Sci-fi giant and non-child buggerer Arthur C. Clarke died today in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived for 52 years. The former RAF radarman, scuba nut and author of Rendezvous with Rama was 90 years old. Renezvous is being made into a movie starring Morgan Freeman.

… [His] technical paper, published in the British journal Wireless World, establishing the feasibility of artificial satellites as relay stations for Earth-based communications… This so-called geostationary orbit has been officially designated the Clarke Orbit by the International Astronomical Union… In a wry piece entitled, “A Short Pre-History of Comsats, Or: How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time,” he claimed that a lawyer had dissuaded him from applying for a patent. The lawyer, he said, thought the notion of relaying signals from space was too far-fetched to be taken seriously…

He first became interested in diving in the early 1950s, when he realized that he could find underwater “something very close to weightlessness” of outer space. He settled permanently in Colombo… [and] established a guided diving service for tourists…

One of his closest relationships was with Leslie Ekanayake, a fellow diver in Sri Lanka, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1977… Clarke’s standard answer when journalists asked him outright if he was gay was, “No, merely mildly cheerful.” [Link -- thanks, Rahul]

Update: Clarke got a personal apology from Rupert Murdoch over the tabloid’s pedophilia accusation:

… he was turned over by the Sunday Mirror. It was Murdoch who wrote him a “very nice” note promising him that the reporters responsible would never work in Fleet Street again… “I take an extremely dim view of people mucking about with boys,” Clarke says. “The whole thing was distressing to me. It was vindictive and very unpleasant. I can only assume it was a plot to embarrass Prince Charles…”

… he was faced with the prospect of conscription; instead he joined a secret team of scientists working on radar. The days left plenty of time for writing. “I was a devout coward. I was never in any danger. We were a long way from the action…”

He has lived in Sri Lanka since 1956, when he stopped off in what was then Ceylon on a diving holiday… He is a surrogate grandfather to [his business partner] Hector’s three daughters, Cherene, Tamara, and Melinda whom he describes as “the apples of my eye”… He has seven staff - including an apolitical private secretary called Lenin - to deal with the fan mail and interview requests. He also has a pet chihuahua called Pepsi. [Link]

In a video message on his birthday last year, Clarke said if he were granted three wishes, one would be an end to the Sri Lankan civil war:

He closed with a Rudyard Kipling poem, ‘The Appeal’:

If I have given you delight
By aught that I have done,
Let me lie quiet in that night
Which shall be yours anon:

And for that little, little span
The dead are borne in mind
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behind. [Link]

Three other Rama novels — Rama II, The Garden of Rama and Rama Revealed — were written by a different author. Clarke’s own rendezvous with Rama today was slightly delayed after encountering a mysterious black monolith.

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