ACC RIP
March 19, 2008
Very sad to hear of the death of one of my heroes today.
I grew up reading the novels and short stories of Arthur C. Clarke,
who has died at the age of 90. (Official biography here.)
The man was such a visionary, he even managed to die in the future.
The imagination behind books like Rendezvous With Rama and The Fountains of Paradise was astounding, and how many films and television shows have borrowed that iconic image of spaceships hovering over the cities of the world in Childhood’s End?
Not forgetting all those vividly memorable short stories like The Star, The Nine Billion Names of God and, of course, The Sentinel, which inspired 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There are still lots of his books I haven’t read: mainly the ones I didn’t get my sticky hands on when I was a kid. The biggest of which I have got down off the shelf tonight:
A collection of his essays, subtitled, not immodestly,
‘A vision of the 20th century as it happened.’
So it’s goodbye to one of the most forward thinking carbon-based bipeds Planet Earth has ever known. We will miss your input sir.
