Arthur C. Clarke was the foremost science fiction writer of his time. He wrote around 100 books, and his television series Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious Worlds brought him to the attention of a large audience not usually interested in the genre. Besides suggesting that geostationary satellites could be used as telecommunications relay stations, he was best known for his part in one of the most famous science fiction movies, 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968.

Clarke’s work was infused with an enthusiasm for the future. Two constants were the technological wonders that could complete Man’s evolutionary destiny — taking him down from the trees and sending him up to the Moon — and the spiritual imperative that drove him towards this new age.

Although his oeuvre was not explicitly religious — “Any path to knowledge is a path to God — or Reality, whichever word one prefers to use”, he said — he did give Man’s journey a mystical significance and a quasireligious intensity.

This theme is most apparent in his book Childhood’s End (1953), in which mankind is helped to merge with a cosmic overmind by extra-terrestrials who look like the Devil and are excluded from the ultimate spiritual absorption.

The idea of Man’s Earth-life as a preliminary was extended in his collaboration with the film director Stanley Kubrick. The film 2001 drew on Christian mythology, with a narrative that unravelled a process of Man’s creation, damnation, redemption and salvation. The ending shows the man who has broken through the shackles of space and time, becoming a godling, a foetus about to be born to command worlds, the Starchild. Through such ideas Clarke implied both a sense of loss and an ache for better things.

Arthur Charles Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset, in 1917, and attended Huish’s Grammar in Taunton. As a boy he displayed a great enthusiasm for the workings of the world. He had a crystal set, fashioned telescopes from cardboard tubes and developed an interest in fossils when his father (who died when he was only 13) gave him a Player’s cigarette card with a picture of a dinosaur. He learnt how to send Morse code from his mother, who ran the local post office. After buying a copy of Amazing Stories at Woolworth’s, he became addicted to science fiction magazines, on which he would spend all his pocket money.

He moved to London in 1936 to work as an auditor with the Exchequer. His interest in future science, fuelled by early reading of H. G. Wells and later of Olaf Stapledon, was not confined to speculation. He was a member of the British Interplanetary Society, which regularly met to contemplate ways in which Man could be sent to the Moon.

Clarke served in the RAF during the war, and was demobilised with the rank of flight lieutenant. Here, his fascination with technology was satiated when he was selected to join a US team to work on a radar project: a microwave beam unit. While on this project in 1945, he submitted an article to Wireless World on the possibility that radio signals could be bounced off a satellite with a geosynchronous orbit — he calculated that, at a height of 23,000 miles above the Earth, an object could sustain a fixed position over one particular place on the Earth. Clarke was paid £15 for his article which anticipated the age of satellite communications.

After the war he entered King’s College London, taking his BSc with a first in physics and mathematics in 1948.

His non-fiction publishing really took off with The Exploration of Space (1951), and his reputation was established with the still-classic novel Childhood’s End two years later. His writing, like his TV appearances, was stiff and gawky but unselfconscious. This was never more apparent than in his Dunsany-like short stories, Tales from the White Hart. His numerous factual books on popular-science won him the Unesco Kalinga prize in 1962 and his science fiction — in which technical knowledge informs the narrative — benefited notably from his scientific attainments.

He was a master at science fiction short stories, with tales such as The Star and The Nine Billion Names of God dramatising the conflict between rationalism and religious belief. Although no innovator, he strengthened and stiffened that traditionalist vein within science fiction that stems from idols such as Wells and Stapledon. His populism and his propensity to dabble in fantasy did not endear Clarke to the scientific establishment.

He once said that the three achievements he most valued were formulating the idea for the communication satellite, inspiring Gene Roddenberry to create Star Trek through his work Profiles of the Future, and 2001.