Towards the end of his life, Clarke cited 2001 as one of his most significant achievements.

In its
prophesying prowess, it was far from unique among his many works of fiction. For instance, his first
novel, 1947’s Prelude to Space, accurately predicted the year of the first moon rocket in 1959. And a
long list of inventive gadgets, gizmos and ideas that pop up in the pages of his novels and short stories
begins with ‘automatic control cars’ (driverless, we call them) and runs through the alphabet to zero ‘g’,
a term, if not a concept, coined by Clarke.

A Somerset farmer’s son, he was born in 1917 into a world in which sonar, crossword puzzles and bras
were all relatively new-fangled inventions. His boyhood was filled with science-fiction magazines,
stargazing (he made his own telescope from cardboard tubes) and fossils, a source of fascination from
the moment his father gave him a cigarette card with a dinosaur on it. He had a crystal set, and his
mother, who ran the local post office, taught him to tap out messages in Morse code.

Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation – Arthur C Clarke

He would never lose his West Country vowels, but he lost his father when he was just 13. By the time he
left school a few years later, any money that might have been used to send him to university was gone.
Instead, he ended up in London in 1936, working as a civil servant. By then, he was a card-carrying
member of the British Interplanetary Society, a group fascinated by the idea of space travel long before
it seemed realistic. He wrote for their newsletter, and contributed short stories to fanzines.