Happy Birthday Arthur C. Clarke!

[Doc Al]

The one and only Arthur C. Clarke was born on this date in 1917. (He died in 2008.)

[Lacy33]

And Happy Birthday Anniversary to you Sir!

[turbo]

A visionary and a nice guy.

I never met him, but he saw my friends' book on astrophotography as a work in progress, and wrote a great foreword for it. The guys are perfectionists, so the book wasn't completed until after his death, but it was so good to see his contribution. We could use more A. C. Clarkes.

[Ivan Seeking]

ACC was one of my heroes.

Childhood's End was a growth experience.

[jackmell]

Two quotes of his, one I agree with, one I don't:

"A technology sufficiently advanced from ours is indistinguishable from magic"

"By the year 3000, we will have visited all the stars that can be seen with the naked eye"

[waht]

Thanks for putting up a posthumous thread celebrating Arthur C. Clarke's birthday.

Most people are familiar with the author through the movie "2001 Space Odyssey" which is based on ACC's book. If you guys loved the movie, I strongly recommend reading the book. I've found it to be even more interesting than the movie, and the mysteries of the black monolith make a genuine case to motivate a highly-advanced civilization to actually build one.

"Rendezvous with Rama" I think was the best sci-fi book I've ever read, "2001 Space odyssey" is the second best or vice-versa, now I don't know which. But one of the two for sure. An advanced spaceship enters the solar system on a parabolic orbit around the sun. Meaning that it will swing around the sun and be off into outer space. Earth has little time to send a team and explore the ship. And boy, what mysteries did they find. It's as if Clark has been on the ship and simply came to report it. He glimpses into the super-advanced technologies of the ship, majestic in comparison with ours, and leaves us with deep philosophical questions, and mysteries, and tests us face-to face with our inflated egos.

In his later years, ACC wrote new books, like the trilogy: Time's Eye, Sunstorm, and Firstborn which are just fantastic read, full of adventures, twists and turns. In Sunstorm he gives a grand tour of going up to space on a space elevator. Amazing piece of technology it might one day be.

[Lacy33]

My husband just told me that Arthur C Clarke was the author of 2001.
I have to be honest. As a battered child...... I saw this movie as a double feature with A Clockwork Orange. In that order. I was so tramuatized by seeing one first this beautiful futuristic space movie and then Alex beating a senior to some classical piece I had loved to that point, I'm sure that was the most terrifying day of my life.
At 15 years old so many of us saw the two together.
Like being totally trusting and getting beat nearly to death.

[turbo]

My husband just told me that Arthur C Clarke was the author of 2001.
I have to be honest. As a battered child...... I saw this movie as a double feature with A Clockwork Orange. In that order. I was so tramuatized by seeing one first this beautiful futuristic space movie and then Alex beating a senior to some classical piece I had loved to that point, I'm sure that was the most terrifying day of my life.
At 15 years old so many of us saw the two together.
Like being totally trusting and getting beat nearly to death.Not a pretty picture, Lacy. I was so caught up with science fiction that that I cannot remember a time before age 10 where I wasn't totally caught up in SF. Of course, this was back almost 40 years ago, in the age of the pulps and the short stories.