I am a few days late in posting this, since I was busy, but a few days ago, one of the greats of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke, died. Clarke was most famous for his collaboration with the great movie director Stanley Kubrick, on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and for authoring the great science fiction novel of the same name, but he also wrote many other novels which inspired my imagination during my teens, and even today when I read them. The City and the Stars, The Nine Billion Names of God and Childhoods End are great imaginative works of fiction, and are well worth reading even if you don't like Science Fiction literature usually.

He also is credited with the invention of the idea of the communications satellite, and wrote many non-fiction books on science.


Arthur Charles Clarke


16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008

He was always one of my favorite authors as well. I think he lived in Sri-Lanka for a while. Did he die there? He will be missed, but his work will live on and on and on....

All of his sci-fi books are well worth reading--especially Childhood's End in my opinion.

Yes, WakeHolden, Sir Arthur C. Clarke lived and died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

Yeah, I actually re-read Childhoods End a few days before he died, and it is a fine novel, though in some ways unusual for a "hard science" science fiction writer like Clarke. That is what makes great science fiction; the ideas and themes, not the gadgets, or the little green men.

The 150 mile diameter ring-shaped surface feature with the black center on Iapetus, Saturn's moon, was the TMA-2 Stargate in Clarke's 2001 novel. Clarke predicted it would be there before anyone saw it, which was the early Voyager I NASA mission I believe. There are more recent photos of Iapetus online which show what appears to be a long wall-like feature on the moon's equator. Of course some are saying it was constructed by the progenitors, etc.

Image of the Iapetus equatorial wall feature...

I was an avid science fiction reader as a young child (age 7 through 14), and read all of Asimov, Heinlein, Clark, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Le Guin, Ellison, and a host of others.

Asimov made me think. Bradbury confused me. Heinlein thrilled me and taught me and and made me feel brave. Vonnegut repelled me (at that age). Ellison was tres-cool. Clark... I read everything, but he always left me sad. And Childhood's End, which I read as a child, left me in tears. I think I will go buy it and read it again, and see how my adult mind reacts to it.

I think he wrote 'Childhood's End' before '2001: A Space Odessy', but the 2 novels seemed to deal with the same theme. Evolution.... it happens, perhaps it's directed, speeded, shaped, and guided by external forces, and it's for the ultimate good... but what does it feel like when you see it happening to your own species, and you yourself are left behind? Obselete? A dead end with no future? Left all alone, no hope ahead, nothing to do but wait for the lights to go out.

Yes, Clark lived in Sri Lanka, way back when it was called Ceylon (which sounds much prettier and more musical to my ears, but the Sri Lankans probably despise it).

The City and the Stars also deals with evolution, of the mental, physical and the social kind. I think that the stories that Clarke wrote Pre-1980's were amazing in their ideas, but some of his later works were somewhat disappointing in the light of his earlier work.


Bradbury was poetic, so his works are full of amazing imagery and ideas, but he was more of a fantasy writer than a writer of scientifically exact science fiction, like Clarke was. Of course he also wrote that fine, and often censored, novel about the topics of censorship and the trends he could see in society, "Fahrenheit 451".

Isaac Asimov, a genius of sorts if one looks at the amount and quality of the fiction and non-fiction he wrote. His works are very exciting and easy to read, since he was a gifted storyteller. He wrote the great Foundation series of novels, and thought up the Three Laws of Robotics (actually there ultimately were four laws). Clarke had a friendly rivalry with Asimov, and wrote his own Clarke's Laws, which are also worth a look.

Clark wrote a couple of sequels to 2001: A space Odessy. I haven't read those, has anyone here read them?

He wrote three sequels, I read them all.

2010: Odyssey Two, is an interesting novel and worth a read.

2061: Odyssey Three, isn't too bad, it is classic scientifically exact Clarke.

3001: The Final Odyssey, is disappointing, since it was hinted in a previous novel in the series, that the last Odyssey would take place tens of thousands of years in the future. Nothing amazing in the ideas in it either, since the alien artifact is defeated much too easily.

Clarke often had a habit of writing a chapter into a novel, not for the sake of the story, but to talk about a certain scientific topic. I think I remember a chapter in The Fountains of Paradise or maybe it was in, The Ghost from the Grand Banks, which he seemed to have added the chapter, just so he could talk about fractals. Sometimes Clarke's desire to talk about science, caused the storyline to suffer.