I was in Junior High when I really went after Science Fiction with abandon. In my elementary school  years I had been a Hardy Boys man (boy). But along around 7th grade I read Robert Heinlien’s Have Space Suit Will Travel and I was hooked. From then on it was Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Heinlein’s racy, grown up stuff, and, of course, Arthur C. Clarke.

I had actually seen Clarke and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey before I read my first Clarke book, Childhood’s End. Then The Fountains of Paradise and Islands in the Sky followed.

Clarke once said:

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.

He was 90 years old and his death was not a sudden one. My hope is that in the final months of his life, he applied that fertile imagination to the question of what lies beyond this life and sought answers from living God whose Creation Clarke so admired.