Dunia kehilangan salah satu penulis fiksi ilmiah terbaiknya, Arthur C. Clarke
yang meninggal dunia kemarin di Srilangka.
Buat saya, 2001 A Space Odyssey beserta sequel-sequelnya (2010, 3001)
merupakan salah satu buku fiksi ilmiah yang paling saya nikmati (selain
Foundation series nya Isaac Asimov) sampai saat ini meskipun ramalan pak Arthur
bahwa pada tahun 2001 sudah akan terjadi kolonisasi bulan dan penerbangan
berawak ke Mars nampaknya meleset beberapa dekade.
Pak Awang, ulasan2nya mengenai pak Arthur ini ditunggu.
Cheers
Oki
By RAVI NESSMAN, Associated Press Writer 51 minutes ago
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who
co-wrote "2001: A Space Odyssey" and won worldwide acclaim with more than 100
books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday, an aide said. He was
90.
Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s,
died at 1:30 a.m. in his adopted home of Sri Lanka after suffering breathing
problems, aide Rohan De Silva said.
Co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey,"
Clarke was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer.
He was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945,
decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep
satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits.
He joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite as commentator on the U.S.
Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s.
Clarke's non-fiction volumes on space travel and his explorations of the
Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science,
and in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of
Aeronautics and Astronautics.
But it was his writing that shot him to his greatest fame and that gave him
the greatest fulfillment.
"Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered," Clarke said
recently. "I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and
space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer."
From 1950, he began a prolific output of both fiction and non-fiction,
sometimes publishing three books in a year. He published his best-selling
"3001: The Final Odyssey" when he was 79.
Some of his best-known books are "Childhood's End," 1953; "The City and The
Stars," 1956, "The Nine Billion Names of God," 1967; "Rendezvous with Rama,"
1973; "Imperial Earth," 1975; and "The Songs of Distant Earth," 1986.
When Clarke and Kubrick got together to develop a movie about space, they
used as basic ideas several of Clarke's shorter pieces, including "The
Sentinel," written in 1948, and "Encounter in the Dawn." As work progressed on
the screenplay, Clarke also wrote a novel of the story. He followed it up with
"2010," "2061," and "3001: The Final Odyssey."
In 1989, two decades after the Apollo 11 moon landings, Clarke wrote: "2001
was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human
history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and
Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction
have become inexorably intertwined."
Clarke won the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America in
1972, 1974 and 1979; the Hugo Award of the World Science Fiction Convention in
1974 and 1980, and in 1986 became Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers
of America. He was awarded the CBE in 1989.
Born in Minehead, western England, on Dec. 16, 1917, the son of a farmer,
Arthur Charles Clark became addicted to science fiction after buying his first
copies of the pulp magazine "Amazing Stories" at Woolworth's. He read English
writers H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon and began writing for his school magazine
in his teens.
Clarke went to work as a clerk in Her Majesty's Exchequer and Audit
Department in London, where he joined the British Interplanetary Society and
wrote his first short stories and scientific articles on space travel.
It was not until after the World War II that Clarke received a bachelor of
science degree in physics and mathematics from King's College in London.
In the wartime Royal Air Force, he was put in charge of a new radar
blind-landing system.
But it was an RAF memo he wrote in 1945 about the future of communications
that led him to fame. It was about the possibility of using satellites to
revolutionize communications an idea whose time had decidedly not come.
Clarke later sent it to a publication called Wireless World, which almost
rejected it as too far-fetched. Clarke married in 1953, and was divorced in
1964. He had no children. He moved to the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka in
1956 after embarking on a study of the Great Barrier Reef. Clarke, who had
battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a
wheelchair, discovered that scuba-diving approximated the feeling of
weightlessness that astronauts experience in space. He remained a diving
enthusiast, running his own scuba venture into old age. "I'm perfectly
operational underwater," he once said. Clarke was linked by his computer with
friends and fans around the world, spending each morning answering e-mails and
browsing the Internet. At a 90th birthday party thrown for Clarke in
December, the author said he had three wishes: for Sri Lanka's raging civil war
to end, for the world to embrace cleaner sources of energy and for evidence of
extraterrestrial beings to be discovered. In an interview with The Associated
Press, Clarke once said he did not regret having never followed his novels into
space, adding that he had arranged to have DNA from strands of his hair sent
into orbit. "One day, some super civilization may encounter this relic from
the vanished species and I may exist in another time," he said. "Move over,
Stephen King."
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