ITEM! One of the elder gods of imaginative literature has passed on to that great publishing house in the sky — Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday at age 90 in his adopted homeland of Sri Lanka. I feel like the creative clubhouse of us pioneer penners of peerless predictive prose is just a little more empty today.
Did’ja know that Arthur C. Clarke and Jolly Jack Kirby were born mere months apart back in 1917? Yup, and they both served in WW II. Clarke was helping invent radar for the Brits while Jack was slogging along through Europe in Patton’s 3rd Army. And both thought of things before anyone else — Clarke invented telecommunication satellites, Kirby the iPhone... er, Motherbox.
Maybe the similar ages and outlooks of Arthur C. Clarke and Jack Kirby explained why Arthur didn’t even get that mad when Jolly Jack took major liberties when adopting his book and screenplay into the Marvel Treasury Edition of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I begged Jack to let me dialogue this one, but he just kept faxing me back copies of his contract with the "editorial freedom" clause underlined and surrounded by Kirby Krackle.
I hope that Arthur C. Clarke finds out that the afterlife is "full of stars."
Excelsior!
Smiley
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