Arthur C. Clarke came from an era when science fiction had the power to rewire your brain. I remember reading his short story The Nine Billion Names of God, in which some monks hire a supercomputer company so they can work out all the permutations of the letters that make up God’s name.

Their idea is that when the task is done, God will say that mankind’s work is complete and bring an end to the world. At the end of the story, the computer technicians are reflecting that the program must have just about run its course. The last line of the book is: “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

Science fiction is much harder to write now, especially if you are writing about the near future, because technology moves on so quickly. A few years ago it seemed as though the CD was going to be the future, but then the iPod came along and CDs look like they belong to the age of the dinosaurs.

Science fiction may also have been easier to write in Clarke’s time. Man landing on the Moon is an easy concept to grasp, but if you are writing about complex mutations of DNA then you are asking the man on the street to have an awful lot of specialist knowledge.

The genre has also had to compete with epic fantasy books. Clarke’s definition was that science fiction was something that could happen, even if you would rather it didn’t, whereas fantasy was something that couldn’t happen even if you might wish it could.

If you had asked me as a teenager what reading Arthur C. Clarke felt like, I would have said: “Having my brain pried open and the Universe poured in.” After reading some of his short stories last night, I would say my teenage self had it spot on.

We lost one of our Greats yesterday. Farewell, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the world is poorer for your passing.

Darren Nash is editorial director of Orbit, the largest sci-fi publisher in Britain

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