If I made a list of the top 100 influences on my life, Arthur Clarke would be high up on the list. I read out the collection of his works at the Brooklyn Pubic Library and found more where I could. When everyone was else was oohing and ahhing over Moorcock and Ellison and the New Wave, I was reveling in Clarke's straightforward, traditional hard-science, speculative fiction. Clarke brought the wonders of space exploration to life by using the grandeur of the solar system -- and the human spirit -- as a backdrop to quotidian affairs of real men and women. His civil-servant spacemen - mechanics and pilots and scientists and bureaucrats - accomplished the miraculous and the routine, sometimes at the same time. He showed me that courage, achievement, and greatness were not reserved for larger-than-life heroes alone, but rather were within the reach - or within the soul - of every person.
If he were only a writer, Clarke's place in history and our hearts wold already be guaranteed. But he was a visionary (instrumental in the development of the communications satellite and radar), an explorer (of the Great barrier Reef and other undersea sites), a humanitarian, and a thinker - a renaissance man for the modern age. And a braveheart man-in-skirt for thirty years!
Goodnight, Sir Arthur. May your sky be filled with stars.
AP News obit.
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