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To: Neocon who wrote (2823)	5/16/2000 11:51:00 AM
From: Raymond Clutts	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3246

Well I'd chime in for Clarke's position if we define, "influential" to mean which author's projected reality contained scientific or technological innovations that were essential to modern society. On that score while Robert Heinlein proposed the water bed, Arthur Clarke gave us telecommunication satellites. And Neo you might thereby note that once again, Art is triumphant.

To: Neocon who wrote (2823)	5/16/2000 1:00:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3246

I'll try. His short story "The Sentinel" was waaay ahead of its time, and it became the movie 2001, and that movie left a deep mark on how out culture thinks of space, and space travel. "Childhood's End" was an amazingly imaginative idea turned into an amazingly readable book. Clarke was also a serious engineer, unusual for a science fiction writer. Geosync orbit is still called "Clarke orbit" in some circles, and he was one of the two popularizers of the marvelous but technically still impractical idea of a "space elevator". His book "The Fountains of Paradise" expounded upon that idea, but in my subjective opinion Charles Sheffield's "The Web between the Worlds" was a bigger, more interesting story.