We largely have Clarke to thank for "2001: A Space Odyssey." It was he who introduced Kubrick to his design and engineering friends at NASA, and who convinced NASA that Kubrick's plans for Clarke's short story "The Sentinel" would be the perfect advertisement for the moon shot.

But I best remember Clarke as the author of a short story entitled "The Star." It is utterly brilliant, his best work really, and has consistently made it into the annual "Norton Anthology of Short Fiction." It is also the most extraordinary rendering of the conflict within people's hearts between science and religion that I have ever read, and I think that anyone is ever likely to read. Here's the link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_%28short_story%29

But I don't have any yellowed books leftover. I got all my sci-fi from the children's section of the local public library.

Looking back on that -- hooray for the librarians who stocked those shelves.

Arthur C Clarke, one of the true pioneers of modern science fiction.

My college library had several of Clarke’s novels and I spent a semester reading all of them. A have a few of his novels sitting on my bookshelf now. They do indeed hold up better than many of his contemporary’s work.

I think it’s because in addition to his strong grasp of the science Clarke, better than many of the others of his era, explored the social, the human aspects of technology. Spread throughout his novels are small touches (the mish-mash of Russian and English in 2010, the cocktail party from Childhood’s End etc) that have elements of realism. Natural reactions to extraordinary events that breathe life into his characters.

He never forgot the mundane things that define humanity. People still need to communicate with each other, need to travel from place to place, need to procreate, need to connect. Clarke explored how technology affected those things. The grand vistas he created in our imaginations may be what inspire us but it was the small things that made them seem real.

Every sci-fi author today owes a debt to Clarke. His influence over the genre (particularly hard SF) can not be overstated.

A quick look at Amazon.com will show that he kept writing right up to the end (four books scheduled for publication later this year).

Unlike the supermen heroes penned by some of his contemporaries (Heinlein, Asimov, etc.) Clarke almost always gave us human beings -- flawed, jealous, believable -- interacting in his future landscapes.

Which I think was actually much more important than his "predictive" technologist powers.

I really hope that the "Rendezvous With Rama" film -- due in 2009 -- is a fitting tribute to this titan of science popularization and science fiction.

Clarke was often quoted as saying that one of the things that made him proudest was the number of astronauts and scientists who attributed to him powerful motivation for their lifelong love of science.

Goodbye, Sir Arthur.

I still have all those books---every single one. And not just on my bookshelves but in my brain as well.

I didn't know about the Rendezvous with Rama project, however. Thanks.

Upon hearing about Dr. Clarke's passing I went to rhapsody.com and played Deodato's jazz version of the Theme from 2001, Also Sprach Zarathustra. The track was used in Being There as Chance the gardener stepped out into the world for the first time. Like Chance, Clarke helped a lot of people to step out of their gardens and explore the universe of the imagination.

I'm sad to hear another legend has passed. I too remember babylon, I think I was 13 when I first read it.

Brilliant man, sorely missed.

Thanks Andrew.

Clarke was the spirit of science fiction for over thirty years. I grew up with him at the same age you did.

For him, the universe was an often frustrating mystery. An honest dude.

And he was a personable, often funny writer, as your quotations show.

Terri

You wrote some great entertainment, and made the world a better place. We'll miss you.

Too bad you never got to physically travel into space...

reading this to first cue up Strauss's Blue Danube waltz on Rhapsody. Ah! The perfect soundtrack. No doubt Sir Arthur invented online music services, too. There truly was no limit to his genius. RIP.

And so the last of the Giants of the Golden Age, Arthur C. Clarke, has died. I read every one of his stories, including the aforementioned Babylon - which if you think about it, may be the first inkling of today's Internet - and I find that they still hold up.

Especially the ideas.

I loved Arthur as well, and agree with your assessment of Heinlein. It would have been nice to see a nod to Herbert as well.

"I Remember Babylon" was first published in Playboy (in 1960) and may well have been Clarke's first story for Playboy; this possibly explains its attention to matters of sex. The extremely short 1961 story "Love That Universe" is one of his funniest and also has a sexual theme: A black dwarf is approaching the solar system, a super-advanced civilization has been detected at galactic center, and Earth's only hope is to somehow send a faster-than-light signal to attract their attention so that they might intervene -- and the only way to generate such a signal is for everyone on Earth to have a simultaneous (electrically stimulated) orgasm.

I must have read some Clarke before 1968 (when I was 11) or I wouldn't have made the effort to see 2001 in Cinerama when it came out that spring. Soon I had the novel version and quickly thereafter Childhood's End and several story collections.

I agree that the Heinlein books post-1961 can be painful to reread, often because of his way of writing about sex -- although they were certainly popular when new. However, the first time he published something with sexual content, it was a gem: the 1959 " 'All You Zombies--' ", probably his last short story. The story's Wikipedia page describes it pretty well.