From the NY Times:
Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died early Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.
...
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.”
The last of those I have heard quoted a lot. And did you know that geosynchronous orbits are called Clarke orbits? He dreamed of things that some thought impossible, and some of those dreams have come true.
Let it suffice to say that in the late 1960s the Stanley Kubrick rendering of 2001 A Space Odyssey was a must see for those who would occasionally dabble in derivatives of canabis sativa.
Clarke was also among the first to widely promote the idea of a "space elevator" as an alternative to the current method for lifting loads into space. His idea of a geosynchronous orbit was a key to the development of that idea.
Thanks for remembering this literary giant.