Official News page 6

FAREWELL TO ARTHUR C CLARKE

by Hazed

Science fiction author Arthur C Clarke died last week in Sri Lanka, where he had lived for many years, at the age of 90. He is best known for the film "2001: A Space Odyssey". It was based in part on a short story by Clarke called "The Sentinel", and he collaborated with filmmaker Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay for the cult classic.

His books were classic "hard" science fiction, full of the sense of wonder at what the future might bring. Amongst my favorites were "The Sands of Mars", set on a colony on Mars, "Childhood's End", about the future evolution of the human race, and "Rendezvous with Rama", in which a mysterious alien object appears in the Solar System. If you've visited the Starbase1 space station in Fed, which contains tributes to famous works of science fiction, you will have noticed this book is referenced there.

But Clarke's influence goes beyond the enormous body of work he left. During WWII, when he was working on the top-secret development of radar, he published a paper which predicted communications satellites in geo-stationery orbit, with electronic signals bouncing off them to reach all around the Earth. (This wasn't his only prediction - to read some of them and find out whether they came true or not, see this BBC News article.)

He will also be remembered for his famous dictum, which came to be known as Clarke's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Last year, on his 90th birthday, he told his fans: "I want to be remembered most as a writer. I want to entertain readers and hopefully stretch their imaginations as well." If you enjoy good science fiction, then I urge you to seek out some of his work and see how good stories should be told.

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