[Reader-list] Arthur C Clarke dies

[Yousuf]

Science fiction writer Arthur Clarke dies in Sri Lanka
19 Mar 2008, 0439 hrs IST, AP

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 on Wednesday in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, an
aide said. He was 90. 

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 also 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 writing by English authors 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, 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." 


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