The Death of the Future

Earlier today I was thinking about a short story I've been working on, in which a robotics engineer who has reached the edge of his career decides to create a magical golem. There's actually a lot more going on that I won't get into, but the important thing is that I considered having the character muse on the quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The originator of this quote, and another great gem, "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible," the science fiction guru Arthur C. Clarke, died today at 90 [via technoccult]. I had never really considered Clarke to be one of my bigger inspirations, though I can still vividly recall the awe I felt watching this scene from Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" when I was a child:



and the wonder I felt when I finally read Clarke's original novel, as well as his "Rama" series. Unlike the many of these twenty sci-fi novels that will change your life that actually changed my own life, I had never considered "2001" such a world-shaker. And yet... Clarke's philosophical perspective of the near identical nature of technology and magic certainly stuck with me, and perhaps with countless others who went on the take both science fiction, and real science, from the magic of dreams to the technology of reality. In honor of the passing of one of the world's great visionaries, I will go downstairs and grab the nearest sci-fi anthology from my bookshelf.

[EDIT: I hadn't read this one before, but "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke is perhaps one of the most brilliant sci-fi short stories ever written, about Tibetan monks using a computer to print out a copy of all the names of God.]