When I was young, I quickly gobbled up my local library’s small selection of science fiction, alphabetically: Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke….

Clarke passed yesterday, at the age of 90. The New York Times published an excellent tribute:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/books/19clarke.html excerpt:

Clarke’s Three Laws

Among his legacies are Clarke’s Three Laws, provocative observations on science, science fiction and society that were published in his “Profiles of the Future” (1962):

– “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

– “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

– “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”