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General News: Sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke dies.
Rest in peace, Mr. Clarke.
Yanked from the newswire:
Writer Arthur C. Clarke Dies at 90
Mar 19, 12:56 AM (ET)
By RAVI NESSMAN
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) - Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who wrote "2001: A Space Odyssey" and won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday, an aide said. He was 90.
Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome for years, died at 1:30 a.m. in his adopted home of Sri Lanka after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De Silva said.
The 1968 story "2001: A Space Odyssey" - written simultaneously as a novel and screenplay with director Stanley Kubrick - was a frightening prophesy of artificial intelligence run amok.
One year after it made Clarke a household name in fiction, the scientist entered the homes of millions of Americans alongside Walter Cronkite anchoring television coverage of the Apollo mission to the moon.
Clarke also was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits.
His 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.
But it was his writing that shot him to his greatest fame and that gave him the greatest fulfillment.
"Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered," Clarke said recently. "I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these, I would like to be remembered as a writer."
From 1950, he began a prolific output of both fiction and non-fiction, sometimes publishing three books in a year. He published his best-selling "3001: The Final Odyssey" when he was 79.
A statement from Clarke's office said that Clarke had recently reviewed the final manuscript of his latest novel. "The Last Theorem," co-written with Frederik Pohl, will be published later this year, the statement said.
Some of his best-known books are "Childhood's End," 1953; "The City and The Stars," 1956; "The Nine Billion Names of God," 1967; "Rendezvous with Rama," 1973; "Imperial Earth," 1975; and "The Songs of Distant Earth," 1986.
When Clarke and Kubrick got together to develop a movie about space, they used as basic ideas several of Clarke's shorter pieces, including "The Sentinel," written in 1948, and "Encounter in the Dawn." As work progressed on the screenplay, Clarke also wrote a novel of the story. He followed it up with "2010,""2061," and "3001: The Final Odyssey."
In 1989, two decades after the Apollo 11 moon landings, Clarke wrote: "2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined."
Planetary scientist Torrence Johnson said Clarke was a major influence on many in the field.
Johnson, who has been exploring the solar system through the Voyager, Galileo and Cassini missions in his 35 years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recalled a meeting of planetary scientists and rocket engineers, where talk turned to the author.
"All of us around the table said we read Arthur C. Clarke," Johnson said. "That was the thing that got us there."
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 awarded the CBE in 1989.
Born in Minehead, western England, on Dec. 16, 1917, the son of a farmer, Arthur Charles Clark became addicted to science fiction after buying his first copies of the pulp magazine "Amazing Stories" at Woolworth's. He read English writers H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon and began writing for his school magazine in his teens.
Clarke went to work as a clerk in Her Majesty's 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.
It was not until after the World War II that Clarke received a bachelor of science degree in physics and mathematics from King's College in London.
In the wartime Royal Air Force, he was put in charge of a new radar blind-landing system.
But it was an RAF memo he wrote in 1945 about the future of communications that led him to fame. It was about the possibility of using satellites to revolutionize communications - an idea whose time had decidedly not come.
Clarke later sent it to a publication called Wireless World, which almost rejected it as too far-fetched.
Clarke married in 1953, and was divorced in 1964. He had no children.
He moved to the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka in 1956 after embarking on a study of the Great Barrier Reef.
Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, discovered that scuba-diving approximated the feeling of weightlessness that astronauts experience in space. He remained a diving enthusiast, running his own scuba venture into old age.
"I'm perfectly operational underwater," he once said.
Clarke was linked by his computer with friends and fans around the world, spending each morning answering e-mails and browsing the Internet.
At a 90th birthday party thrown for Clarke in December, the author said he had three wishes: for Sri Lanka's raging civil war to end, for the world to embrace cleaner sources of energy and for evidence of extraterrestrial beings to be discovered.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Clarke once said he did not regret having never followed his novels into space, adding that he had arranged to have DNA from strands of his hair sent into orbit.
"One day, some super civilization may encounter this relic from the vanished species and I may exist in another time," he said. "Move over, Stephen King."
Posted by OldLordSkull on Wed Mar 19, 2008 4:09 pm ( Reads: 458 )(comments? General News | Score: 0)
MILWAUKEE (AP) - Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and is widely seen as the father of the role-playing games, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69. He had been suffering from health problems for several years, including an abdominal aneurysm, said his wife, Gail Gygax.
Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. The game known for its oddly shaped dice became a hit, particularly among teenage boys, and eventually was turned into video games, books and movies.
Gygax always enjoyed hearing from the game's legion of devoted fans, many of whom would stop by the family's home in Lake Geneva, about 55 miles southwest of Milwaukee, his wife said. Despite his declining health, he hosted weekly games of Dungeons & Dragons as recently as January, she said.
"It really meant a lot to him to hear from people from over the years about how he helped them become a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, what he gave them," Gail Gygax said. "He really enjoyed that."
Dungeons & Dragons players create fictional characters and carry out their adventures with the help of complicated rules. The quintessential geek pastime, it spawned a wealth of copycat games and later inspired a whole genre of computer games that's still growing in popularity.
Born Ernest Gary Gygax, he grew up in Chicago and moved to Lake Geneva at the age of 8. Gygax's father, a Swiss immigrant who played violin in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, read fantasy books to his only son and hooked him on the genre, Gail Gygax said.
Gygax dropped out of high school but took anthropology classes at the University of Chicago for a while, she said. He was working as an insurance underwriter in the 1960s, when he began playing war-themed board games.
But Gygax wanted to create a game that involved more fantasy. To free up time to work on that, he left the insurance business and became a shoe repairman, she said.
Gygax also was a prolific writer and wrote dozens of fantasy books, including the Greyhawk series of adventure novels.
Gary Sandelin, 32, a Manhattan attorney, said his weekly Dungeons & Dragons game will be a bit sadder on Wednesday night because of Gygax's passing. The beauty of the game is that it's never quite the same, he said.
Funeral arrangements are pending. Besides his wife, Gygax is survived by six children.
Posted by OldLordSkull on Wed Mar 05, 2008 3:53 pm ( Reads: 450 )(comments? Gaming Industry | Score: 0)
'Rosemary's Baby' Author Ira Levin Dies
Nov 13, 8:08 PM (ET)
By LARRY McSHANE
NEW YORK (AP) - Best-selling writer Ira Levin, whose genre-hopping novels such as the horror classic "Rosemary's Baby" and the Nazi thriller "The Boys From Brazil" provided meaty movie roles for Mia Farrow and Laurence Olivier, has died of a heart attack, his agent said Tuesday. He was 78.
Levin, who also wrote for television and Broadway during his long career, passed away in his Manhattan apartment on Monday, agent Phyllis Westberg said. Long before authors such as Stephen King had their books routinely turned into movies, Levin watched his novels move inexorably to the big screen. Besides "Rosemary's Baby" with Farrow and "The Boys From Brazil" with Olivier, Levin's novels "The Stepford Wives,""Sliver" and "A Kiss Before Dying" all received the Hollywood treatment. His long-running 1978 play "Deathtrap" was also made into a Sidney Lumet-directed film, starring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve.
Levin's page-turning books were once compared by Newsweek writer Peter S. Frescott to a bag of popcorn: "Utterly without nutritive value and probably fattening, yet there's no way to stop once you've started." Born in the Bronx, Levin's father was hopeful his son would follow him into the family toy business. But by age 15, Levin determined that he wanted a career in writing; in his senior year at New York University, Levin won the $200 second place prize in an NBC-sponsored screenplay-writing competition and launched his career.
He worked as a TV writer before finishing his first novel, "A Kiss Before Dying," a murder mystery that was an instant success and twice made into a movie. His debut won the Edgar Allan Poe Award as the best first novel of 1953, and it was twice turned into a movie - first in 1956, and again in 1991.
It wasn't until 14 years after his first book that Levin completed his second novel, "Rosemary's Baby," the creepy tale of a New York couple in the clutch of Satanists who want the young wife to bear Satan's child.
"The Stepford Wives" was Levin's satirical tale of a suburban town where the spouses were converted into subservient robots, while "The Boys From Brazil" detailed a South American underground where the infamous Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele tried to clone Adolf Hitler.
The idea for the latter book came from a newspaper article on cloning, which suggested Hitler and Mozart as examples of the disparate possibilities for the new technology.
In 1991, Levin wrote a thriller set in a Manhattan high-rise apartment building, "Sliver," which became a movie starring Sharon Stone.
Besides "Deathtrap," Levin also wrote the Broadway adaptation of "No Time for Sergeants." The 1955 show, which launched the career of actor Andy Griffith, ran for more than 700 performances. He wrote several other less successful plays, including "Drat! That Cat!" which closed after a week in 1966.
Funeral arrangements were incomplete. Levin is survived by three sons and three grandsons, Westberg said.
Posted by OldLordSkull on Wed Nov 14, 2007 5:51 am ( Reads: 558 )(comments? General News | Score: 0)
CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) - Author Robert Jordan, whose "Wheel of Time" series of fantasy novels sold millions of copies, has died of a rare blood disease, his aide said Monday. He was 58.
Jordan, whose real name was James Oliver Rigney Jr., died Sunday at the Medical University of South Carolina of complications from primary amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy, his personal assistant, Maria Simons, said. The disease attacks the body's major organs; in Jordan's case, it caused the walls of his heart to thicken.
He wrote a trilogy of historical novels set in Charleston under the pen name Reagan O'Neal in the early 1980s. Then he turned his attention to fantasy and the first volume in his Wheel of Time epic, "The Eye of the World," was published in 1990 under the name Robert Jordan.
Jordan's books tells of Rand al'Thor, who is destined to become the champion who will battle ultimate evil in a mythical land.
Book 11, "Knife of Dreams," came out in 2005; there was also a prequel, "New Spring: The Novel," in 2004. The other titles in the series include "The Great Hunt,""Lord of Chaos" and "The Path of Daggers." Jordan was working on a 12th volume at the time of his death, Simons said.
He is survived by his wife, Harriet McDougal Rigney.
Posted by OldLordSkull on Mon Sep 17, 2007 8:19 pm ( Reads: 652 )(comments? General News | Score: 0)
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