His "The Nine Billion Names of God" still... 
give me willies ever time they announce a new, faster more powerful computer is on the market!
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
Posted on 03/18/2008 3:02:47 PM PDT by fishtank
Adulthood’s End.
I still don't understand what that book was all about.
ping
Great quote. I’m a nerd for the space race. His death on the heels of my recent diagnosis of cancer (albeit highly curable), doesn’t help. Hope he’s getting the answers he so highly sought.
His "The Nine Billion Names of God" still... give me willies ever time they announce a new, faster more powerful computer is on the market!
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
I heard it, but only here on FR. Here's Wikipedia:
"In early 1998, Clarke was to be made a knight, with Prince Charles visiting Sri Lanka in order to make the investiture. Just before the ceremony, a British tabloid, The Sunday Mirror, claimed in a sensationalist story that Clarke was an avowed paedophile, giving supposed quotations from Clarke about the harmlessness of his predilection for boys. Clarke released a statement saying that "the accusations are such nonsense that I have found it difficult to treat them with the contempt that they deserve." He also said, "I categorically state that The Sunday Mirror's article is grossly defamatory and contains statements which in themselves and by innuendo are quite false, grossly inaccurate and extremely harmful." He later asked that the investiture of his knighthood be delayed "in order to avoid embarrassment to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales during his visit to Sri Lanka." In answer to the newspaper's allegations, Clarke was investigated by Sri Lankan authorities, who eventually dismissed the accusations. The Sunday Mirror later printed a retraction and Clarke was made a Knight Bachelor on May 26, 2000, in a ceremony in Colombo. A formal investigation undertaken by Sri Lankan police cleared Clarke in April 1998."
Of course, the fact that he was cleared by the police never made it to FR. ;)
Bad luck to be forever mistaken for Gary Glitter.
That’s right, I forgot about Ray. ...which is inexcusable, since he was the one who first got me interested in sci-fi after speaking at my elementary school (when I was in 5th grade).
One of the first SF stories I read (in the mid 1950’s) was Clarke’s “Rescue Party”, and it got me hooked on SF short stories. It’s a little dated reading it now, but it was thrilling reading when I first read it.
The Fountains of Paradise had a space elevator as its main setting. Rendezvous with Rama was a very good book about an artificial alien world that entered our solar system.
BTW Arthur C. Clarke was a leading member of the "evolutionary" science fiction contingent. He believed mankind needed to change in order to be suited to venture out into space. Although he certainly disputed the World's religions as the source of ultimate truth, nonetheless he wrote about religion respectfully, and like many who reject conventional religion there is often an acknowledgement of something mysterious and unknowable which might just be God. In Childhood's End, he included a debunking of World religions in the story, but on the Overlord's home planet, they are reverential with respect to a mysterious presence which they don't fully understand. I think Clarke had a skepticism but still an interest in God.
Whoa! Never knew until you spilled the beans... 
that Clarke was one of Flint's past lives!
Well, that would explain why I didn't understand the movie as a 12 year old nor the book 2-3 years later.
How many of us were pointed skyward by this man? A part of my childhood has ended.
One of my favorite quotes from him: “Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
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