British writer Arthur Charles Clarke's long and successful career has made him perhaps the best-known science fiction writer in the world and arguably the most popular foreign-born science fiction writer in the United States. Clarke is best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the film script he wrote with noted director Stanley Kubrick.

Clarke's writings are in genre of "hard" science fiction—stories in which science is the backbone and where technical and scientific discovery are emphasized. He is considered one of the main forces for placing "real" science in science fiction; science fiction scholar Eric Rabkin has described Clarke as perhaps the most important science-oriented science fiction writer since H. G. Wells. His love and understanding of science coupled with his popularity made him a central figure in the development of post-World War II science fiction. Clarke's success did much to increase...