by Iain Blair

When I heard that Arthur C. Clarke, the prolific sci-fi writer whose prophetic ideas about satellites and space travel helped to usher in the space age, had died in Colombo, Sri Lanka, at the grand old age of 90, it brought back two vivid memories. The first was when I was a kid, going with friends to see “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the classic 1968 science-fiction film he wrote and collaborated on with director Stanley Kubrick, which was so stunning that we ended up seeing it three times. My second memory is the bizarre fact that our local plumber was one of his brothers. I still remember his comments about his famous brother’s work: he didn’t understand anything about his books or the films and that he was happy to stick to plumbing.

Share This

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.