A Study Guide for Arthur C. Clarke's The Sentinel

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sentinel," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535839501

Book preview

12

The Sentinel

Arthur C. Clarke

1951

Introduction

Sir Arthur C. Clarke is known among the science fiction fan community as a Grand Master (together with Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov) in light of his long and distinguished career within the genre, and in particular his efforts in translating science fiction from a purely fan-based genre to the mainstream of cultural consciousness. This process culminated in his collaboration with the film director Stanley Kubrick on the 1968 screenplay and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is acknowledged as one of the greatest films of any kind ever made, and in particular was the first science fiction to be taken seriously by the film industry and the community of mainstream film critics and historians. Clarke's 1951 short story The Sentinel served as the basis on which the larger 2001 project was built. Clarke was already known to the general public as a popularizer of science throughout the 1950s and 1960s in the context of the space race through a series of nonfiction books and articles such as The Exploration of Space (1951) and Profiles in the Future (1962). In both his science writing and his fiction, Clarke's goal was to prepare his audience for the coming space age. The Sentinel is included in the 1983 short-story collection of the same name.

Author Biography

Clarke was born on November 16, 1917 in the town of Minehead in Somerset, England. As a teenager he took up the hobby of astronomy and became a devotee or fan of the emerging literature of science fiction as it developed in the pulp magazines of the 1930s. During World War II Clarke became an instructor in the operation of the new technology of radar for Royal Air Force personnel (a reflected in his 1963 novel, Glide Path). During the war Clarke considered the fact that a satellite orbiting the Earth at a distance of 23,336 miles (now called the Clarke orbit in his honor) would have an orbital period equal to one day and so remain stationary over the same position on Earth. While this was well known, it occurred to Clarke that if three satellites evenly spaced around the Earth were put in this orbit, they would be able to see each other as well as one third of the surface of the Earth and so could instantly transmit radio signals from one area of the Earth to any other. This idea is the basis of the modern network of communications satellites necessary