Born on 16 December 1917, Arthur C Clarke lived long enough to see the year he and Stanley Kubrick made cinematically famous with 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it seemed for a while as though he might see in his centenary too: he was physically active (he had a passion for scuba diving), non-smoking, teetotal and always interested in and curious about the world. But having survived a bout of polio in 1962, he found the disease returned as post-polio syndrome in the 1980s; it eventually killed him in 2008.
For a while Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov constituted the “big three”, bestriding science fiction like colossi. Like many SF fans I grew up reading Clarke. He was, for a time, everywhere: his books thronging the shops, he himself popping up on telly to present Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. He was a prolific science writer and presenter, a rationalist and space flight advocate. But most important was his science fiction. With “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953), Childhood’s End (1953) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) he has a fair claim to have produced the best short story, novel and screenplay in 20th-century SF.
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