Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Writer, Innovator, Explorer and Inspiration, Dead at 90

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE passed away on Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at his home in Sri Lanka, his adoptive country for the past 50 years, at the age of 90. SIr Arthur was a writer, inventor, undersea explorer and promoter of space.

Having written over 100 books on space, science and his outlook of the future, he came to worldwide fame in 1968 for the screenplay 2001: A Space Odssey he co-wrote with Stanley Kubrick. Which the process itself was innovative and not duplicated to this day. Kubrick contacted Clarke, who was in New York working on a book about Space for Time/Life. He said he wanted to make the definitive science fiction movie and did Arthur have any ideas. Clarke did and the two work in the evenings until the Time/Life book was completed, then devoted full time to the project. Clarke would write some of the novel and show it to Kubrick. Kubrick would work on the script and show it to Arthur. Then they would both go back to their respective work, drawing from the other's work. The result was a wildly popular and incredibly controversial film.

Following this up, he was on the CBS News with Walter Cronkite as a space analyst during the Apollo mission to the moon. During one brain storming session, the department had very little money (the entire budget was about a quarter of a million dollars) but wanted to find a way to show what living on the moon would be like. They all looked to Arthur Clarke. True to his "down to earth" personality, as Richard Hoagland would say, Sir Arthur looked around, asked to see a small replica of the moon. Holding it up, he said, "just poke few holes in this thing and stick a 25-watt lightbulb in it.