Arthur
C. Clarke's "Mysterious" Involvement In 'Moonraker'
An
examination by 'SILHOUETTE MAN'
Arthur
C. Clarke (1917-2008), author of over one hundred books of fiction and non-fiction
and broadcaster, seemingly had connections with Ian Fleming’s third James
Bond novel, Moonraker (1955). In James Bond: The Man And His World (2005) by Henry
Chancellor there is the following passage in the ‘Inspirations’ section
for the novel Moonraker:
“The
story of the Moonraker rocket targeting London and Bond’s attempts to stop
it was originally conceived for a film. ‘The reason why it breaks so badly
in half as a book,’ Fleming explained to Joyce Briggs, Rank’s script
editor at Pinewood, ‘is because I had to more or less graft the first half
of the book on to my film idea in order to bring it up to the necessary length.’
Ian’s film idea had been about a German V-2 rocket, which he had updated
to an early intercontinental nuclear weapon - an extremely topical subject, as
both the Americans and the Russians were rushing to develop this new technology.
As he was not an expert in this field, Ian went to great lengths to make sure
his Moonraker rocket was correct, writing to Arthur C. Clarke and the British
Interplanetary Society to check his facts about range and accuracy.”
(Henry
Chancellor, James Bond: The Man and His World, The Official Companion to Ian Fleming’s
Creation, John Murray, London, 2005, p. 56)
Arthur
Charles Clarke, born in Minehead, Somerset was to science fiction what Ian Fleming
was to spy fiction, an innovator who changed the genre forever. Just as John Buchan
and Sapper influenced Fleming’s spy novels, so the works of H.G. Wells and
Olaf Stapledon influenced Clarke, and like Fleming with his literary predecessors,
he was their literary heir. In 1937 Clarke joined the British Interplanetary Society,
for which he twice served as Chairman, in 1946-7 and 1950-3 respectively, just
before Fleming was referred to him when writing and researching Moonraker. The
British Interplanetary Society was a small, advanced group, which met regularly
to contemplate ways in which Man could be sent to the Moon. In London, from 1937
to 1941 Clarke was an Assistant Auditor with the Exchequer. During the Second
World War, Clarke joined the Royal Air Force, serving from 1941-46, eventually
becoming a radar instructor and technical officer on the first Ground Controlled
Approach radar. In 1945, before leaving the RAF with the rank of Flight Lieutenant,
and more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight, he published a
technical paper, “Extraterrestrial Relays”, in Wireless World, which
became one of his most influential pieces of writing as in it he was the first
to propose (and describe) a geosynchronous communications satellite. He discussed
the possibility that radio signals could be bounced off a satellite with a geosynchronous
orbit, calculating that, at a height of 23,000 miles above the Earth, an object
could sustain a fixed position over one particular place on the Earth. Clarke
was paid £15 for his article, which anticipated the age of satellite communications.
Clarke’s lawyer, who insisted it was too outlandish to be taken seriously,
dissuaded him from patenting this idea. Clarke subsequently wrote a book on this
subject, with the subtitle How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time. (Ben
McIntyre, ‘A man on the Moon? It was all thanks to H.G. Wells’ The Times,
Friday 21 March 2008, p. 23.) After the war Clarke entered King’s College
London, taking his BSc with a first in physics and mathematics in 1948. In the
early 1950s he discovered the southern oceans through scuba diving and in 1954
he moved to Sri Lanka, where he remained until his death in March 2008. This interest
represents another connection with Ian Fleming as he was also a keen scuba diver
who wrote evocative underwater scenes in novels like Live and Let Die (1954) and
Thunderball (1961) and several of his short stories like The Hildebrand Rarity
and Octopussy. Clarke wrote several celebratory non-fiction books about the ocean,
namely The Coast of Coral (1956) and Indian Ocean Adventure (1961), which was
written along with his diving partner, Mike Wilson. The fiction of this period,
such as The Deep Range (1957) also reflected his new interest in the ocean. Clarke’s
interest in scuba diving enabled him to experience something of the weightlessness
of outer space. He established a deep-sea diving school in Sri Lanka, and he became
an honoured resident of the island and Chancellor of Moratuwa University. The
diving school, at Hikkaduwa, south of Colombo, was destroyed in the December 2004
tsunami and then rebuilt. It was Clarke’s collaboration with the film director
Stanley Kubrick, however, which really led to his extraordinary fame as a science
fiction writer and expert. When Kubrick asked him to expand his early short story
The Sentinel (1951) the result was the film script of the enormously successful
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Clarke simultaneously fleshed out the story into
a novel. In later years, Clarke became a household name beyond the realm of science
fiction after the release of his two series, Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious
World (1980) and Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers (1985). His appearances
in these television series brought him to a wider audience, which shared his fascination
with the contemplation of events and circumstances, which seemed to be scientifically
intractable. Clarke also provided the commentary for the American CBS television
network on the lunar flights of Apollos 11, 12 and 15. Clarke was appointed CBE
(Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1989 and knighted in 1998. Clarke
had become a semi-hermit in Colombo and during his latter years he was partially
immobilised in a wheelchair after contracting polio as a young man.
Andrew
Lycett’s biography of Fleming contains further details and gives a conflicting
account of Arthur C. Clarke’s involvement which seems to contradict Chancellor:
“To
check technical details of rocketry, Ian called on Writers’ and Speakers’
Research, the small agency set up by Joan Bright and Joan Saunders, wife of another
of his wartime NID colleagues. They proposed he should get in touch with Arthur
C. Clarke. But, since Clarke was away in the United States, the British Interplanetary
Society suggested another scientist to cast his eye over the manuscript.”
(Andrew
Lycett, Ian Fleming, Phoenix, London, 2002, p. 257.)
As
Chancellor’s book lists “Lycett, Andrew, Ian Fleming, Wiedenfield &
Nicolson, 1995” in the Bibliography of James Bond: The Man And His World
at page 243, his information on Arthur C. Clarke and Moonraker appears to have
possibly been corrupted from this original source, or perhaps it is from a letter
Fleming received from Arthur C. Clarke or the British Interplanetary Society,
or even a copy of the letter Fleming may have sent to Clarke. Chancellor’s
book also contains a photograph of space-related clippings collected by Fleming.
One particular picture of various satellites and spacecraft has the following
text printed below it:
“This
selection of cross-sections of satellites and other spacecraft features in a clipping
collected by Fleming. This is precisely the sort of technology that would appeal
to the Bond villain, and the later Bond films developed this further.”
(Henry
Chancellor, James Bond: The Man and His World, The Official Companion to Ian Fleming’s
Creation, John Murray, London, 2005, p. 123.)
The
next two pages contain a side view and plan view photograph of a flying saucer.
The text printed below the flying saucer reads:
“Fleming
once interviewed the French inventor Henri Coanda, a scientist who had successfully
designed and built a flying saucer, called a ‘lenticular aerodyne’ (above).
It was powered by achieving a vacuum around the edge of the wing - see opposite
from above.”
(Henry
Chancellor, James Bond: The Man and His World, The Official Companion to Ian Fleming’s
Creation, John Murray, London, 2005, pp. 124-5.)
It
is clear from these connections and the clippings he kept for inspiration, that
Fleming had an interest in space-age technology. The Space Race between the superpowers
of the United States and the Soviet Union was burgeoning alongside the Arms Race
at the time Fleming was writing Moonraker, so in this sense the novel was very
topical and played on the very real fears of nuclear annihilation held by society
at large. Although both Lycett and Chancellor give conflicting accounts of Arthur
C. Clarke’s involvement in Fleming’s research and writing of Moonraker,
Clarke, or perhaps some other notable scientist or expert of the time appear to
have a small cameo in Fleming’s novel. When James Bond visits the Ministry
of Supply to study Major Tallon’s record there, Fleming describes the expert
Bond was assigned on rocket technology:
“Then
he had had an inadequate half-hour in the Operations Room of the Ministry with
Professor Train, a fat, scruffy, undistinguished-looking man who had been runner-up
for the Physics Division of the Nobel Prize the year before and who was one of
the greatest experts on guided missiles in the world.
Professor
Train had walked up to a row of huge wall maps and had pulled down the cord of
one of them. Bond was faced with a ten-foot horizontal scale diagram of some thing
that looked like a V2 with big fins.
“Now,”
said Professor Train, “you know nothing about rockets so I’m going to
put this in simple terms and not fill you up with a lot of stuff about Nozzle
Expansion Ratios, Exhaust Velocity, and the Keplerian Ellipse. The Moonraker,
as Drax chooses to call it, is a single-stage rocket. It uses up all its fuel
shooting itself into the air and then it homes on to the objective. The V2’s
trajectory was more like a shell fired from a gun. At the top of its 200-mile
flight it had climbed to about 70 miles. It was fuelled with a very combustible
mixture of alcohol and liquid oxygen which was watered down so as not to burn
out the mild steel which was all they were allocated for the engine. There are
far more powerful fuels available but until now we hadn’t been able to achieve
very much with them for the same reason, their combustion temperature is so high
that they would burn out the toughest engine.”
The
professor paused and stuck a finger in Bond’s chest.
“All you, my
dear sir, have to remember about this rocket is that, thanks to Drax’s Columbite,
which has a melting point of about 3500 degrees Centrigrade, compared with 1300
in the V2 engines, we can use one of the super fuels without burning out the engine.
In fact,” he looked at Bond as if Bond should be impressed, “we are
using fluorine and hydrogen.”
“Oh,
really,” said Bond reverently.
The
Professor looked at him sharply. “So we hope to achieve a speed in the neighbourhood
of 1500 miles an hour and a vertical range of about 1000 miles. This should produce
an operational range of about 4000 miles, bringing every European capital within
reach of England. Very useful,” he added drily, “in certain circumstances.
But, for the scientists, chiefly desirable as a step towards escape from the earth.
Any questions?”
(Ian
Fleming, Moonraker, Pan Books Ltd., London, 1963, pp. 71-2.)
In
this passage it is evident that Fleming has copied almost verbatim the words of
possibly Arthur C. Clarke, or if Lycett’s account is correct, some other
eminent scientist or expert in the field from the British Interplanetary Society.
Clarke was certainly qualified to give expert advice to Fleming on the technical
details of rocketry in Moonraker. In 1961 he won the Unesco Kalinga Prize for
his numerous factual books on popular-science, and later he won the American Association
for the Advancement of Science Westinghouse Award in 1969. This technical knowledge
also informed the narrative of his science fiction. In 1986 the Science Fiction
Writers of America made him a Nebula Awards Grand Master. The ‘Professor
Train’ sequence from Moonraker, with its technical exposition on rocketry
for Bond and the reader, is like a blueprint for the Q/Bond scenes with Q the
boffin giving Bond the run-down on his various gadgetry and Bond being very flippant,
rather as the literary Bond is here at one point. There is a hint of this where
in the quoted passage above Bond reverently replies, “Oh, really” to
Professor Train’s imparted technical information. Perhaps this scene from
Moonraker was as much of a influence on the Q/Bond relationship in the films as
the Major Boothroyd ‘Armourer’ character from the novel Dr. No was,
who eventually developed into Q, the head of Q Branch in the subsequent films
after Dr. No (1962), as played by Desmond Llewelyn. The relationship between Bond
and an expert is certainly similar in this sequence.
While
it is unclear exactly whether Arthur C. Clarke was involved in helping Ian Fleming
get the technical details correct in Moonraker, it is certainly an interesting
fact that Fleming was referred to him as an expert and may well have decided to
embellish his information in a character called ‘Professor Train’ in
an amusing, but also informative sequence from his third Bond novel which may
have been a literary influence for the later Q/Bond sequences from the Bond films.
It also shows Fleming’s dedication to his writing and his desire to represent
technical and scientific information in an accurate and believable way, to ease
the reader into Bond’s more outlandish world, in much the same way as he
used famous brand names to also ease the reader into Bond’s world. It remains
a “mysterious” chapter of the already fascinating history of the Moonraker
novel, and the discrepancy between the accounts of Lycett and Chancellor does
not provide a definite confirmation of Arthur C. Clarke’s involvement in
Ian Fleming’s Moonraker. The truth surrounding his involvement in Moonraker
therefore remains a mystery worthy of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World.
[The
Sir Arthur C. Clarke biographical details are taken from the Obituaries for the
author printed in The Times (pp. 76-7), Thursday 20 March 2008, and The Independent
(pp. 50-1), Thursday 20 March 2008.]
Sir
Arthur C. Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset on 16 December 1917, and died
in Colombo, Sri Lanka on 19 March 2008, aged 90.
