Book description
Since the beginning of time it had worked its will on humanity, and for
as long as man could remember, he had struggled against its power. But
in the 21st century the battle was won: the sea, mankind's age-old
enemy, had finally been conquered. Professionals like Walter Franklin
now patrolled the infinite savannahs of the oceans, harvesting from the
plankton prairies as crop which kept the world fed. But like that other
great frontier, space, the sea had not yet yielded up all its secrets.
And men like Franklin would never rest until its every fathomless
mystery had been challenged... Arthur C. Clarke was born in Minehead
in 1917. During the Second World War he served as a radar instructor for
the RAF, rising to the rank of flight-lieutenant. After the war, he
entered King's College, London taking, in 1948, his BSc in physics and
mathematics with first class honours. One of the most respected of all
science fiction writers, he has won the Kalinga Prize, the Aviation
Space-Writers' Prize and the Westinghouse Science Writing Prize. He also
shared an Oscar nomination with Stanley Kubrick for the screenplay of
2001: A Space Odyssey, which was based on his story, The Sentinel. He
lived in Sri Lanka from 1956 until his death in 2008.
