Arthur C. Clarke, grandmaster author of some of the greatest science fiction ever written and inventor of the geosynchronous communication satellite, is dead today.
He’s one of the last from SF’s Golden Age. He worked with Stanley Kubrick, to turn his short story, Sentinel, into the movie (and accompanying book), 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Without question, he will be missed.
I’ve been a fan of his from my earliest discoveries of written science fiction. His light-hearted stories of tall tales told in a bar (many collected in Tales of the White Hart would later inspire such famed writers as Larry Niven and Spider Robinson. His book Childhood’s End, to be made at some point into a movie, was an obvious inspiration to such invasion epics as V and Independence Day, and was one of the first books which discussed the next stage of human evolution might bring, and what the effect on those of us left behind might be. Imperial Earth inspired in me a love of puzzles which is still with me today.
The world has lost one of its greatest thinkers and inspirations today.