He was on my list of people I’ll likely not meet before they die. Patrick Moore is on it too.
RIP.
At least now I’ll have a chance to catch up on his books.
As a kid, he was my favorite author. And Arthur.
Back when I was in college, a friend of mine went to Sri Lanka to study Buddhism. He actually looked up Clarke and got his autograph for me. I have it framed and hanging on the wall in my office.
Very sad day.
Going to sit in a corner…I just need a moment to myself
Sorry to hear it. The last of the giants is gone.
Good bye, Mr. Clarke. Hope you don’t have to memorize all nine billion names.
I just loved his stuff. AFAIK the stuff that wasn’t as good was the stuff on which he collaborated with other writers; his own stuff was always superb, even if he did re-use the occasional descriptive plot feature (e.g. behavior of last generation on Earth in both Childhood’s End and Songs of Distant Earth*.
*Was that the title? I’m referring to the novel where a sleeper ship containing the last inhabitants of Earth arrive at a colony settled earlier.
Aw, geez. Over the summer I was re-reading a bunch of his books. I’ve got a lump in my throat.
Not surprising, but oh shit. He was my favorite sf author ever, and influenced me more than anyone outside my family (and maybe more than those inside.) I got Challenge of the Spaceship from a bookclub at school when I was in sixth grade, and I was never the same. (I still have it.) Profiles of the Future stirred my imagination like no other book, and the far future Diaspar in City and the Stars vastly increased my imaginative horizon.
In 9th grade we were supposed to write a paper for English comparing a few books by one writer, and turn in an outline before writing. I’m sure she meant a page, I did a 32 page outline including an analysis of just about every book he had written by 1965.
I think I anticipated the release of 2001, still my favorite movie, more than anything besides getting married and the birth of my kids.
He came to MIT the year before and the year after I was there. Damn!
Clarke, more than anyone, made SF respectable. The Exploration of Space was a Book of the Month club selection, unprecedented until then for that crazy rocket stuff. Childhood’s End was reviewed on the front page of the NY Times Book Review - no sf novel had ever received such respect.
Whenever I look at my satellite dish, I remember that Clarke got it right.
That’s the one. You might be interested to know that there is an album by Mike Oldfield based on it.
Whenever I read Clarke’s fiction or nonfiction, I get the sense of a deep, calm intellect tempered with wry humor. With his extremely long career, through his words he was a companion my whole life. I must have read The Promise of Space a dozen times in my childhood. I’m working through a collection of his short fiction now.
I’ve never even been a science fiction fan, but Clarke regularly blew my mind. I’m sorry to hear of his death. He was brilliant.
I got a used copy of this, and it had the original flyer in it.
The flyer says that “Mr. Clarke is not a very imaginative writer…”
I think they wrote that to assure the Book of the Month Club readers that Clarke’s science was down-to-earth, and they weren’t reading some utterly wild speculation. Still, it did the man a disservice. He’d already openly written and published science fiction by then.
He came to MIT in 1976 as part of a symposium on the centennial of the telephone. But I didn’t find out about it until afterwards, dammit.
Love his stuff. Of the Big Three, he seemed the most intellectual and respectable, and continued to write science fiction uninterrupted for the longest stretch of them. I was dissatisfied with his collaborations near the end, but his stuff stayed consistently good throughout. He’ll be missed.
While I saw 2001 as a kid and it had an immense effect on broadening my appreciation of cinema, I really first registered Clarke himself via, of all things, Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. Yet I think that series exemplified for me a way of approaching its subjects that was at once curious and ultimately sceptical. That sense that one could strongly doubt such matters, yet still acknowledge that they were intrinsically fascinating. It’s a component of those subjects that I’d now likely dub Doper-ish: stuff that’s unserious, possibly disreputable, even nonsense, yet fun to argue about.
From there I devoured his fiction and non-fiction. There was a point in the early nineties where I believe I had managed to read all his published fiction up till that date. Looking back, I think I outgrew much of what I picked up from him, but I learnt and thought a lot as a result of his books.
Not an unexpected death - for me, he was always the same age as my father and he died a few years back now - but one end to a century he helped define.
“Childhood’s End” is arguably the greatest SF novel ever.
I think that I’ll just pop around to the White Hart and hoist a pint of bitter to his memory.
Maybe it was because he was British. 
He didn’t write as much non-fiction as Asimov, but what he did write was far more imaginative.
I just finished the last of the Baxter collaborations a few days ago. At least these were of considerably better quality than the Gentry Lee crap.
I heard the news today and I realized that today the Golden Age of Science Fiction has truly ended.
John Mace, it has generally been considered that the big three of the Golden Age of Science Fiction were Clark, Asimov and Heinlein of course. Besides the big three were all connected to the War effort as an added bonus.
Ray Bradbury has just never been included with them.
Never. He was a good * writer.
Of the Big Three, though, Clarke was clearly the best as a dealer in prose. He had a plain style but used it effectively. He could create landscapes, images, and scenes that were highly visual and nobody was ever better than he at making ideas soar.
Like Asimov, he eventually became a more important figure for his nonfiction, with dozens of science essays (collected in multiple books) that helped define the image of science in the early days of the Space Age.
We badly miss the days when people could consider science and engineering optimistically and look forward to a better and greater future. Clarke’s death means the death of that era and that’s far more of a loss than the end of the Golden Age.
- And he was 100 times more important than Clarke in making sf respectable in the 1950s.