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Arthur C Clarke, writer and futurist, dies at 90
Arthur C Clarke, the pioneering science fiction author and technological visionary best known for the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died at his home in Sri Lanka, aged 90. Clarke, who wrote more than 100 books in a career spanning seven decades, died of heart failure linked to the post-polio syndrome that had kept him wheelchair-bound for years.
His forecasts often earned him derision from peers and social commentators. But although his dreams of intergalactic space travel and colonisation of nearby planets were never realised in his lifetime, Clarke's predictions of a host of technological breakthroughs were uncannily accurate.
He was one of the first people to suggest the use of satellites for communications, and in the 1940s forecast that man would reach the moon by the year 2000 - an idea that experts at first dismissed as nonsense.
The astronomer Patrick Moore, a friend of Clarke's since the 1930s, said: "He was a great visionary, a brilliant science fiction writer and a great forecaster. He foresaw communications satellites, a nationwide network of computers, interplanetary travel; he said there would be a man on the moon by 1970, while I said 1980 - and he was right."
In 1983, Clarke wrote: "At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years"
I was raised on the classics of literature. From my mother, and various teachers along the way, I was introduced to the great masters of the written word. And yet I also learned to nourish myself on the great masters of Science Fiction. Arthur C. Clarke was one of those sources. In the 50's I encountered his novels 'The Sands of Mars' and 'Childhood's End' among many others. And his "Rama series" stands as one of the classics of all literature.
Just yesterday a freind wrote, "Tu sabes que somos parte de esa arena de planetas como Marte y Arrakis...." [You know that we are a part of that sand of planets such as Mars and Arrakis...]. We do indeed carry within each of our human bodies some of those same atoms from which the countless stars and planets of the universe are composed.
Not only do we read and write about the sands of Mars, we are the sands of Mars. . .
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Sir Arthur C Clarke: 90th Birthday Reflections
Colombo, Sri Lanka: 30 January 2007
"I have always had mixed feelings about posterity (as a cynic remarked, what good does it do to me?). Yet completing 90 orbits around the sun was a suitable occasion to reflect on how I would like to be remembered. I’ve had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser. Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a writer – one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.
“I find that another English writer -- who, coincidentally, also spent most of his life in the East -- has expressed it very well. So let me end with these words of Rudyard Kipling:
If I have given you delight
by aught that I have done.
Let me lie quiet in that night
which shall be yours anon;
And for the little, little span
the dead are borne in mind,
seek not to question other than,
the books I leave behind."