In 1992, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke descended into the Indian Ocean to explore a shipwreck. Best known for his novels about space exploration, Clarke’s undersea adventures are often overlooked, but his passion for scuba diving influenced his visions of the future.
Clarke’s interest in the oceans was common in the mid-twentieth century, argues historian Helen Rozwadowski. She believes that Clarke’s life and work gives us insight into the dream and ultimate reality of oceanic exploration. While the oceans had always been commercially and militarily important, after World War II their potential seemed almost unlimited. Nuclear submarines and other technologies fueled people’s imaginations.
Jacques Cousteau’s 1949 aqualung invention spurred a new era of undersea activity. Scuba was “eagerly embraced by skin divers and spear fishers,” Rozwadowski explains, “and also by newcomers to the sport, including recreationalists, scientists, filmmakers, and others.” This list quickly came to include science fiction authors.
Already a skin diver, Clarke had wanted to experience something like weightlessness, Rozwadowski writes. With scuba, he began spear fishing and underwater photography in the 1950s. The hobby became a business, taking him from the English Channel to Florida and Australia. Clarke and his business partner sold photographs and films, wrote and lectured about their adventures, and began treasure hunting.
In 1956, Clarke moved to Sri Lanka to explore the Indian Ocean. Around this time, Clarke’s fiction also moved beneath the waves. Rozwadowski analyzes his 1957 novel The Deep Range, in which a former astronaut takes a job on an undersea ranch. Clarke’s characters fight off orcas hunting their whale herds, while later Clarke stories feature submarine cargo transportation.
These imaginative visions reflected Frederick Jackson Turner’s model of the American frontier, Rozwadowski explains. In this view, the frontier progressed from hunting, to ranching and mining, to farming and industrialization. Rozwadowski sees this in Clarke’s works, but she also sees something more.
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“Clarke presented a vision of a new human relationship with the ocean,” she writes, “one that integrated science, recreation, industry, government, and spirituality.” For Clarke, the ocean was humankind’s evolutionary destiny, and necessary for accommodating population growth and ensuring human survival.
Clarke was also aware of the ocean’s limitations, Rozwadowski argues. Whale ranching, for example, was complicated by the vast range of whale migration. To Clarke, this implied that “radical internationalization” must occur. Technological challenges also proved formidable, as ambitious projects like Sealab failed.
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In the 1960s, the Space Race reoriented frontier discourse, as space took central focus in both industry and fiction. In the end, “ocean engineering did not spawn a marine equivalent of the giant aerospace industry,” Rozwadowski points out.
While the elaborate dreams never became reality, new technology did empower oceanography. Conventional exploitation of the oceans also continued. The old frontier model received serious criticism, and faltered as ideas of conservation migrated from land to sea. Recently, however, talk of deep-sea mining has resumed.
For Clarke, the 1992 dive would be his last. A photograph shows the English author at seventy-four, floating near the sea floor with a metal detector in hand.
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