COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, an aide said. He was 90.
Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De Silva said.
Co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Clarke was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer.
He was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits.
He joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite to comment on the Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s.
Clarke’s nonfiction volumes on space travel and his explorations of the Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science, and in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
But it was his writing that shot him to his greatest fame and that gave him the greatest fulfillment.
“Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered,” Clarke said recently. “I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these, I would like to be remembered as a writer.”
Starting in 1950, he began a prolific output of fiction and nonfiction, sometimes publishing three books in a year. His best-selling “3001: The Final Odyssey” came out when he was 79.
Some of his best-known books are “Childhood’s End,” 1953; “The City and the Stars,” 1956; “The Nine Billion Names of God,” 1967; “Rendezvous with Rama,” 1973; “Imperial Earth,” 1975; and “The Songs of Distant Earth,” 1986.
Clarke won the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1972, 1974 and 1979, and the Hugo Award of the World Science Fiction Convention in 1974 and 1980. He became Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1986.
Born the son of a farmer in Minehead, western England, on Dec. 16, 1917, Arthur Charles Clark became addicted to science fiction after buying his first copies of the pulp magazine “Amazing Stories” at Woolworth’s. He devoured English writers H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon and began writing for his school magazine in his teens.
Clarke went to work as a clerk in Her Majesty’s Exchequer and Audit Department in London, where he joined the British Interplanetary Society and wrote his first short stories and scientific articles on space travel.
It was not until after World War II that Clarke received a bachelor of science degree in physics and mathematics from King’s College London.
Clarke married in 1953 and was divorced in 1964. He had no children.
Disabled by post-polio syndrome, the lingering effects of a disease that had paralyzed him for two months in 1959, Clarke rarely left his home on the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka.
He moved there in 1956, lured by his interest in marine diving, which, he said, was as close as he could get to the weightless feeling of space.
