Goodnight Arthur

Arthur C. Clarke died today. I was working on assigning some poor soul a two day engineering task when J called to tell me that bit of news specifically. I wasn't surprised. The man was old. 90 they say, though he had a vision much older and wiser; he was the messiah of science fiction and he hooked me young.

I read 2001 after I fell asleep watching the movie. The book was easier and faster to digest than the movie. I remember I was sixteen and in love with pretentions and the things that others said were important to culture. For film, that was Stanley Kubrick. I have yet to find a Kubrick film I like. (I guess I'm not that geeky?) But thanks to Stanley, I found Arthur, and that's what's important here. I found the Aurthur who wasn't the greatest of writers who seemed to have copied and pasted whole passages between his books before copying and pasting was invented in order to get past having to rewrite descriptions of places like Jupiter. Still, despite going, "hmm, I swear I read this passage in 2010" while reading 2061; I loved his books. They made me think of science, space, frontiers, and other worlds.

If only they could jettison his body into space so that he could awake in 3001 to see if his predictions in that book came true. He fired my imagination and I thought when I first read his books that he must've died long ago. When I found out he wasn't, I thought he would live forever. Surely, someone would think to invent a cube full of terabytes to perserve this man's mind. Surely, Aurthur C. Clarke would never truly die.

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I've been working and prepping for finals. Be back later. =)