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Just a year later, Clarke published what many consider (to his annoyance) to be his finest novel, "Childhood's End," a dark tale of an alien occupation of Earth. According to Thomas Disch, author of "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World," Clarke "never surpassed this tale of mankind self-destructing for its own transcendental good."

If the two works seemed to exist in yin-yang opposition, it was because Clarke's formidable intellect made for a complex optimism. As Clarke had said of Kepler, "He was both a scientist and a mystic." The fabulist in him was stimulated by the new frontier, but his inner scientist was guarded. In 1962 -- the same year John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth -- Clarke cautioned, "We'll never conquer space." The universe is too vast, and stories like "The Sentinel" and "Childhood's End" demonstrated his belief that, should there be intelligent life out there, it was likely far too advanced for human comprehension.

Clarke was prolific, publishing novels -- "Earthlight" (1955), "A Fall of Moondust" (1961) -- and collections of essays and lectures. Critics such as sci-fi editor David Pringle fault Clarke's characterization as "minimal, the dialogue embarrassingly stilted." But Pringle admits, "Clarke writes an unusually pure form of science fiction." Clarke's "City and the Stars," he writes, "succeeds in evoking a childlike sense of wonderment." The elegant novel, about the last city on Earth and a lone boy who yearns to escape, conforms "to popular science fiction stereotypes ... and moreover does it beautifully."

In April 1964, while in New York to work on a Time-Life book called "Man and Space," the Time Traveller was summoned to Trader Vic's in the Plaza Hotel to meet director Stanley Kubrick. Clarke joined Kubrick after the director, fresh from his success with "Dr. Strangelove," informed him of his desire to make "the proverbial really good science fiction movie." They used Clarke's short story "The Sentinel" as a launch pad. As it evolved, the theme of "2001: A Space Odyssey," "man's place in the pecking order of cosmic intelligence" (as Clarke later put it), would suit both men perfectly.

The pair were in some ways a classically mismatched odd couple -- English gentleman Arthur, who believes "no sane person is awake after 10 p.m., and no law-abiding one after midnight," Stanley the Bronxite with "a night-person pallor," as Clarke wrote in "Son of Dr. Strangelove" in 1972. But Stanley's genius and meticulous attention to detail dovetailed with Arthur's imagination and raw scientific knowledge. Diary entries from Clarke's journal seem to encapsulate the relationship:

July 11. Joined Stanley to discuss plot development, but spent almost all the time arguing about Cantor's Transfinite Groups ... I decide that he is a mathematical genius.

Sept. 28. Dreamed I was a robot, being rebuilt. Took two chapters to Stanley, who cooked me a fine steak, remarking, "Joe Levine [executive producer of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians] doesn't do this for his writers."

The dream foreshadows the HAL 9000. Kubrick breathed life into the sentient computer, but it was Clarke who provided HAL's soul. He was holed up in the Hotel Chelsea -- where diversions included visits from Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Andy Warhol and William S. Burroughs -- to write the story upon which Kubrick would base his screenplay. "2001" was published a few months after the film was released in the spring of 1968.

The film was a visual masterpiece, impeccably timed, but the novel is only slightly less opaque. Like other Clarke works, "2001" imagines extraterrestrials as an enlightening force on humanity, steering the species toward the development of intellect. The aliens leave an alarm -- the monolith -- on the moon to notify them the moment humanity is smart enough to find it; astronaut David Bowman, on the outskirts of the solar system, eventually makes contact. Bowman is reborn in the image of the alien: as a form of radiation, bodiless, able to travel beyond the speed of light. "2001" ends in a euphoric rush of hallucinatory imagery and Clarke's familiar refrain: "History as men knew it would be drawing to a close."

At Christmas, the Apollo 8 crew read from the book of Genesis as they orbited the moon, and later confided to Clarke that "they had been tempted to radio back the discovery of a large black monolith" on the dark side.

As for Clarke's continuing track record: Later, after the Apollo 13 crew barely survived the explosion of an onboard oxygen tank, Clarke received a report on the mishap from a NASA administrator with the inscription, "Just as you always said it would be, Arthur." And while "2001" the film carries the spaceship Discovery only as far as Jupiter, in the novel Clarke uses Jupiter's gravitational field to give the ship a boost in momentum, carrying it farther toward Saturn, a "slingshot" maneuver used for the first time 11 years later by Voyager II on its way to Neptune and beyond.

Clarke has often hit the moving target of the future with amazing precision, but part of his charm as a writer is that he doesn't take himself too seriously to admit his misses: "I'm already a little embarrassed to see that 'The Sands of Mars' (1951) contains the sentence, 'There are no mountains on Mars,'" he wrote in 1973. When a Sunday Times columnist offered a prize for the best alternative to the clunky new phrase "word processor" in 1986, "I submitted "word loom", which seems to have taken off like the proverbial lead balloon," Clarke writes.

The same year, and for the first time, Clarke entered into a novelistic collaboration, with NASA's former director of planning for the Viking missions to Mars, Gentry Lee, with whom he penned "Cradle" and three sequels to his novel "Rendezvous With Rama" even as he continued to grind out sequels to "2001": "2010: Odyssey Two," "2061: Odyssey Three" and "3001: the Final Odyssey," in which original astronaut Frank Poole (sent into the deep freeze of space by the homicidal HAL) is revived and given a crash course in human history by a device called the brain cap, which pumps information directly into the cerebral cortex.

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