A long time ago I had a neighbor who was a huge fan of SF. Through her good graces I was pleased to meet a large number of my favorite authors, and one of them was Sir Arthur C Clarke. <\/p>\n
He was just as you’d imagine- brilliant, and talkative. Very much the raconteur. I was only priveleged to be in his actual presence for a very brief time, but i was incredibly starstruck.<\/p>\n
Later, as I was introduced to the Internet, in the 80’s, (well, telnet) I started digging around by URL and finding people in different places. I dug up people’s email addresses when most people had no idea what an email address was. <\/p>\n
And then I stumbled on Sri.lanka.net. I thought, hell, why not? There can’t be but ten people (at that time) in Sri Lanka that had an email address, so I went to the one I could find. The webmaster at the University of Sri Lanka (you used to get some of the damnedest responses just by typing “webmaster@(someurl).com”<\/p>\n
Anyway, the webmaster forwarded my wishes to Sir Arthur, and was nice enough to forward a response from Sir Arthur to me. One day I even got an email from the Man Himself. I was electrified. <\/p>\n
I sent off a quick email (by this time, Sir Arthur had become embroiled in a wierd scandal that tagged him as a shorteye) saying “I understand all one’s heroes often have feet of clay, but I admire your work and hope you continue to publish for many years to come”<\/p>\n
He responded <\/p>\n
“I assure you, my feet are made of the very finest clay”<\/p>\n
Later, when 3001 was published, he sent me autographed bookplates. <\/p>\n
We corresponded a couple of times a year from the late 90’s until recently, when his assistant took to writing his responses. <\/p>\n
And now he’s gone. <\/p>\n
Godspeed, my wonderful friend. You touched my life in incredible ways, and I will never forget. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A long time ago I had a neighbor who was a huge fan of SF. Through her good graces I was pleased to meet a large number of my favorite authors, and one of them was Sir Arthur C Clarke. He was just as you’d imagine- brilliant, and talkative. Very much the raconteur. I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2142"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}