British-Sri Lankan · 1917–2008
Arthur C. Clarke invented the concept of geostationary communication satellites in 1945, two decades before they existed. His fiction brought the same rigorous extrapolation to storytelling: Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama, and 2001: A Space Odyssey combine hard science with cosmic wonder. He moved to Sri Lanka in 1956, drawn by scuba diving, and lived there for the rest of his life. Knighted in 2000, he is the only SF writer whose ideas directly shaped global telecommunications infrastructure. His third law—'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'—became perhaps the most quoted sentence in science fiction.