Bugger. The Space Age ended today. Sir Arthur C Clarke, the grand master of science fiction, is dead at age 90. According to the BBC he died in Sri Lanka, his adopted home since 1956, from a cardio-respiratory attack.

Clarke is best-known, of course, for his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on the 1966 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even today it’s visually stunning, a grand expression of 1960s technological confidence. Even today, the ending still makes no sense whatsoever, with or without LSD.

Everyone remembers that the computer HAL 9000 went mad and killed the crew. The real lesson is that HAL went mad because his masters had told him to lie, to cover up the mission’s true purpose. This Cold War-era fable about how paranoia corrupts the mind remains completely relevant in this age of The Continual War on Terror.

What Clarke should really be remembered for, however — and what could have made him a multi-billionaire — is suggesting the use of geostationary satellites for international telecommunications.

Clarke’s 1945 paper “Extra-Terrestrial Relays — Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?” sketched out the idea so thoroughly that it counts as “prior art” and no-one’s been able to gain patents ever since.

Apart from 33 novels, 13 short-story collections, TV programs and countless non-fiction works, Clarke was a regular letter-writer to New Scientist magazine. Sometimes he wrote about the ethics and politics of science and technology, but more often than not it was to point out that some newly-patented idea had already been described in one of his novels decades before. Not to boast, just to chuckle.

Sir Arthur is dead. The Space Age is dead.

At least the First Space Age is dead. The 1960s imperative “to boldly go” as imagined by visionaries like Clarke has congealed into a bloated, bureaucratic NASA which has, in the US at least, drained all the excitement from spaceflight.

Long live Space Age 2.0, funded not by governments asserting their fitness to rule the world, but by entrepreneurs like Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic. Space will never be the same.

[A slightly different version of this story was published in Crikey today.]

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Without a doubt, Dr Strangelove is an important Cold War satire — especially since the psychotic Jack D Ripper character is based on the rather scary real-world head of Strategic Air Command, Curtis LeMay. [1] But Toronto-based artist Kristan Horton’s obsession with Dr Strangelove is something else again…

Horton has re-created 200-odd stills from Dr Strangelove using ordinary objects — in meticulous detail. Explore them — and him! — in this feature at The Morning News, the artist’s own website (scroll down), the Wynick/Tuck Gallery, this article, at Jessica Bradley Art+Projects and the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto (where it’s currently showing). It’s also available as a book.

Horton says he’s seen Dr Strangelove more than 730 times — and it shows. What fascinates me is that the lighting and composition are perfect! Yes, it’s obsessive — but then so was Stanley Kubrick when he created the film in the first place.

I suspect that as soon as I finish writing this piece, I’ll place an order for the book.

Related post: Photos of a world gone wrong…

A Footnote on Curtis LeMay

1. The Wikipedia article on LeMay is gentle, and perhaps I’m being too circumspect calling him “rather scary”. LeMay is described elsewhere as psychotic and demented.

LeMay ran the fire-bombing campaign against Japan in World War II, estimated to have killed around a million Japanese civilians. And while it’s impossible to judge the morality of those conducting a global war some 60 years ago while I sit comfortably sipping coffee, LeMay himself once remarked that had the US lost the war he fully expected to be tried for war crimes.

In the 1950s, under Eisenhower, LeMay had the authority to order a nuclear strike without presidential authorization if the president could not be contacted. That option was extended down to General Thomas Powers, head of SAC, whom LeMay himself described as “not stable” and a “sadist.” LeMay’s proposal for a nuclear first strike and massive destruction of the Soviets was thwarted by Eisenhower, whom LeMay came to consider as indecisive. He was even more disgusted with Kennedy, whom LeMay believed to be a coward. LeMay talked openly about a preemptive attack in which one hundred million people would be killed.

It was LeMay who proposed escalating the bombing of North Vietnam, coining the immortal phrase “bomb them back into the Stone Age.”

Dig, and you’ll find a lot, lot more…

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