![]() Clarke, CBE, is likely the only author of fiction whose papers happen to be archived in a repository devoted to outer space-the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center. ![]() An Indian satellite orbits Mars, while I’m in my home study poring over pages from the Arthur Clarke personal papers, sent to me in a form Clarke would have appreciated: as electronic files. I’d innocently brought along my entire Arthur Clarke fiction and nonfiction collection, which filled a large bag. After his speech, Clarke, a bespectacled, round-shouldered man, joked with me in a donnish fashion as he signed a tall stack of my paperbacks. Clarke told his audience two important things: Information should no longer be printed on paper, and Indians should keep up the good work with their space program. I stared in awe at the visionary sage as he addressed a crowd who included the city’s businessmen, clad in white cotton dhotis and jubbahs, sitting in wooden chairs in an air-conditioned hotel ballroom. Clarke, a British expat who made his home in the nearby island nation of Sri Lanka, was the first science fiction writer I’d ever met. ![]() Clarke arrived in the city on a lecture tour. That was how, as a science fiction-obsessed kid, I ended up in an audience in Madras when Sir Arthur C. ![]() I was once a teen from Texas, living in southern India during the early 1970s (my father had been dispatched abroad in the petrochemical-employment diaspora). ![]()
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