Craig Berry

Sir Arthur C. Clarke died today.  He has been my favorite author from a very early age (about seven, I believe) when I read his first novel, Against the Fall of Night, and identified so strongly with the protagonist that he (Alvin of Diaspar) has been a sort of alter ego of mine ever since.  I had the pleasure a few years ago of buying a used copy of the same edition I read and re-read to tatters as a child, and the novel held up far better than I had hoped; it still moved me deeply and excited me in ways no other author has ever managed.

I ended up reading every book of his I could find up through around the mid-1980s, when I'm afraid he lost interest (or the knack) and began putting out a series of rather poor books, often cowritten.  One of the last books of his that I love is The Fountains of Paradise, which I first read while recuperating from an appendectomy.  It's a measure of Clarke's hypnotic storytelling power that I had to be reminded by the nurse when it was time to take more painkillers; I was so lost in the novel that I entirely forgot about minor details like a day-old stomach incision.

What most amazed me about Clarke was his ability to meld the hardest of hard science fiction -- spaceships, computers, hyperrealistic portrayals of planets and moons -- and the deepest religious and mystical explorations into a unified story.  His most famous work in this vein is 2001, of course, but I think that Childhood's End will be his most enduring legacy.  I credit that novel with helping to awaken a spiritual side of myself, a side whose existence I was struggling to deny at the time. 

J. B. S. Haldane once remarked that Clarke was one of the few modern writers saying anything original about God; and that indeed, he was saying several contradictory things, and were that not the case he might be considered a public nuisance.  He was also a brilliant storyteller, an ardent popularizer of science, an inventor, an advocate of ecological protection decades before that became fashionable, and a tireless explorer on all planes.

Enjoy your rest, my teacher and friend.  And yes, you will dream.