The science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died, at 90, in his adopted home of Sri Lanka. Clarke broke into publishing through Astounding Science Fiction magazine and later served as "science adviser" to the British adventure comic strip Dan Dare, eventually becoming revered as a major figure of the genre as the author of such books as Childhood's End. To movie lovers, though, Clarke will always be best remembered for his work on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. That movie grew out of "The Sentinel", a story Clarke first wrote in 1948 as an unsuccessful entry in a BBC competition; later published under the title "Sentinel of Eternity", it introduced the concept of the monolith which would anchor the screenplay that Clarke and Kubrick eventually assembled, drawing on other stories by Clarke, such as "Encounter at Dawn." While Kubrick made the movie, Clarke wrote a novel, also called 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was published shortly after the novel's release. Technically, the book, being based on the screenplay, might be called a novelization, but it was intended not as a cheap tie-in but as a work that could stand on its own while also serving as a complementary work to the movie.
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