Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, whose visionary writing inspired millions of readers, writers, astronauts, and scientists, passed away early on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at his home in Sri Lanka. He was 90.

One of the most popular and successful science fiction writers of all time, Clarke was the final living member of "The Big Three" of science fiction, which included Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.

Born in the UK in 1917, Clarke was a science fiction fan in the 1930s and wrote for fanzines. Following service as a radar specialist in the RAF in World War 2, he entered Kings College in London when he earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in mathematics and physics.

His first professional science fiction sale was the short story "Rescue Party" which was published in Astounding Science Fiction in May, 1946. His second sale, "Loophole" appeared one month earlier in the April Astounding. His first novel, Prelude to Space, was published in 1951. He went on to author and co-author dozens of novels, short story collections and books on science. Clarke's most popular novels include Against the Fall of Night, Childhood's End, The Fountains of Paradise, and Rendezvous with Rama. The Last Theorem is scheduled for release later this year.

Clarke's 1948 short story, "The Sentinel" inspired his most famous work, 2001, A Space Odyssey. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick developed the screenplay for the movie while Clarke simultaneously wrote the novel.

Sir Arthur was a founding member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

A complete list of the honors bestowed on Arthur C Clarke would fill pages, but they included multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, Heinlein Award, having an asteroid named after him, induction in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Knight Bachelor, and Sri Lanka's highest civilian award. Several awards are named in his honor.

Clarke moved to Sri Lanka in 1956.

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Arthur C. Clarke is gone. He was looking very frail during the videocast he sent out for his 90th birthday, considerably worse than during the Cassini flyby of the enigmatic moon Iapetus just a few months earlier, so I suppose it shouldn't have come as a surprise. But somehow his longevity seemed part of his image, mixing the real and the science fictional, and his death seems strange and inappropriate. He lived to see 2001, but, sadly, not the next year he used as a title, 2010.

More than any other science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke connected the real world of science and space exploration with the fictional worlds he wrote about. He wrote about the real solar system. When Voyager revealed the Galilean satellites in all their glory, he incorporated that data with glee in books like 2010. He was expert in celestial mechanics, and spacecraft propulsion, and a hundred other disciplines that you need in order to get the science right. Everyone mentions that he was the inventor of the communications satellite, but he was also the first to have a very science-fictional insight, that if you place a satellite in an equatorial orbit at a certain height, it will move at exactly the same speed as the earth rotates, and thus be “geostationary” -- an insight that has revolutionized the way telecommunications works.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote many of the classics of science fiction, both novels and short stories. A Fall of Moondust, Against the Fall of Night, Childhood’s End, “The Star”,”The Nine Billion Names of God,” “A Meeting with Medusa, “ – the list is a very long one. The movie 2001, his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, is still the quintessential science fiction movie, and brought the distinctive world view of a hard sf writer to a mass audience, changing them forever. No other movie before or since has accomplished such a profound feat. He was SFWA’s seventh Grand Master, won Nebula and Hugo Awards, appeared on TV with Walter Cronkite during the Apollo flights. He did all this and more. The world wouldn't be the same without his influence, and neither would space, or at least, humanity’s conception of it. Without his inspiration, I wouldn't be a science fiction writer, and I'm sure many others in SFWA could say the same.

I hope he’s watching a monolith eclipse some magnificent celestial body right now.

Michael Capobianco
President, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

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For awhile during the 90's, Arthur and I shared some correspondence. It began when I sent him a copy of my second novel, Clarke County, Space; after all, I'd named a Lagrange colony after him, so perhaps he should know about it. I wasn't really expecting a response, but I got one anyway, the first of several letters -- usually handwritten -- I received from him over the next several years.

More than just letters. I once jokingly asked him if all the stuff he'd jam into those envelopes -- postmarked Sri Lanka, of course -- were his way of clearing his desk. Photocopies of NASA images from space probes, with funny notes written at the bottom. Cartoons clipped from newspapers. A fake editorial memo, listing the titles of stories he vowed never to write (one of those, "Jonathan Livingstone Seaslug", led to a story of my own, with his gracious permission). And samples from his favorite project at the time, CGI-generated images of a terraformed Mars that he did on his desktop computer. I just dug out one of those letters, dated January 3, 1994, and here's what he had to say about that:

"Anyway, many thanks for Rude Astros [Rude Astronauts, my first collection, which I sent him] -- I'm enjoying it between computer sessions -- I'm terraforming Mars with VISTAPRO -- almost finished, I hope, after two years ... now have 90 X 2Mb images.

"Isn't it a shame that S/L [the Shoemaker/Levy comet] will hit the after side of Jupiter? Can't NASA do anything right these days..?"

As always, he signed it "Art". Not "Arthur C. Clarke" or even, after he was knighted, "Sir Arthur," but simply "Art". The man was not pretentious. Yet for a young writer at the beginning of his career, to be at the receiving end of such casual correspondence from one of the masters was nothing less than astonishing. Even my postman was impressed; one day, while he was dropping a handful of letters in my mailbox, he held up the latest letter Arthur had sent me and asked, "Is this the Arthur C. Clarke?" After that, my mail always came on time.

Our correspondence petered out after a few years. He sent a form letter to his friends, politely asking them not to distract him while he was working on 3001: Final Odyssey. I obeyed his wishes, but never really got around to resuming our pen-pal relationship. However, when my novel Oceanspace came out -- a novel inspired, in large part, by The Deep Range -- I sent him a copy, with a note telling him how much his work had influenced mine. And I received a notecard -- typical of Arthur, the card itself was a jest: it was from his Undersea Safaris scuba-diving business in Sri Lanka -- in which, among other things, he chided for me having "sabotaged a busy weekend -- had trouble putting it down."

That's the finest complement a writer can receive.

Farewell, my friend. See you on Mars (if NASA gets it right, we'll both be there soon).

Allen Steele

Posted March 18, 2008