Arthur C. Clarke in his office
in Colombo, Sri Lanka
with “Beyond:
Visions of the Interplanetary Probes.”
[Picture by Rohan
de Silva]
ARTHUR C. CLARKE is the
greatest living prophet of the space age. Best known for
his visionary science fiction, which includes
the novel Childhood’s End and the screenplay and novelization
of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke
has also been a consistent advocate of the peaceful exploration
of outer space. Recently the executive assistant to the late
rocketry pioneer Werner Von Braun confirmed that Von Braun—the
designer of the Saturn 5 rocket which took men to the Moon—used
Clarke’s book The Exploration of Space to persuade
President John F. Kennedy that such a voyage was feasible.
Clarke is
also credited with being the father of the communications
satellite. He has lived in Colombo, Sri Lanka, since the
mid-1950s, and
was made a Knight of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth
in
1992.
[For an interview of Arthur Clarke, click here.]
Lawrence Weschler in his office at the NY Institute of the
Humanities.
[Picture by Joel Meyerowitz]
LAWRENCE WESCHLER is the director
of the New York Institute of the Humanities. He was a staff writer
at The New Yorker from the early
1980s to 2002, and is a two-time winner of the George Polk
Award (for Cultural Reporting in 1989 and Magazine
Reporting in 1992). He is the author of Mr. Wilson’s
Cabinet of Wonder, which was a finalist for both the
Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award,
and which
is a part of his ongoing "passions and wonders" series,
earlier volumes of which include Seeing is Forgetting
the Name of the Thing One Sees and Shapinsky’s
Karma, Bogg’s Bills
and Other True-Life Tales. He lives in Westchester
County, New York, with his wife and daughter.
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