[ExI] More words of Arthur C. Clarke

Amara Graps amara at amara.com
Thu Mar 20 01:17:37 UTC 2008


---Forwarded from NEO News

Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:44:28 -0700
From: David Morrison <david.morrison at nasa.gov>
To: David Morrison <david.morrison at nasa.gov>
Subject: NEO News (03/19/08) Arthur C. Clarke Dies

NEO News (03/19/08) Arthur C. Clarke Dies

Science fact and science fiction lost one of our most visionary and
influential heroes with the death of Arthur C. Clarke. Following are
several obituaries. None of them comment, however, on Clarke's
contribution to our field by providing the name for the Spaceguard
Survey. The name "Spaceguard" was suggested by the NASA Spaceguard
Workshop (which I chaired) in 1992. This name had been coined in
Clarke's novel "Rendezvous with Rama", for a future system to detect any
incoming asteroids or comets in time to protect the Earth from a
catastrophic impact. Clarke graciously endorsed our use of the term,
which has become synonymous with asteroid surveys. He himself supported
our efforts to initiate this survey and was pleased to have his name
associated with such a worthy endeavor. Partly inspired by the new
attention to the impact hazard, Clarke wrote in 1994 a novel on this
theme: "Hammer of God". The plot concerns efforts to deflect a large
cometary object on a collision course with Earth. This novel was
acquired by a Hollywood studio and became part of basis for the 1998
film "Deep Impact", although Clarke himself did not write the script.
All of us who have been entertained and inspired by Sir Arthur Clarke's
writings mourn his passing.

David Morrison

====================================

Arthur C. Clarke, 90, Science Fiction Writer, Dies
By Gerald Jonas
New York Times: March 19, 2008

Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise
and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died early
Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was
90. Rohan de Silva, an aide, confirmed the death and said Mr. Clarke had
been experiencing breathing problems, The Associated Press reported. He
had suffered from post-polio syndrome for the last two decades.

The author of almost 100 books, Mr. Clarke was an ardent promoter of the
idea that humanity's destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth. It was a
vision served most vividly by "2001: A Space Odyssey," the classic 1968
science-fiction film he created with the director Stanley Kubrick and
the novel of the same title that he wrote as part of the project. His
work was also prophetic: his detailed forecast of telecommunications
satellites in 1945 came more than a decade before the first orbital
rocket flight.

Other early advocates of a space program argued that it would pay for
itself by jump-starting new technology. Mr. Clarke set his sights
higher. Borrowing a phrase from William James, he suggested that
exploring the solar system could serve as the "moral equivalent of war,"
giving an outlet to energies that might otherwise lead to nuclear
holocaust.

Mr. Clarke's influence on public attitudes toward space was acknowledged
by American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, by scientists like the
astronomer Carl Sagan and by movie and television producers. Gene
Roddenberry credited Mr. Clarke's writings with giving him courage to
pursue his "Star Trek" project in the face of indifference, even
ridicule, from television executives.

In his later years, after settling in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Mr. Clarke
continued to bask in worldwide acclaim as both a scientific sage and the
pre-eminent science fiction writer of the 20th century. In 1998, he was
knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

Mr. Clarke played down his success in foretelling a globe-spanning
network of communications satellites. "No one can predict the future,"
he always maintained. But as a science fiction writer he couldn't resist
drawing up timelines for what he called "possible futures." Far from
displaying uncanny prescience, these conjectures mainly demonstrated his
lifelong, and often disappointed, optimism about the peaceful uses of
technology - from his calculation in 1945 that atomic-fueled rockets
could be no more than 20 years away to his conviction in 1999 that
"clean, safe power" from "cold fusion" would be commercially available
in the first years of the new millennium.

Popularizer of Science

Mr. Clarke was well aware of the importance of his role as science
spokesman to the general population: "Most technological achievements
were preceded by people writing and imagining them," he noted. "I'm sure
we would not have had men on the Moon," he added, if it had not been for
H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. "I'm rather proud of the fact that I know
several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books."

Arthur Charles Clarke was born on Dec. 16, 1917, in the seaside town of
Minehead, Somerset, England. His father was a farmer; his mother a post
office telegrapher. The eldest of four children, he was educated as a
scholarship student at a secondary school in the nearby town of Taunton.
He remembered a number of incidents in early childhood that awakened his
scientific imagination: exploratory rambles along the Somerset
shoreline, with its "wonderland of rock pools"; a card from a pack of
cigarettes that his father showed him, with a picture of a dinosaur; the
gift of a Meccano set, a British construction toy similar to American
Erector Sets.

He also spent time, he said, "mapping the moon" through a telescope he
constructed himself out of "a cardboard tube and a couple of lenses."
But the formative event of his childhood was his discovery, at age 13 -
the year his father died - of a copy of Astounding Stories of
Super-Science, then the leading American science fiction magazine. He
found its mix of boyish adventure and far-out (sometimes bogus) science
intoxicating.

While still in school, he joined the newly formed British Interplanetary
Society, a small band of sci-fi enthusiasts who held the controversial
view that space travel was not only possible but could be achieved in
the not-so-distant future. In 1937, a year after he moved to London to
take a civil service job, he began writing his first science fiction
novel, a story of the far, far future that was later published as
"Against the Fall of Night" (1953).

Mr. Clarke spent World War II as an officer in the Royal Air Force. In
1943 he was assigned to work with a team of American scientist-engineers
who had developed the first radar-controlled system for landing
airplanes in bad weather. That experience led to Mr. Clarke's only
non-science fiction novel, "Glide Path" (1963). More important, it led
in 1945 to a technical paper, published in the British journal Wireless
World, establishing the feasibility of artificial satellites as relay
stations for Earth-based communications.

The meat of the paper was a series of diagrams and equations showing
that "space stations" parked in a circular orbit roughly 22,240 miles
above the equator would exactly match the Earth's rotation period of 24
hours. In such an orbit, a satellite would remain above the same spot on
the ground, providing a "stationary" target for transmitted signals,
which could then be retransmitted to wide swaths of territory below.
This so-called geostationary orbit has been officially designated the
Clarke Orbit by the International Astronomical Union.

Decades later, Mr. Clarke called his Wireless World paper "the most
important thing I ever wrote." In a wry piece entitled, "A Short
Pre-History of Comsats, Or: How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare
Time," he claimed that a lawyer had dissuaded him from applying for a
patent. The lawyer, he said, thought the notion of relaying signals from
space was too far-fetched to be taken seriously.

But Mr. Clarke also acknowledged that nothing in his paper - from the
notion of artificial satellites to the mathematics of the geostationary
orbit - was new. His chief contribution was to clarify and publicize an
idea whose time had almost come: it was a feat of consciousness-raising
of the kind he would continue to excel at throughout his career.

A Fiction Career Is Born

The year 1945 also saw the start of Mr. Clarke's career as a fiction
writer. He sold a short story called "Rescue Party" to the same magazine
- now re-titled Astounding Science Fiction - that had captured his
imagination 15 years earlier.

For the next two years Mr. Clarke attended King's College, London, on
the British equivalent of a G.I. Bill scholarship, graduating in 1948
with first-class honors in physics and mathematics. But he continued to
write and sell stories, and after a stint as assistant editor at the
scientific journal Physics Abstracts, he decided he could support
himself as a free-lance writer. Success came quickly. His primer on
space flight, "The Exploration of Space," became an American
Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

Over the next two decades he wrote a series of nonfiction bestsellers as
well as his best-known novels, including "Childhood's End" (1953) and
"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968). For a scientifically trained writer
whose optimism about technology seemed boundless, Mr. Clarke delighted
in confronting his characters with obstacles they could not overcome
without help from forces beyond their comprehension.

In "Childhood's End," a race of aliens who happen to look like devils
imposes peace on an Earth torn by Cold War tensions. But the aliens'
real mission is to prepare humanity for the next stage of evolution. In
an ending that is both heartbreakingly poignant and literally
earth-shattering, Mr. Clarke suggests that mankind can escape its
suicidal tendencies only by ceasing to be human. "There was nothing left
of Earth," he wrote. "It had nourished them, through the fierce moments
of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of
wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs towards the Sun."

The Cold War also forms the backdrop for "2001." Its genesis was a short
story called "The Sentinel," first published in a science fiction
magazine in 1951. It tells of an alien artifact found on the Moon, a
little crystalline pyramid that explorers from Earth destroy while
trying to open. One explorer realizes that the artifact was a kind of
fail-safe beacon; in silencing it, human beings have signaled their
existence to its far-off creators.

Enter Stanley Kubrick

In the spring of 1964, Stanley Kubrick, fresh from his triumph with "Dr.
Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," met
Mr. Clarke in New York, and the two agreed to make the "proverbial
really good science fiction movie" based on "The Sentinel." This led to
a four-year collaboration; Mr. Clarke wrote the novel and Mr. Kubrick
produced and directed the film; they are jointly credited with the
screenplay.

Many reviewers were puzzled by the film, especially the final scene in
which an astronaut who has been transformed by aliens returns to orbit
the Earth as a "Star-Child." In the book he demonstrates his new-found
powers by detonating from space the entire arsenal of Soviet and United
States nuclear weapons. Like much of the plot, this denouement is not
clear in the film, from which Mr. Kubrick cut most of the expository
material.

As a fiction writer, Mr. Clarke was often criticized for failing to
create fully realized characters. HAL, the mutinous computer in "2001,"
is probably his most "human" creation: a self-satisfied know-it-all with
a touching but misguided faith in his own infallibility. If Mr. Clarke's
heroes are less than memorable, it's also true that there are no
out-and-out villains in his work; his characters are generally too busy
struggling to make sense of an implacable universe to engage in petty
schemes of dominance or revenge.

Mr. Clarke's own relationship with machines was somewhat ambivalent.
Although he held a driver's license as a young man, he never drove a
car. Yet he stayed in touch with the rest of the world from his home in
Sri Lanka through an ever-expanding collection of up-to-date computers
and communications accessories. And until his health declined, he was an
expert scuba diver in the waters around Sri Lanka.

He first became interested in diving in the early 1950s, when he
realized that he could find underwater, he said, something very close to
the weightlessness of outer space. He settled permanently in Colombo,
the capital of what was then Ceylon, in 1956. With a partner, he
established a guided diving service for tourists and wrote vividly about
his diving experiences in a number of books, beginning with "The Coast
of Coral" (1956).

Of his scores of books, some like "Childhood's End," have been in print
continuously. His works have been translated into some 40 languages, and
worldwide sales have been estimated at more than $25 million.

In 1962 he suffered a severe attack of polio. His apparently complete
recovery was marked by a return to top form at his favorite sport, table
tennis. But in 1984 he developed post-polio syndrome, a progressive
condition characterized by muscle weakness and extreme fatigue. He spent
the last years of his life in a wheelchair.

Clarke's Three Laws

Among his legacies are Clarke's Three Laws, provocative observations on
science, science fiction and society that were published in his
"Profiles of the Future" (1962):

¶"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is
impossible, he is very probably wrong."

¶"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a
little way past them into the impossible."

¶"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Along with Verne and Wells, Mr. Clarke said his greatest influences as a
writer were Lord Dunsany, a British fantasist noted for his lyrical, if
sometimes overblown, prose; Olaf Stapledon, a British philosopher who
wrote vast speculative narratives that projected human evolution to the
farthest reaches of space and time; and Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick."

While sharing his passions for space and the sea with a worldwide
readership, Mr. Clarke kept his emotional life private. He was briefly
married in 1953 to an American diving enthusiast named Marilyn Mayfield;
they separated after a few months and were divorced in 1964, having had
no children.

One of his closest relationships was with Leslie Ekanayake, a fellow
diver in Sri Lanka, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1977. Mr.
Clarke shared his home in Colombo with his friend's brother, Hector, his
partner in the diving business; Hector's wife, Valerie; and their three
daughters.

Mr. Clarke reveled in his fame. One whole room in his house - which he
referred to as the Ego Chamber - was filled with photos and other
memorabilia of his career, including pictures of him with Yuri Gagarin,
the first man in space, and Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the
moon.

Mr. Clarke's reputation as a prophet of the space age rests on more than
a few accurate predictions. His visions helped bring about the future he
longed to see. His contributions to the space program were lauded by
Charles Kohlhase, who planned NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn and who
said of Mr. Clarke, "When you dream what is possible, and add a
knowledge of physics, you make it happen."

At the time of his death he was working on another novel, "The Last
Theorem," Agence France-Presse reported. " The Last Theorem' has taken a
lot longer than I expected," the agency quoted him as saying. "That
could well be my last novel, but then I've said that before."

=======================================

Sir Arthur C. Clarke Dies at 80
By Lech Mintowt-Czyz and Steve Bird
The Times, 18 March 2008

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, has died aged 90 in
his adopted home of Sri Lanka, it was confirmed tonight. Clarke, who had
battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes
used a wheelchair, died at 1:30am after suffering breathing problems,
his personal secretary Rohan De Silva said.

"Sir Arthur passed away a short while ago at the Apollo Hospital [in
Colombo]. He had a cardio-respiratory attack," he said. His valet, W. K.
M. Dharmawardena, said that funeral arrangements would be finalised when
his close family returned to the island from Australia. Mr Dharmawardena
said that Clarke's condition had begun to deteriorate in recent weeks
and he had been in hospital for four days.

The visionary author of more than 70 books, who was nominated for a
Nobel Prize after predicting the existence of satellites, was most
famous for his short story "The Sentinel", which was expanded into the
novel that was later adapted for Stanley Kubrick's film "2001: A Space
Odyssey". He was also credited with inventing the concept of
communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality.

Clarke was the last surviving member of what was sometimes known as the
"Big Three" of science fiction, alongside Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac
Asimov. The astronomer Sir Patrick Moore said that his friend was a
"great visionary, brilliant science-fiction writer and great
forecaster". "He said there would be a man on the Moon by 1970, while I
said 1980 - and he was right," he said. "He was ahead of his time in so
many ways. I'm very, very sad that he's gone."

The pair met at the British Interplanetary Society in the 1930s and
became friends. Sir Patrick said he spoke to the author a few weeks ago
and was concerned about his health.

The son of an English farming family, Clarke was born in the seaside
town of Minehead, Somerset, England on December 16, 1917. His father
died when he was 13. After attending schools in his home county, Arthur
Clarke moved to London in 1936. There he pursued his early interest in
space sciences by joining the British Interplanetary Society. He started
to contribute to the BIS Bulletin and began to write science fiction.

With the onset of World War II he joined the RAF, eventually becoming an
officer in charge of the first radar talk-down equipment, the Ground
Controlled Approach, during its experimental trials. Later, his only
non-science-fiction novel, Glide Path, was based on this work.

In 1945, the UK periodical magazine "Wireless World" published his
landmark technical paper "Extra-terrestrial Relays" in which he first
set out the principles of satellite communication with satellites in
geostationary orbits, a speculation that was realised 25 years later. He
was paid £15 for the article.

During the evolution of his discovery, he worked with scientists and
engineers in the USA in the development of spacecraft and launch
systems, and addressed the United Nations during their deliberations on
the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Today, the geostationary orbit at
36,000 kilometres above the Equator is named The Clarke Orbit by the
International Astronomical Union.

Clarke is best known as a visionary science fiction writer. The first
story he sold professionally was "Rescue Party", written in March 1945
and appearing in "Astounding Science" in May 1946. He went on to become
a prolific writer of science fiction, renowned worldwide with his break
coming when "The Sentinel", was noticed by Kubrick. In 1964 he started
to work with the noted film producer on a science fiction movie script.
Four years later, he shared an Oscar nomination with Kubrick at the
Hollywood Academy Awards for the film version of "2001: A Space
Odyssey".

In television, Clarke worked alongside Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra
for the CBS coverage of the Apollo 12 and 15 space missions. His
thirteen-part TV series "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World" in 1981
and "Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers" in 1984 have been
screened in many countries and he has contributed to other TV series
about space, such as Walter Cronkite's "Universe" series in 1981.

Clarke first visited Colombo, Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon) in December
1954. He moved there in 1956 and lived there ever since, pursuing an
enthusiasm for underwater exploration along that coast and on the Great
Barrier Reef. His fascination with diving led to him meeting his wife
Marilyn Mayfield, whom he divorced ten years later.

In 1998, his lifetime work was recognised when he was honoured with a
knighthood - formally conferred by Prince Charles in Sri Lanka two years
later.

In recent years, he has been largely confined to a wheelchair due to
post-polio syndrome, but his output as a writer continued undiminished.
Marking his "90th orbit of the Sun" in December, the author said that he
did not feel "a day over 89" and made three birthday wishes: for ET to
call, for man to kick his oil habit and for peace in Sri Lanka.

=====================================

Writer Arthur C. Clarke Dies at 90
By the Associated Press
Published: March 19, 2008

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) -- Even in death Arthur C. Clarke would not
compromise his vision. The famed science fiction writer, who once
denigrated religion as ''a necessary evil in the childhood of our
particular species,'' left written instructions that his funeral be
completely secular, according to his aides. ''Absolutely no religious
rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated
with my funeral,'' he wrote.

Clarke died early Wednesday at age 90 and was to be buried in a private
funeral this weekend in his adopted home of Sri Lanka. Clarke, who had
battled debilitating post-polio syndrome for years, had suffered
breathing problems in recent days, aide Rohan De Silva said.

The visionary author won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on
space, science and the future. The 1968 story ''2001: A Space Odyssey''
-- written simultaneously as a novel and screenplay with director
Stanley Kubrick -- was a frightening prophecy of artificial intelligence
run amok.

One year after it made Clarke a household name in fiction, the scientist
entered the homes of millions of Americans alongside Walter Cronkite
anchoring television coverage of the Apollo mission to the moon.

Clarke also 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.

His nonfiction 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 nonfiction,
sometimes publishing three books in a year. A statement from Clarke's
office said he had recently reviewed the final manuscript of his latest
novel. ''The Last Theorem,'' co-written with Frederik Pohl, will be
published later this year, it said. 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 looked for inspiration to several of Clarke's shorter pieces. 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.''

Planetary scientist Torrence Johnson said Clarke's work was a major
influence on many in the field.

Johnson, who has been exploring the solar system through the Voyager,
Galileo and Cassini missions in his 35 years at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, recalled a meeting of planetary scientists and rocket
engineers where talk turned to the author. ''All of us around the table
said we read Arthur C. Clarke,'' Johnson said. ''That was the thing that
got us there.''

In an interview with The Associated Press, Clarke said he did not regret
having never traveled to space himself, though he arranged to have DNA
from 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.''

Clarke, a British citizen, won a host of science fiction awards, and was
named a Commander of the British Empire in 1989. Clarke was officially
given a knighthood in 1998, but he delayed accepting it for two years
after a London tabloid accused him of being a child molester. The
allegation was never proved.

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa lauded Clarke for his passion for
his adopted home and his efforts to aid its progress. ''We were all
proud to have this celebrated author, visionary and promoter of space
exploration, prophet of satellite communications, great humanist and
lover of animals in our midst,'' he said in a statement.

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 read 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 World War II that Clarke received a bachelor of
science degree in physics and mathematics from King's College in London.
Serving in the wartime Royal Air Force, he wrote a 1945 memo about the
possibility of using satellites to revolutionize communications. Clarke
later sent it to a publication called Wireless World, which almost
rejected it as too far-fetched.

He moved to Sri Lanka in 1956. In recent years, Clarke was linked by his
computer with friends and fans around the world, spending each morning
answering e-mails and browsing the Internet.

Clarke married in 1953, and was divorced in 1964. He had no children. He
is survived by his brother, Fred, and sister, Mary. His body is to be
brought to his home in Colombo so friends and fans can pay their
respects before his burial.

=====================================

Arthur C. Clarke: Luminaries Pay Tribute By Clara Moskowitz Space News:
19 March 2008

As news of Arthur C. Clarke's death spread through communities of
scientists, writers and science fiction fans, many people shared their
memories of how the visionary writer, inventor and futurist inspired and
influenced them.

Clarke is famous for his book, "2001: A Space Odyssey" (he also co-wrote
the screenplay for the subsequent movie), for coming up with the idea
for the communications satellite and for predicting space travel long
before humans left Earth.

"I think the passing of Arthur C. Clarke is really epical," said Alan
Stern, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
"There is no one of his caliber or vision on the scene today ...
Clarke's contribution was to motivate people to go after careers because
they wanted to help shape a certain kind of future, to be at the
beginning of something of millennial importance."

Stern said Clarke's legacy at NASA and in the space exploration
community was particularly significant. "For my generation, the children
of Apollo, Clarke's writings were hugely and deeply inspirational,"
Stern told SPACE.com. "He was not just a technically competent writer of
science fiction, science fact and futurism, but he was incredibly
optimistic. I have had many emails in the last 18 hours, from friends of
mine, from childhood, graduate school, adulthood. It's amazing to me how
many say the same thing: 'I wouldn't be in this line of work if it
weren't for Arthur Clarke.' People across the world, especially the
backbone of American aerospace exploration and space science, were
inspired by Clarke's writings at one stage or another in their youth."

Clarke had a profound impact on technology and invention. His idea for
the communications satellite has affected the whole planet. "Arthur was
not only a major figure in the first baby steps in humans' exploration
of space, but a major figure in the building up of our planet as an
interconnected organism," said writer Ann Druyan, widow of science
popularizer Carl Sagan. "He was someone really significant."

Druyan said she met Clarke many times over the decades that he and Sagan
were friends, as well as after Sagan's death. "He was not only a great
technical mind, but of course he had a powerful imagination, which
influenced every one of us," Druyan said. "If we use anything based on a
communications satellite then we definitely owe Arthur a huge debt. In
my mind, '2001' remains the greatest sci-fi movie ever made. In many
ways today it seems more futuristic than movies made 30 years later."

Many people have wondered how Clarke was able to predict so many
elements of the future before they unfolded in reality. "I think it was
partially because his mother was a radio telephone operator," Druyan
said. "So here he is as a young person growing up in the early part of
the 20th century, at a moment where electronic communication was in its
fledgling earliest stages, and he is a guy who has an exceptional
imagination. So it was the perfect recipe for a child with Arthur's
talents to go in that direction. The modesty of his background is yet
another reason why it's so important to educate everybody, because you
never know where the next Arthur C. Clarke or Carl Sagan could be."

Druyan said her friend will be remembered long after his death. "Arthur
had a great life," she said. "I don't really feel sadness because I
think he had a full measure of life and he used it to the utmost. We are
better for [his life]."

Clarke also profoundly affected his fellow science fiction authors.

"Arthur C. Clarke was one of the giants of science fiction; impossible
to ignore, looming over all of us who have come since," said Charles
Stross, author of the novels "Saturn's Children" and "Halting State."
"He introduced many of us to science fiction for the first time ... He
managed, somehow, to combine visions grounded in an understanding of
science and engineering with a numinous sense of awe at the scale and
beauty of the cosmos in a manner that is all too rare."

With Clarke's death, an important epoch in the world of science fiction
is over, Stross said. "All of us come to an end eventually, and at 90
years of age Sir Arthur had decent innings," he said. "But I'm still
saddened: Along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, he pretty much
defined science fiction for those of us of a certain age, and news of
his death signals the end of an era, far more than the end of one man."

Many writers remember the first Clarke book they read, and the profound
effects his work had on them. "My friends and I read Clarke and talked
about his fiction with the awe of rabbinical students falling in love
with Torah and Talmud," said Orson Scott Card, author of many science
fiction novels, including "Ender's Game." "Inarticulate with youth, we
would say things like, 'Wasn't it cool when ...'  But we were responding
to the experience of religious awe, which Arthur C. Clarke's fiction
inspired in us."

Although Clarke is no longer with us, his work will live on, Card said.
"His books have not died," Card told SPACE.com. "They are still alive.
As long as we pass them on to the young, open-minded readers who are the
natural audience for science fiction, they will continue to inspire and
move new generations. The technologies that he explained or forecast
will or have become passe; but the deep issues his fiction addresses
will live on, and so will our hunger for books like his."

A writer's writer

Not only did Clarke impact the sweep of human history with his ideas,
but he had a very direct effect on the lives of many. "When I met my
wife, just shy of fifty years ago, I gave her one book to read, to see
whether we could get along - Arthur Clarke's collection of stories,
'Expedition to Earth,'" said Joe Haldeman, author of "The Accidental
Time Machine." "She did like it, and we're still going together."

Plus, he was a great smoking companion. "I had the great pleasure of
watching a couple of Apollo launches with Arthur," Halderman said. "For
most of those launches, all of us science fiction writers got together
at the house of Joe Green, a writer who worked for NASA.  Arthur and I
were smokers then, and so were banished to the back porch together.  He
was a wonderful conversationalist, which I hope made up for the fact
that I was tongue-tied, thrust into isolation with an idol of my youth.
He was a writer's writer, and a humane and brilliant man. He will be
missed, and never replaced."

Clarke inspired many young people to pursue science, and shaped the way
many scientists approach their work.

"He affected how I thought about what I was doing," said Ed Stone,
director of the Space Radiation Laboratory at Caltech and project
scientist for nine satellite missions, including Voyager. "What he did
was take what was happening in science and extrapolate it in a realistic
way into way in the future. Since that's what science and engineering
and technology are trying to do, to create a new future, it was very
interesting to get his ideas of what that future might look like."

He helped to make science important and understandable to the public.
"One of his main legacies is his really firm belief that science and
technology is a defining feature of human evolution," Stone said. "And I
of course believe that myself. So he was a very effective writer in
capturing the idea of how important science and technology are to human
evolution."

Staff Writer Dave Mosher contributed reporting to this story.


--
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

NEO News (now in its fourteenth year of distribution) is an informal
compilation of news and opinion dealing with Near Earth Objects (NEOs)
and their impacts. These opinions are the responsibility of the
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dmorrison at arc.nasa.gov. For additional information, please see the
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please include this disclaimer.

-- 

Amara Graps, PhD      www.amara.com
Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado



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