It's the end of an era, the death of Arthur C Clarke. He was one of two authors who introduced me to science fiction (the other being Ursula K Le Guin).
My favourite one of his books has to be The Fountains of Paradise, but I also found Childhood's End deliciously creepy. One of his short stories, The Nine Billion Names of God, is one of my favourite short stories (even though Buddhists don't believe in "God" in quite the way that the story implies).
He also invented the space elevator and the idea that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays.
Quite a few people have remembered him on their blogs:
Here is to Arthur C. Clarke. Here is to Sri Lanka. by Iva Skoch
Gadling - http://www.gadling.com
Arthur C. Clarke: An Appreciation of a Life Well-Lived by Jeff VanderMeer OMNIVORACIOUS - http://www.omnivoracious.com/
Arthur C. Clarke, 1917 - 2008 by The Bad Astronomer
Bad Astronomy Blog - http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog
Arthur C. Clarke Appreciation by Jeff VanderMeer
Ecstatic Days - http://www.jeffvandermeer.com
An appreciation of Arthur C. Clarke
Official Google Blog - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
Arthur C. Clarke, RIP
skepticalobservor - http://skepticalobservor.blogspot.com/
Remembering Arthur C. Clarke by Dave Itzkoff
Paper Cuts - http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com
Arthur C. Clarke: 1917 - 2008 by Dan Sandler
Control Freak - Video Games - http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_videogames/
Arthur C. Clarke RIP by Stuart Woods
Quillblog - http://www.quillandquire.com/blog
RIP Sir Arthur - Liz Williams
Arthur C Clarke is dead by Al Billings at In Pursuit of Mysteries
3 comments:
He wrote Buddhist sf in the same way the C.S. Lewis wrote Christian sf -- at least that's what I thought of Childhood's end, which I thought was his best.
I was gutted too when I heard about it on Breakfast News. Wrote a piece on the Forbidden Planet blog where, sadly, there have been too many mentions of recent passings from comics and SF folks. Sadly Arthur's passing was only a few weeks before the annual Arthur C Clarke awards, the pre-eminent British SF literary awards.
IEEE Spectrum has just published his last interview - he was actually in hospital by the time their reporter arrived but insisted on seeing him. They were just about to post it and a podcast version online when they heard the news about his passing: http://spectrum.ieee.org/mar08/6075.
Hard to think on him finally being gone - I've been reading Arthur's work since before my voice broke, must have been reading his work on and off for three of my four decades and I still admire his optimism in the future, that he had seen so much of the worst of 20th century history and yet still wrote tales where we could make the world better. While darker edged fiction is often more dramatically satisfying there are times when I really need his optimism and hope in the future.
Joe's post on the FP blog is here.
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