Sci Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Dies: "An Enigma To The End"
"The science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke has died, in Sri Lanka, at the age of 90. As a person and as a writer he remained an enigma to the end. Part of the challenge of grappling with Clarke is the sheer size of his oeuvre: towering masterpieces like Childhood’s End, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama almost disappear among his more than 30 novels and a dozen short story collections.
"And there's a paradox at the heart of that massive body of work. The son of a farmer, Clarke studied math and physics at King’s College London. He worked on the development of radar in WWII. He was among the first people, in 1945, to propose and flesh out the idea of using geosynchronous satellites in communications.
"But after the war he turned to writing science fiction, and despite his nuts-and-bolts background his work had a pronounced mystical bent. Look at Childhood’s End, which remains an astoundingly creepy, compelling book, in which humanity hits an evolutionary singularity and children begin displaying unearthly telekinetic and telepathic powers. As their parents commit mass suicide, the future-kids merge into a hivemind, possessed of dark wisdom and high purpose, and begin to radically reconfigure the solar system. Or 2001, more famous now as a book than a movie (on which Clarke collaborated), in which astronauts encounter an interstellar monolith that transforms and translates them into a new kind of being."
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