(Originally posted on Myspace on 18/Mar/2008)

It’s a sad day for the human race. We’ve lost a visionary, and a damn good storyteller.

I’m saddened to learn today that Arthur C Clarke has died.

We should all observe a minute of silence, and light a candle for the man who invented the concept of the communications satellite, among many other things.

His science fiction, most notably the Odyssey series, is the stuff of legend, and it is in his wonderfull, optimistic works that he will live on forever. Along with Isaac Asimov and Gene Roddenberry, Arthur had a positive vision of the future – a future where humanity matures along with it’s technology, and the concept of destroying itself through atomic warfare or whatever is moot, because in arthur’s future, humanity wouldn’t even think of it.

In addition to sharing this optimistic vision, Arthur was a science nut, and so he largely wrote science-fiction which was within the bounds of our current (at the time of writing, of course) knowledge – he was a stickler for details, and like Kim Stanley Robinson, he wrote about things which were at least feasable, if not downright possible – you won’t find factual errors in a Clarke novel. And if you do, it’s pretty much because we’ve learnt something since the story was written. Nitpicking Clarke’s work is hard.

He will live for as long as humanity does through his works and ideas.

RIP Arthur C Clarke.