Colombo - Sir Arthur C Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday in Sri Lanka, an aide said. He was 90. The English writer - who died in Colombo, where he had lived since 1956 - was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer. The physicist and mathematician was a futurist, and many of his ideas and theories became reality.
Clarke's most important scientific contribution might be propagating the idea that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays. He proposed the concept in 1945, 25 years before communications satellites became a reality, the Arthur C Clarke Foundation said.
He was also known as the co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick's 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey" and writer of the novel of the same name.
"Life is just one big banana," Clarke wrote. "Science fiction allows us all to peel open the reality and discover the yellow truth inside."
Clarke's non-fiction volumes on space travel and his explorations of the Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science, and in 1976, he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Clarke won the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1972, 1974 and 1979; the Hugo Award of the World Science Fiction Convention in 1974 and 1980; and in 1986 became grand master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He was knighted in 1989.
Born in Minehead in western England on December 16, 1917, the son of a farmer, Arthur Charles Clarke became addicted to science fiction after buying his first copies of the pulp fiction magazine Amazing Stories at Woolworth's department store.
Clarke went to work as a clerk in the Exchequer and Audit Department in London, where he joined the British Interplanetary Society and wrote his first short stories and scientific articles on space travel. In World War II, he served in the Royal Air Force.
Clarke married in 1953 and was divorced in 1964. He had no children. He moved to Sri Lanka in 1956 after embarking on a study of the Great Barrier Reef.
In recent years, he was confined to a wheelchair because of a post-polio syndrome.
