Overhead, Without Any Fuss, A Star Was Going Out

I didn't really intend to go on a blogroll here, but now comes the news that Arthur C. Clarke has died. My extremely minor connection to Clarke is that when I was working at my first job in New York as an editorial assistant for Asimov's and Analog, I was responsible for gathering e-mail, and we received one brief one from Clarke (I can't remember to whom it was directed). I was actually not a huge SF fan (I think that helped me get the job, really), but that and taking a phone call from Harlan Ellison were cool moments (though maybe not as memorable as my encounter with the Star Child).

More importantly, he was responsible for helping Stanley Kubrick shape the brilliant 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film I loved as a child and still love today (though not for the exact same reasons), he wrote the classic Childhood's End (in important respects a forerunner of 2001), and generally was in the vanguard of encouraging space exploration and scientific discovery. There may have been arguments about who the B was in the ABCs of SF, but the C was always Clarke.