Arthur C. Clarke, 1917 - 2008

[I'm Murrin]

News just going out: Arthur C Clarke has died today, age 90.

[danlo]

Just about to post this.

Anyway:
(CNN) -- Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the epic film "2001: A Space Odyssey" and raised the idea of communications satellites in the 1940s, died Wednesday at age 90, an associate confirmed.


Visionary author Arthur C. Clarke had fans around the world.

Clarke died early Wednesday at a hospital in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since the 1950s, said Scott Chase, the secretary of the nonprofit Arthur C. Clarke Foundation.

"He had been taken to hospital in what we had hoped was one of the slings and arrows of being 90, but in this case it was his final visit," Chase said.

Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick shared an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay for "2001." full story

[Ur Dead]

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, an aide said. He was 90.

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Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died at 1:30 a.m. after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De Silva said.

Co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey," Clarke was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer.

He was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits.

He joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite as commentator on the U.S. Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s.

Clarke's non-fiction volumes on space travel and his explorations of the Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science, and in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

But it was his writing that shot him to his greatest fame and that gave him the greatest fulfillment.

"Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered," Clarke said recently. "I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer."

From 1950, he began a prolific output of both fiction and non-fiction, sometimes publishing three books in a year. He published his best-selling "3001: The Final Odyssey" when he was 79.

Some of his best-known books are "Childhood's End," 1953; "The City and The Stars," 1956, "The Nine Billion Names of God," 1967; "Rendezvous with Rama," 1973; "Imperial Earth," 1975; and "The Songs of Distant Earth," 1986.

When Clarke and Kubrick got together to develop a movie about space, they used as basic ideas several of Clarke's shorter pieces, including "The Sentinel," written in 1948, and "Encounter in the Dawn." As work progressed on the screenplay, Clarke also wrote a novel of the story. He followed it up with "2010," "2061," and "3001: The Final Odyssey."

In 1989, two decades after the Apollo 11 moon landings, Clarke wrote: "2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined."

Clarke won the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1972, 1974 and 1979; the Hugo Award of the World Science Fiction Convention in 1974 and 1980, and in 1986 became Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He was awarded the CBE in 1989.

Born in Minehead, western England, on Dec. 16, 1917, the son of a farmer, Arthur Charles Clark became addicted to science-fiction after buying his first copies of the pulp magazine "Amazing Stories" at Woolworth's. He devoured English writers H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon and began writing for his school magazine in his teens.

Clarke went to work as a clerk in Her Majesty's Exchequer and Audit Department in London, where he joined the British Interplanetary Society and wrote his first short stories and scientific articles on space travel.

It was not until after the World War II that Clarke received a bachelor of science degree in physics and mathematics from King's College in London.

In the wartime Royal Air Force, he was put in charge of a new radar blind-landing system.

But it was an RAF memo he wrote in 1945 about the future of communications that led him to fame. It was about the possibility of using satellites to revolutionize communications — an idea whose time had decidedly not come.

Clarke later sent it to a publication called Wireless World, which almost rejected it as too far-fetched.

Clarke married in 1953, and was divorced in 1964. He had no children.

Disabled by post-polio syndrome, the lingering effects of a disease that had paralyzed him for two months in 1959, Clarke rarely left his home in the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka.

He moved there in 1956, lured by his interest in marine diving which, he said, was as close as he could get to the weightless feeling of space.

"I'm perfectly operational underwater," he once said.

Clarke was linked by his computer with friends and fans around the world, spending each morning answering e-mails and browsing the Internet.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Clarke said he did not regret having never followed his novels into space, adding that he had arranged to have DNA from strands of his hair sent into orbit.

"One day, some super civilization may encounter this relic from the vanished species and I may exist in another time," he said. "Move over, Stephen King."

One of the Greats is gone.

[Wyldewode]

I read about this. . . very sad.

[Carson Napier]

Very sad, this man will be remembered for many things, but mostly for giving us this...



Rest in Peace.

[The Laughing Man]

[Mortice Root]

Wow. Just.... wow.


He gave us some fantastic stuff though.

[dlbpharmd]

Yes indeed.

Godspeed, Mr. Clarke.

[matrixman]

I posted this at the Hangar and I'll post it here:

Arthur C. Clarke was one of my heroes, a man of great intellect and a writer who was able to convey tantalizing and terrifying visions of humanity's possible futures through some of the most lucid prose I have ever read by anybody.

Rendezvous With Rama is my favorite science fiction novel of all time.

2001: A Space Odyssey is my favorite science fiction film of all time.

Now that both Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke are gone, it signifies to me the formal end of an era in "speculative" fiction - that peculiar and paradoxical kind of optimism about the future that came out of the Sixties' space race. Even though I was born after that point in history, I only need to read Clarke's books or watch 2001 to feel a deep connection to the spirit of that time.

Mr. Clarke, you will be missed. But I'll be forever grateful that you were among us to share your awesome visions of the cosmos and of our place in it.

[MsMary]

[I'm Murrin]

[Merging the two threads.]

[Cail]

Wow, damn shame.

[Zarathustra]

So, any Clarke recommendations? I'd like to remember him the way he wanted: as a writer.

I enjoyed Childhood's End tremendously, but (sadly) I haven't read anything else of his. I need to change that.

[I'm Murrin]

A short story of his I've seen linked in a few threads here and there--it's supposed to be regarded as one of his best:
The Nine Billion Names of God

In novels, Rendezvous with Rama is well regarded.
I've not read any of his work yet, myself.

[Mortice Root]

I thought Rendezvous With Rama was fantastic. The Rama sequels that we cowrote with someone else (sorry blanking on the outher author's name) had some great ideas, but weren't as strong as the original Rama novel.

[iQuestor]

OMG Mr Clark-- you have been such an inspiration to us all. I know you wished first contact would be made before you died; You have given so much to us. We will miss you greatly. greatly. We are less without you. God Speed to you, Sir.

[Avatar]

First thing I thought when I saw this was that MM and Lore would be saddened by it. The second was to remind Lore that he got his best ideas stoned.

The third was the great loss to the science and science fiction writing and reading communities. Always sad to see a great author go.

--A

[matrixman]

Interesting...didn't know Lore was a fan of Clarke's work.

At least it's nice to know that Clarke kept writing up til the very end. Apparently he had just reviewed the final manuscript of a novel, The Last Theorem, that he co-wrote with Frederik Pohl. Rather spookily appropriate that what turns out to be Clarke's last novel would have such a title.

[Avatar]

I think he woulda appreciated the irony.

Oh damn...Haha, I think I might mixed him up with Sagan there for Lore. (It suddenly occurs to me.)

--A

[danlo]

That's what you get for smoking that stuff Av! I really enjoyed The Fountians of Paradise and Rendezvous with Rama-Childhood's End was one of the first Sci-Fis I every read.