It's rare for a writer, within their own lifetime, to change the world they live in purely through the power of their fiction.
Rarer still for them to be a genre writer.
But in one of his more famous statements, he was absolutely correct: "Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories."
And people did read Arthur's work.
His three laws about science are definitive. More even than Asimov, he defined the problems at the heart of the computer age.
And his warning "It has yet to be proved that intelligence has any survival value" remains as prescient now, in the age of nuclear proliferation and global warming, as any statement to guide us collectively in the future.
Arthur C Clarke, RIP.
1 comment:
RIP Sir Arthur.
My favourite quote of his is:
'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'
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