The news about Sir Arthur came in while I was in the air. Kevin told me when I phoned him on landing. Despite the fact that we came from the same small part of the UK, I never met him. My father knew him in the RAF during the war, and claimed that the other radar guys thought that Clarke guy was crazy. As we all know now, he wasn’t. SF authors can rarely be accused of prescience, but Sir Arthur did a lot better than most. There are plenty of obituaries all over the blogosphere, so I’ll just leave it as saying we’ll miss him very much.