By IANS
Colombo : Science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke died here early Wednesday. He was 90.
The British-born Clarke, best known for his novel “2001: A Space Odyssey” and its two sequels, died of a cardio respiratory attack, said his personal assistant Rohan De Silva. The first part of the trilogy was made into a film with Stanley Kubrick as director,
A victim of polio, Clarke had been in a wheel chair for a number of years. He has authored 80 books and hundreds of articles.
Born on Dec 16, 1917, Clarke had served as a radar specialist in the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the World War II, even as he was writing on science.
In the 1950s, he chose to settle down in Sri Lanka, where he had gone first as a scuba diving enthusiast.
Through his science fiction, Clarke was the first to suggest the use of satellites for communications, and in the 1940s, forecast that man would land on the moon by 2000, though the scientific community trashed the idea then.
When Neil Armstrong did land on the moon in 1969, the US acknowledged that Clarke had “provided the intellectual drive that led us to the moon”.
At the time of his death, he was working on a fictional “space elevator”.
“The golden age of space is only just beginning,” he had said recently.