Arthur C. Clarke
March 20th, 2008
Unless you’ve been living incommunicado for the past 24 hours, you likely know by now that author Arthur C. Clarke has passed away at the age of 90 in his home in Sri Lanka. The first to visualize geosynchronous satellites forming a world-spanning relay for communication, Clarke was a scientist with a flair for exquisitely elegant prose, authoring Childhood’s End, Songs of Distant Earth, and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. While the concepts in his stories were deeper than the characters he crafted, the beauty of his words appealed to me the most. His death is a loss, but his life has been a wonderful gain for us all.