Arthur C. Clarke, the visionary science fiction writer with worldwide acclaim and more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died in his adopted home of Sri Lanka at 90.I'm shocked...I thought he was already dead.
Clarke had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died suffering breathing problems.
He was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits. From 1950, he began a prolific output of both fiction and non-fiction, sometimes publishing three books in a year. Clarke joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite as commentator on the U.S. Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s. His non-fiction volumes on space travel and his explorations of the Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science, and in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Highly accomplished, it was his writing that shot him to his greatest fame and that gave him the greatest fulfillment. When Clarke and Stanley Kubrick got together to develop a movie about space, they used as basic ideas several of Clarke's shorter pieces, but both worked together to create 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is regarded as a masterpiece for both.
"Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered," Clarke said recently. "I have had a diverse career...of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer."
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