Arthur C. Clarke Is Dead At 90
 

I read many of his books when I was young.

Story
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23697230/

|sad|

I'm a huge fan of his. Never could decide if I liked him or Asimov better.

The grand old man.

I haven't read a Clarke book in a while, but they had great impact on me in my teens.

A book called "Childhoods End" hit me perhaps the hardest - it started me on a long quest to study the human mind.

Humanity lost a great man.
Rest in Peace

Oh man that sucks. Damn, first Kilgore Trout, now him.
Another great mind hits the ether.

I read a lot of his books as well. My father is a scifi nut as far as reading. His books were all over the house. :)

He did well to hit 90, amazing life history though.. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke

Just heard about that on the news. Didn't know he was both a scientist and a SciFi writer.
RIP Arthur

I loved the way his fiction was based on solid science facts. "Fountains of Paradise" is the one that really sticks in my mind. The level of engineering detail he offered was staggering. So many times SF gets into fantasy land, but he kept things grounded in real science.

He's got some great quotes, too:

"Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. "

"The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale. "

"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum. "

"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. "

I had no idea who this guy was - you nerds & your books.

>>making note to send a books to Upstat..err...Western New York<<

Here's why he's important to you GG ... there might be no satellite radio if he hadn't thought about the idea of geosynchronous orbits way back in 1945. (Oh sure, someone else might have come up with the idea in the last 63 years...but then again, maybe not, since we still aren't zooming around in our flying cars.)

Clarke, together with Asimov and a few others, helped create the concept of "speculative fiction" which, unlike science fiction, has to be grounded in actual science.


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A couple more Clarke quotes I like:
"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."

And since we're surrounded by water down there, this one hits home:

"How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean."