Final Space Odyssey

Posted on March 18, 2008

The passing today of writer Arthur C. Clarke at age 90 in Sri Lanka ended one of the most amazing literary careers in history, precisely the greatest science fiction career ever.

While Clarke penned around 100 novels, the absolute poignancy of some and the uncanny futurist accuracy of others led him to be recognized as someone much more than a prolific writer of science fiction.

His primary general acclaim in the public eye came about not because of the literary quality of his work but more so the future scientific accuracy. He often proposed ideas beyond belief and certainly beyond current ideas, invention, or application. Yet those ideas have fostered some of the greatest innovations of this generation. Things like the geostationary satellite have evolved from his writings to become the necessities of today. His vision of a wireless world has become the reality of today. Though he was sometimes criticized in his writings for his less than fully fleshed out human characters, perhaps his most human character traits were described in the actions of a computer named HAL in 2001:A Space Odyssey, the film side of which he and Stanley Kubrick parlayed into great commercial success.

Among his legacies are Clarke’s Three Laws, provocative observations on science, science fiction, and society that were published in his “Profiles of the Future” (1962):

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”