It's a Two-Obit Day: Arthur C. Clarke Dead at 90

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, science-fiction writer, underwater explorer and space promoter, died today in Sri Lanka, where he had been living since 1956. The video above is a message he recorded for his 90th birthday last December, wherein he communicates his final wishes for humanity.

A personal memento after the jump...

AHR here. Above is my own personal copy of Childhood's End. The cover is long gone. In junior high when I was plowing through the short stories of Asimov and Bradbury faster than I could appreciate them, Childhood's End is one of the only novels that triumphed over my painfully short attention span and really shook me up. It deeply affected the way I think about family, legacy, and what it means to be stuck on a tiny planet in a universe full of unknowable unknowns. It's a sad, beautiful and humbling book and I get choked up just thinking about it.

In one of those strange coincidences that encourage you to believe in ghosts, I was cleaning out my closet yesterday and came across this post it note that I wrote to myself in 2003:
I still think this is a great idea, and if I don't make it happen I hope someone does.