preview.tinyurl.com/2264p8 -> www.nytimes.com/aponline/books/AP-Obit-Clarke.htm
Arthur C Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, an aide said. Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died at 1:30 am after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De Silva said.
Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick's film ''2001: A Space Odyssey,'' Clarke was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer. He was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits.
Walter Cronkite as commentator on the US Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s. Clarke's non-fiction volumes on space travel and his explorations of the Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science, and in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. But it was his writing that shot him to his greatest fame and that gave him the greatest fulfillment. He published his best-selling ''3001: The Final Odyssey'' when he was 79. Some of his best-known books are ''Childhood's End,'' 1953;
He devoured English writers HG Wells and Olaf Stapledon and began writing for his school magazine in his teens. Clarke went to work as a clerk in Her Majesty's Exchequer and Audit Department in London, where he joined the British Interplanetary Society and wrote his first short stories and scientific articles on space travel. It was not until after the World War II that Clarke received a bachelor of science degree in physics and mathematics from King's College in London. In the wartime Royal Air Force, he was put in charge of a new radar blind-landing system. But it was an RAF memo he wrote in 1945 about the future of communications that led him to fame. It was about the possibility of using satellites to revolutionize communications -- an idea whose time had decidedly not come. Clarke later sent it to a publication called Wireless World, which almost rejected it as too far-fetched. Disabled by post-polio syndrome, the lingering effects of a disease that had paralyzed him for two months in 1959, Clarke rarely left his home in the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka. He moved there in 1956, lured by his interest in marine diving which, he said, was as close as he could get to the weightless feeling of space. Clarke was linked by his computer with friends and fans around the world, spending each morning answering e-mails and browsing the Internet. In an interview with The Associated Press, Clarke said he did not regret having never followed his novels into space, adding that he had arranged to have DNA from strands of his hair sent into orbit.
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