For Arthur C. Clarke (born 97 years ago on December 16, 1917), probably the highest praise you could give him as a science fiction writer is that so much of what he wrote and said didn’t stay fiction for long. Known as the “Prophet of the Space Age,” he wrote about geostationary satellites in the 1940s, and predicted that they would be useful telecommunications relays. When asked in 1974 how the computer would change the life of a man in the future, he basically explained how online banking and shopping would work decades in advance, stating "[H]e will have, in his own house … a console through which he can talk, through his local computer and get all the information he needs, for his everyday life, like his bank statements, his theatre reservations ... and he will take it as much for granted as we take the telephone."

In the 20th century, Clarke became one of what was known for a time as the “big three” of science fiction writing, along with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. He wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey” as a novel, while developing the screenplay concurrently with Stanley Kubrick. Book and movie were both released in 1968, while Clarke went on to write three sequels to the original novel.

While he achieved fame as a writer, Clarke also experienced life beyond a typewriter. He was a lifelong champion of space travel who joined the British Interplanetary Society and served as its chair twice. He was a deep-sea scuba diver who discovered the ruins of an ancient Hindu temple off the coast of Sri Lanka, and a TV host who explored strange phenomena in shows like “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World” and “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious Universe.”

In short, he was someone who drank deeply from life’s well and used his experiences to imagine what might still come. Any thinker who speculates on what might be does his readers well by becoming richly acquainted with what is, and Arthur C. Clarke did exactly that. He won many science fiction writing awards, took at least one science and engineering honor for his work on satellites, and was knighted in his 80s. But much cooler are all the scientific phenomena named after him, including an asteroid, a species of dinosaur, and the geostationary satellite orbit (a.k.a. the “Clarke Orbit”). He died aged 90 in 2008, leaving behind a world that looked eerily like one he had only seen in his imagination years before.

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