Thank you for the inspiration, Farewell to Arthur C Clarke

It is probably no big surprise to our regular readers that I am somewhat a fan of Science Fiction. That has been a strong interest of mine, bordering on a passion at times, ever since that first summer vacation when my father suggested that instead of reading books about war and spies, as the 13 year old, I should try some science fiction. He gave me an Arthur C Clarke to read.

I had read some Jules Verne before so its not like I hadn't read any Sci Fi, but this was different. It wasn't just Clarke, I also devoured Isaac Asimovs and Ray Bradburys and Robert Heinleins that summer - I read 30 paperback Sci Fi books in that summer of 1973. Some of my most enduring stories have come from that time and I honestly do feel that my immense optimism for the future, that things not only can get better, but they will get better, comes in part from that immersion, almost brainwashing, that I had that summer. And since then Sci Fi has become a staple among books I read - with of course spy stories (James Bond, anyone?) and war stories and now also the lawyer stories etc that are common among the standard bestseller.

Arthur C Clarke had a special place in my heart. I thought him and Isaac Asimov to be very similar, my fave Sci Fi authors. My father had all of them in paperback his bookcase and I read certainly more than half of the books by both authors over the next several years. But individual Clarke stories just somehow touched me even more than Asimov. His style of getting into that moment in the future and telling it like it was today, and we the readers totally understood the moment. Stories like Childhood's End, and Rendezvous with Rama, and Earthlight. Perhaps my fave story of them all is A Fall of Moondust - about a stranded moon-based surface transport, which has a catastrophic accident, and sinks into the dust sea on the moon. And then the frantic efforts of the rescue teams on the moon to try to rescue the passengers trapped under a sea of dust. Magnificent writing.

He is no doubt best known for 2001 A Space Odyssey, the book and the movie. I never thought either was anywhere near his best work. But regardless, all of Clarkes books that I've ever read have been among my faves, and especially for that young teenager mind, who was trying to figure out a world that seemed destined to end in apocalyptic nuclear war (this was the 1970s which started with America in Vietnam and ended with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan) - Sci Fi gave me a lot of hope. To want to get to the future, because in my lifetime we would be travelling to the stars. And all the magnificent new technologies that we would find in that future, and within my lifetime.

When I was a kid I never thought I could actually amount to anything as a writer (writing was not one of my fave subjects in school) but I admired authors a lot. I loved books. It is funny, that in 2000 when we were collecting the material for my first actual book to be published - an edited book, written by 12 contributors at Nokia and co-edited with Joe Barrett of Nokia and myself - that book was a book about the near future. How mobile phones might have cool new services in that "3G world" that was coming in a few years.

While on an extremely short time scale, it was a book about science fiction. We made educated guesses what might be happening five years from that time, and how phones might be used. That 13 year old boy who picked up his first Arthur C Clarke never knew how powerful inspiration those books and that man would end up being for him. 27 years later I wrote my own "Sci Fi" book. Funny how life turns out. I have always thought of him as one of my inspirations. Now we hear that Arthur C Clarke has died at the age of 90.

Thank you, Mr Clarke, for the stories and visions and than you most of all for the inspiration. We will miss you.