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Colombo: Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who peered into the heavens with a homemade telescope as a boy and grew up to become a visionary titan of science-fiction writing and collaborated with director Stanley Kubrick on the landmark film 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died. He was 90.
The British-born writer died yesterday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had made his home for decades, after experiencing a cardio-respiratory attack, his secretary, Rohan De Silva, told Reuters.
Clarke wrote scores of fiction and nonfiction books and more than 100 short stories - as well as hundreds of articles and essays. Among his best-known science-fiction novels are Childhood's End, Rendezvous With Rama, Imperial Earth and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Clarke foretold an array of technological notions in his works, such as space stations, moon landings using a mother ship and a landing pod, cellular phones and the internet. "Nobody has done more in the way of enlightened prediction," author Isaac Asimov once wrote.
George Slusser, author of the 1978 book The Space Odysseys of Arthur C. Clarke and curator emeritus of the Eaton Collection at the University of California, Riverside - the world's largest publicly accessible collection of science fiction, fantasy, horror and utopian fiction - ranks Clarke as one of the three greatest science-fiction writers of all time.
"Clarke, along with Asimov and [Robert A.] Heinlein, is unique in that his human dramas are determined by advances in science and technology," Slusser, a professor of comparative literature, told the Times in 2005. "He places his characters in a near future where science has changed the way we live, and the possibilities for adventure.
Ahead of his time
"Clarke incarnates the essence of [science fiction], which is to blend two otherwise opposite activities into a single story, that of the advancement of mankind."
His record of foreseeing future technologies led him to be known as "the godfather of the telecommunications satellite". A radar pioneer in the Royal Air Force during Second World War, Clarke wrote a 1945 article in Wireless World magazine in which he outlined a worldwide communications network based on fixed satellites orbiting Earth at an altitude of 35,888km - an orbital area now often referred to as the Clarke Orbit.
Clarke's seminal article was published two decades before Syncom II became the world's first communications satellite put into geosynchronous orbit in 1963.
For pioneering the concept of communications satellites, Clarke received several honours, including the 1982 Marconi International Fellowship and the Charles A. Lindbergh Award. His literary career soared with the success of his 1951 nonfiction book The Exploration of Space and his critically acclaimed 1953 science-fiction classic Childhood's End.
Rendezvous with Rama, his 1973 novel about a space probe sent to explore a celestial object speeding through the solar system that turns out to be an alien spacecraft, was one of Clarke's greatest critical successes. It won the Nebula, Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, as well as the British Science Fiction Associate Award, the Locus Award and the Jupiter Award. His collaboration with Kubrick to create a work about man's place in the universe (2001: A Space Odyssey) began in 1964 when he was in New York to complete his work on the Time/Life book Man and Space.
Clarke's 1953 marriage to Marilyn Torgerson, a divorced American with a young son, lasted about six months - although it was not legally dissolved until 1964. He had no children of his own.
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