his science fiction. In 1968 he and Stanley Kubrick developed 2001: A Space Odyssey from the short story "The Sentinel," with Clarke writing the novel of that title at the same time Kubrick wrote the screenplay and directed the film. In 1972 Clarke won the Science Fiction Writers of America's Nebula Award for "A Meeting |
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