Sir Arthur C. Clarke, CBE, died earlier today in Sri Lanka.
It is far beyond my poor powers to condense an extraordinary 90-year life into a few paragraphs, but I can’t let his life pass without saying something. This man I’ve never met influenced my life too much for me to stay silent. He touched your life too, but you might not realize it; Clarke came up with the idea for geostationary communications satellites, without which our world would be a very different place, to say the least. There are innumerable obituaries that cover the salient facts of his life. Let them; this is not the place for that.
Clarke had a superior grasp of science and technology, and it shone through in all of his work. But he never let that become the sole focus of, or the sole reason for, his writing. He was a humanist, and at his best when writing about humans. Clarke’s world was a place where men and women harnessed science and reason to better themselves and the world around them, always pushing to expand the limits of knowledge.
The infamous Monolith in 2001 is sinister - always working at some hidden purpose that is never fully revealed. It is dark, unknown, and terrifying. But it leads to something wonderful.
Goodbye, Arthur.