Born December 16, 1917, Sir Arthur Clarke is one of the supreme science fiction writers of the century, achieving vast popularity with 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. He has over twenty million books in print and has won every imaginable science fiction award, including the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Award for life achievement in 1968.
In addition to his literary accomplishments, Sir Arthur, a former radar officer for the RAF, invented the communications satellite. For this achievement, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize; in 1998 he was knighted by Queen Elizabteh for Services to Literature.
Sir Arthur lives in Sri Lanka, and survived the tsunamis of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. In 1988, he was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome and has since needed to use a wheelchair. On November 14, 2005 Sri Lanka awarded Arthur C. Clarke its highest civilian award, the Lankabhimanaya (Pride of Lanka) award, for his contributions to science and technology and his commitment to his adopted country.
*********************************
ARTHUR C. CLARKE was born in 1917 and graduated from King's College, London. During World War II he was an R.A.F. flight lieutenant in charge of the first experimental ground-controlled approach radar in England. At war's end he took a degree, with First Class Honors, in physics and pure and applied mathematics. From 1949 to 1951 he was on the staff of the Institution of Electrical Engineers as assistant editor of Science Abstracts; since then he has been a full-time writer. Throughout his career, Mr. Clarke's interests have been both astronomical and subaqueous. A Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, he has twice been chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, and both chairman and organizer of the Third Symposium on Space-Flight, sponsored by the Hayden Planetarium in 1954. He is also a member of the Underwater Explorers Club, and was recently engaged in underwater exploration and photography along Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
Mr. Clarke's seven novels and four works of nonfiction have sold over a million copies and have been translated into twelve languages. The Exploration of Space, a Book-of-the- Month Club nonfiction choice in 1952, was hailed by the New York Herald Tribune as "the most important book yet published in its field." He has writ- ten numerous technical papers and more than a hundred articles and short stories.
—from the dust jacket of City and the Stars
Did you find this review helpful?