Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1977, and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. On our desert island this week is a writer of books on science and also one of the best

known writers of science fiction, it's Arthur C Clark.

Mr Clark, does music mean a lot to you?

Yes, it always has.

I used to spend much of my youth listening to a crystal set I built myself.

I used to go to sleep with the earphones on and I heard a lot of music that way and I collected quite a few records

before the war. I lost most of them they're dispersed during the war. Now I have a very large record

collection.

On the island you have this meager ration of eight.

What's the first one you've chosen?

Well, the first piece of music, classical or semi-classical,

I ever got to know and love was the Greek piano concerto and I

used to be able to go to that in my head on long bus journeys and sort of train

journeys you did in the blackout during the war.

It's still one of my favorites. The The The Oh, The opening of the Greig Piano Concerto, Solomon with the Philharmonia

Orchestra conducted by Herbert Mingus. What part of England do come from? I was

born in Meinhead, the west of England, Somerset, a little seaside town.

Little in those days is quite large now.

What was the first branch of science to interest you?

Originally I think Palaeontology, I collected fossils and had a small collection of, well I had a

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