Arthur C. Clarke is overdue for his own thread, and I'm going to open it with this tribute song by The Aardvarks:

Big fan of his short stories.

Big fan of his 2001 series of books.

Still upset that the Rendezvous with Rama movie was never made.

I'm trying to think if I've ever read any Arthur C. Clarke.
I think I read Hammer of God, about an asteroid on collision course with earth.

Among the books I gave away or donated after Rita died was his first professional sales in the April and May 1946 issues of Astounding Science Fiction.

Huge fan of this man's work. He almost never puts a foot wrong, and I was even a fan of the TV show Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World as a youngster; it was like a companion show to In Search Of...only with a British voice-over.

There was one amazing episode where they artificially created ball lightning in a shed.

Man, Simon beat me to a mention of Mysterious World. Ya got get up early to be first at IMWAN.

I just listened to Clarke's "The Wall of Darkness" as a radio play.
I enjoyed it:

One of the first science fiction stories I ever read was Clarke's Islands in the Sky. It's still a favorite of mine for that genre.

I'm still waiting for the space elevator to happen.
(The Fountains of Paradise)


You do realize that movie would come in threes.

Spoiler much?

Wikipedia is even worse by quoting the entire last sentence of the book.

I would like to see a Rendezvous With Rama movie...but a big chunk of it would need to be shot in the dark with no visible background.



Also, Clarke should not have violated the rule of threes when writing sequels to the book.

Right on the money:

I suspect he'd forseen all this whilst examining the crystal skull.

Time traveler, or had interactions with a time traveler.

Seriously, once you learn how close his predictions on technology were, it gives some of his books an ominous feel. His braincap linking mind and computer in 3001 creeped me out because of that.

Not right on - he failed to grasp one wouldn't need theater tickets as much since one could watch tons of shows at home on their computer. He didn't mention email or message boards or facebook when asked about future human interactions in regards to socializing. So, on, but not right on, IMO.

Yes, no one buys theater tickets on the Internet ever. He also didn't mention smartphones or Twitter. Clarke was a poor prognosticator indeed.

You miss my point. What little he predicted there didn't begin to cover it all, not by far, so I simply wouldn't describe it as "right on the money." I didn't say they wouldn't buy theater tickers at all, just not as much, for example. And most people still go into work, even when they could work more at home if allowed. Well, maybe "right on the money" means something else to you than it does to me.

I don't miss your point. I'm observing that the nit does not exist that you will not pick.

Bull. The vast majority of nits aren't worth commenting on, so you're like 99.99% wrong there. True, I'll pick on various nits, particularly mischaracterizations of what I've said. But I've noticed when you nit pick on stuff I say, you hardly ever fail to greatly exaggerated what I've actually said, like turning not buying theater tickets as much into not buying theater tickets AT ALL. Guess it takes that level of twisting to even begin to make your comments seem valid.

He didn't mention WhatsApp, Snapchat and dick pics.

So, total fail.

I think Clarke knew about the rise of the dick pic, or at least suspected its inevitability, but he was wise enough to understand that the world wasn't ready to hear about it back then.