As a kid the first written work I encountered by Arthur C. Clarke was
not science fiction, but was a popular science book called
The Promise of Space published in 1968. I was around eleven and not much of a reader at the time. But my dad was and one day I noticed the book sitting on an end table where he had left it. I started thumbing through the book and within a minute Clarke's words were pulling me through the pages.
By coincidence, a couple of weeks later, after I had read most of the book, my English teacher assigned the short story "If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth . . ." I was excited to find it was written by this "new" author I had discovered, a science writer who wrote fiction as well! So this author who had fascinated me with astronomy and space science was creating
stories set within those fascinating settings, and those stories contained many aspects of the science that he was explaining in his non-fiction. "If I FOrget Thee, Oh Earth . . ." grabbed my attention on many levels and even though it was written almost two decades before I read it, it was not dated. This story will forever remain my favorite piece of fiction.
Not too many weeks later I discovered the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey was out, but I knew it would never reach the single theater in my small town. But when I discovered the library had the book I rushed down to check it out (I mean, there would be a rush on it, right?). Again I found fascinating settings filled with science. I was through the book in no time and so I read it again and when it came book report time for English class that was the one.
That summer I started acquiring all the Clarke works I could get my hands on including:
Childhood's End, Prelude to Space, The Sands of Mars; and later I found several short story collections including
Tales of Ten Worlds, Expedition to Earth, and others. I read "The Nine Billion Names of God" and others. At the same time I found
The Exploration of Space on my dad's bookshelf and, like
The Promise of Space, it grabbed my attention even though it had been published twenty years earlier. (And it was the start of my fascination with past visions of the future.) The book had done very well for him as a book club edition in the early 1950s. (If you can find a copy of the book, it's fascinating how he takes the reader into the "future," showing optimistic scenarios of space travel and lunar settlement.)
A couple of years later I joined the Science Fiction Book Club (and am still a member) and found more Clarke works including the collection
The Wind From the Sun and several anthologies containing a story by him. The Book Club introduced me to other great SF authors as well and I started expanding my horizons within the genre.
A couple more years went by and just as I was worried I would run out of Clarke reading material
Randezvous With Rama came out and once again I was thrilled to read a story with science concepts interlaced throughout.
Over the years there were other works that I inevitably had missed, mostly because they were hard to find or out of print. Two novels I had heard of,
Earthlight, and
A Fall of Moondust, seemed always beyond my reach, but then in the early 1990s I found a used copy of the former and the latter came out in a newly re-released mass market paperback. At the same time,
Hammer of God was released and a couple of years later,
3001: The Final Odyssey. I was thrilled to have more new material. Since the 1960s Clarke would often say that he was done writing this or that only to come out with something new a few years later. Naturally as my reading horizons expanded within SF and outside the genre I continued to remain loyal to Clarke as my favorite. One can only imagine the thrill I felt when he agreed to write the Foreword to the first anthology I edited,
Golden Age SF: Tales of a Bygone Future, published in 2006. Even conversing with him via email was more than I ever had hoped to do.
Better and anyone, Arthur C. Clarke weaved the wonder and beauty of the Univere into his prose. His stories often contained puzzles that the characters had to work out, sometimes in order to survive. His descriptions were vivid and he often put humanity in its place within them. He was a scientist's science fiction writer. We are fortunate to have his works and are also fortunate for all those authors he inspired. For me, his works have been the steady anchor to which the Universe is attached.
Thilina Heenatigala's blog.
The
National Space Society's
Statement on Arthur C. Clarke's Legacy.
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saycestsay, 
