Arthur C Clarke has died.

Arthur C Clarke has died.

The last of the "giants" from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, has died at his home in Sri Lanka, aged 90.

Along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, he was one of the most prolific and popular authors, and notable collaborated with Stanley Kubric on the screenplay of 2001: A Space Oddessy, based loosely around the kernel of Clarke's own short story "The Sentinel". 2001, was of course, back in the 1960s, when the millenium was deemed to begin. By 1999, however, the purists had lost to the populists - a case well argued by Stephen Jay Gould (Questioning the Millennium).

Clarke's three laws

1) 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.
2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

His best work was probably his short stories, and like the other "giants", his later work, especially the collaborative sequels on his novel "Rama" tended to be overlong, rambling, and not as well written as the shorter novels of his younger days; a failing he shared in common with Asimov and Heinlein. His best stories were "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.

He also proposed the idea of the geostationary satellite (and would have made millions if he had patented the idea), which is the fundamental means by which telecommunications can encircle the globe.

The worst of his later work was fronting "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World" in which he had to introduce in a sceptical manner pieces about strange phenomena such as Bigfoot , Ufo's , the Inca Crystal Skull , Sea Monsters, after which the filmic section proceeded to ignore that and present an X-Files narrative which completely undermined his comments. The series was acclaimed, probably by the same viewers who enjoyed the X-Files later.

His will asks for a completely secular burial: "Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral" However, at other times, he adopted a more ambivalent attitude. He commented in one interview that many people "confuse religion with a belief in God.. Buddhists don't necessarily believe in a god or a supreme being at all, whereas one could easily believe in a supreme being and not have any religion."

http://www.timesrecordnews.com/news/2008/mar/19/science-fiction-writer-arthur-c-clarke-dies-90-sri/
http://www.adherents.com/people/pc/Arthur_C_Clarke.html