Arthur C. Clarke: Songs of a Future Earth
Source: Huffington Post (Original Article)
Sir Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary writer of this century and the last, passed away on March 19. He conceived the idea of communications satellites, authored classic science-fiction novels and short stories, and co-wrote the landmark movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, described by Steven Spielberg as “the Big Bang” of his filmmaking generation. I am late with this blog because my wife gave birth to twins two days before Clarke died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90. Despite my severe state of parental bliss and sleep deprivation this week, I want to pay tribute to Sir Arthur, whose books and ideas are a window into the future Earth my children will inhabit.
Born in 1917 in England, Clarke was an avid stargazer and reader of American pulp science fiction as a youth. He was a radar specialist for the Royal Air Force during World War II, which led to a 1945 technical paper in which he introduced the idea of using satellites in geostationary orbits to relay radio signals. That path above the Earth is now known as the “Clarke orbit” in his honor. Think of Sir Arthur the next time you watch television: satellite TV obviously owes him a great debt, and broadcast and cable television use communications satellites to distribute programming. Clarke never filed a patent and once wrote a humorous piece called “A Short Pre-History of Comsats, Or: How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time.”
1945 was also the year Clarke sold his first science-fiction short story and after that his other prophetic ideas were mostly expressed through his fiction. After graduating from King’s College London with honors in physics and mathematics and working as an assistant editor for a scientific journal, Clarke decided to devote himself full-time to his writing. His short stories “The Sentinel” (1948) and “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953) were seminal early efforts, and he found early success with the non-fiction book The Exploration of Space in 1951, degrassi the next generation dvd and the novel Childhood’s End in …continue reading