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Arthur C. Clarke, who was the closest a man could get to reencarnating Leonardo da Vinci, finally joined the ages last March 19th. He took off from Sri Lanka, where he had lived for almost fifty years, though not in an elevator into space as he had imagined would eventually be built on that land. He was ninety and he looked it, having been confined to a wheelchair for a number of years, but his mind remained free to roam until the end, much like some of his characters who underwent a passage from humanity into a new stage.

Perhaps it was his contact with the Hindu culture of Sri Lanka that gave him the theme that appeared in many of his most famous novels ("2001: a Space Odyssey," "2010: Odyssey Two," "Rendezvous with Rama," "Childhood's End"), namely, that the current human race may be only a link in a chain, and that sooner or later it would transcend into something else, perhaps not corporeal at all. Thus David  Bowman, after committing cybercide on HAL 9000 and descending into a huge Jovian (in the movie; Saturnian, in the book) monolith at the end of "2001", becomes the "Star Child" who, from then on, was free to play around with the cosmos (and, of course, with the crew of the next mission, launched to rescue him). The last generation of children in "Childhood's End" are the ones that take humanity to the next level, unfortunately obliterating old humanity in the process, much as the Vogons would do a few years later to build a new inter-galactic highway that happened to go right through the middle of this little blue planet...

But that is a totally different story by a totally different subject of Her Majesty, who didn't get knighted for it, as Arthur did, though he did retain his UK address. But I digress again...

I really like Clarke's stuff, perhaps because I am an engineer by training. You see, Clarke had this idea that everything he described (except, perhaps, the transcendent mind thing) had to work, at least in principle. He described how artificial satellites might be used for communications across oceans, and worked out the details so well that people actually followed up on it and gave us what we have today. If you look at the film version of "2001", you'll see a spacecraft sporting nuclear propulsion and artificial gravity, pretty much exactly like one that might be built today for that mission. If you read "The Fountains of Paradise" you'll be confronted with an elevator stretching out into orbit. And he tells you, almost bolt by bolt, how to build it, and what might go wrong in the process (as it does, of course).

And his style is probably the most deceptively simple in all of science-fiction. Not a fancy word in sight, and not an extra word, yet impossible to improve upon. An English teacher's dream. An absence of floweriness as complete as the vacuum of space, which sucks you in with just as much power and makes you think you can also write, someday.

And it did. I think I might owe to Arthur my trying to write science-fiction. I haven't yet reached the transcendent stage, but what if he was right after all...

In the meantime, I am praying for his soul. Arthur, like so many SF authors of the old school (not so the newer ones), didn't seem to think transcendence might have already arrived on this earth, in the form of religious faith. But he didn't make himself a jerk about it (unlike others) and I've found his stuff actually helpful to be awed with the magnificence of the creator of the universe.