Sir Arthur C. Clarke Dies
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. 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 wrote around 100 books and hundreds of short stories and articles."
***
Arthur C. Clarke
Interviewed by Tasha Robinson
February 18th, 2004
To film buffs, Arthur C. Clarke is best known as the author who collaborated with Stanley Kubrick to produce 2001: A Space Odyssey. The scientific community remembers him as the man who first conceptualized geosynchronous communication-satellite relays, in a 1945 paper that became the foundation for modern communications technology. But science-fiction fans have any number of touchstones for the British author: He's one of very few to be designated a Science Fiction Grand Master, he's the author of the classic novels Childhood's End and Rendezvous With Rama, and he first created the popular axiom "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magick." Now in his late 80s, Clarke has written or collaborated on more than 70 books, including three 2001 sequels, three Rendezvous With Rama sequels (co-authored with Gentry Lee), two autobiographies, and a wide variety of essays and short stories. His non-fiction includes collections of his correspondence with C.S. Lewis and Lord Dunsany, as well as many books on physics, science, and space travel, from 1950's guidebook Interplanetary Flight to 1994's The Snows Of Olympus, a graphic look at a terraformed Mars. His latest, Time's Eye, is a new collaboration with Stephen Baxter, the first in a series of novels involving a cataclysm that slices Earth into segments from across history, leading cosmonauts and prehistoric humans to mix in an epic struggle.
LINK
DAR
Arthur C. Clarke was a humanist, skeptic and very much a freethinker.
One of my favorite quotes from him:
“Whether Freeman Dyson’s vision (some would say nightmare) of eternity is true or not, one thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.
It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the somber hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of color and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in trillions.
They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.”
--Arthur C. Clarke, From: “Profiles of the future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible.”