Arthur C. Clarke passed away Wednesday, March 18, 2008 in Sri Lanka. He is best known for the screenplay 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on his short story “The Sentinel,” in which the seeds of human evolution are planted with contact from an alien artifact known at the Monolith.
It is strange that I should write about his story, “The 9 Billion Names of God,” days before his passing. In this story, Mr. Clarke gave the world a supercomputer whose sole purpose is to calculate all possible iterations of alpanumeric characters from all human languages in which God is able to be named. In “Rendezvous with Rama,” he gave us an exploration tale of an asteriod carved and converted into a spacecraft by an advanced alien race and succeeds in showing us the psychological and emotional limits human comprehension. His quote below serves as a quick summary of all his stories: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clark.

When I taught my Culture Geography Courses at Piedmont Virginia Community College, this was the first quote I posed to my students simply because it highlights the cultural and evolutionary progress of humanity. This is a theme found throughout the body of his work. Another aspect that informed his writing was traditions of zen, hindu and other forms of Eastern Mysticism. He is also credited for advancing the idea of orbital platforms for mass communications in the 1940s.

Mr. Clarke, I thank you for the work and the world you gave me!

A partial bibliography of his work is below:
* Prelude to Space (1951)
* The Sands of Mars (1951)
* Islands in the Sky (1952)
* Against the Fall of Night (1953)
* Childhood’s End (1953)
* Earthlight (1955)
* The City and the Stars (1956)
* The Deep Range (1957)
* A Fall of Moondust (1961)
* Dolphin Island (1963)
* Glide Path (1963)
* 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
* Rendezvous with Rama (1972)
* Imperial Earth (1975)
* The Fountains of Paradise (1979)
* 2010: Odyssey Two (1982)
* The Songs of Distant Earth (1986)
* 2061: Odyssey Three (1988)
* A Meeting with Medusa (1988)
* Cradle (1988) (with Gentry Lee)
* Rama II (1989) (with Gentry Lee)
* Beyond the Fall of Night (1990) (with Gregory Benford)
* The Ghost from the Grand Banks (1990)
* The Garden of Rama (1991) (with Gentry Lee)
* Rama Revealed (1993) (with Gentry Lee)
* The Hammer of God (1993)
* Richter 10 (1996) (with Mike McQuay)
* 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997)
* The Trigger (1999) (with Michael P. Kube-McDowell)
* The Light of Other Days (2000) (with Stephen Baxter)
* Time’s Eye (2003) (with Stephen Baxter)
* Sunstorm (2005) (with Stephen Baxter)
* Firstborn (2007) (with Stephen Baxter)

Omnibus editions

* Across the Sea of Stars (1959) (including Childhood’s End, Earthlight and 18 short stories)
* From the Ocean, From the Stars (1962) (including The City and the Stars, The Deep Range and The Other Side of the Sky)
* An Arthur C. Clarke Omnibus (1965) (including Childhood’s End, Prelude to Space and Expedition to Earth)
* Prelude to Mars (1965) (including Prelude to Space and The Sands of Mars)
* The Lion of Comarre & Against the Fall of Night (1968)
* An Arthur C. Clarke Second Omnibus (1968) (including A Fall of Moondust, Earthlight and The Sands of Mars)
* Four Great SF Novels (1978) (including The City and the Stars, The Deep Range, A Fall of Moondust, Rendezvous with Rama)
* The Space Trilogy (2001) (including Islands in the Sky, Earthlight and The Sands of Mars)

Against the Fall of Night in Startling Stories.
Against the Fall of Night in Startling Stories.

Short story collections

* Expedition to Earth (1953)
* Reach for Tomorrow (1956)
* Tales from the White Hart (1957)
* The Other Side of the Sky (1958)
* Tales of Ten Worlds (1962)
* The Nine Billion Names of God (1967)
* Of Time and Stars (1972)
* The Wind from the Sun (1972)
* The Best of Arthur C. Clarke (1973)
* The Sentinel (1983)
* Tales From Planet Earth (1990)
* More Than One Universe (1991)
* The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2000)