Sci-fi author and futurist Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90 at his home in Sri Lanka. Author of more than 100 books, of which 2001: A Space Odyssey is the most famous, Clarke was also uncannily prescient about space exploration, having predicted the invention of geosynchronous communications satellites more than a decade before the fact.

Obits appear in The New York Times, the Times, and the Guardian, to name a few. The latter offers this candid portrait:

Tallish, bespectacled, rather big-eared and increasingly thin on top, he tended to be described by his friends as a beaming and highly articulate shambles of a chap, a man to whom convention meant very little. Yet his mind was like a razor.

And, for your contemplation, here are Clarke’s Three Laws of scientific discovery, excerpted from The New York Times:

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Experimental French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet has been dead for only a few weeks, but it looks as if the touching eulogy phase is already over. Salon has just posted an essay by Canadian author Stephen Marche (Shining at the Bottom of the Sea) on Robbe-Grillet’s influence on the modern novel, and it’s clear that Marche wasn’t too sorry to see him go.

I should have felt grief at the news of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s death last week. Instead I recognized in myself only confusing relief. He was a great champion for the innovative novel, so in a way I owe him: I’m a novelist, and while I would be loath to call myself avant-garde, my first book did have marginalia all the way through and my second was a literary anthology of an invented country. But the truth is, Robbe-Grillet was a disaster for innovative novels. After him, literary innovation, experiment with form or anything mildly unconventional came to be seen as pretentious and dry, the proper domain of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and nobody else.

[…]

English fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately old-fashioned activity, like archery or churning your own butter. He represented, through his status as cultural icon of the avant-garde, an entire generation that turned literary experimentation into self-involved blandness. In the ’50s, writers like Nabokov could produce Pale Fire or Lolita and feel themselves part of the mainstream of literary culture. After the ’60s, after Robbe-Grillet, anyone who experimented in fiction was being consciously marginal, or at least countercultural.

This Quillblogger, for one, tends to agree with Marche’s overall sentiments, but he seems a little misguided in pinning everything on poor Robbe-Grillet, especially when he makes groaner statements like this:

The relief I felt when I heard about Robbe-Grillet’s death was also partly hope. Now we can go on, I was thinking.

The comments section following the piece is worth a read, too, if only for a number of strong counter-arguments.

How-to books on the subject of suicide don’t seem to be welcome in New Zealand. The Australian author and assisted-suicide advocate Philip Nitschke was detained by authorities in a New Zealand airport earlier this week, and several copies of his book – The Peaceful Pill Handbook – were confiscated from him. According to TV New Zealand:

Nitschke arrived in Auckland ahead of a meeting on Monday with New Zealand’s Chief Censor Bill Hastings, when he planned to resubmit the Peaceful Pill Handbook for classification.

Nitschke, who also plans to conduct a series of workshops while in NZ, said he had been “taken aback” by the incident. “I have occasionally been detained … but this is by far the most detailed and thorough and heavy encounter I have ever had with any authority,” he said from his hotel in Auckland.

[…]

The handbook was originally submitted last year but was banned in June when New Zealand’s Office of Film and Literature Classification gave the handbook an “objectionable” rating. The two copies taken from him were amended versions he hoped would be approved for sale by authorities.

Coincidentally, the Times Online has just compiled a list of “ten extraordinary literary suicides,” and reading it, you kind of have to wonder if some of those people couldn’t have used a few tips from Nitschke’s book.

The death of Norman Mailer elicited tons of reaction over the weekend. Here are just some of the obituaries, personal reminiscences, and other items – not all of it positive, obviously.

• The New York Times
• Toronto Star
• Los Angeles Times
  
• The New Yorker
• James Wolcott
• Robert Fulford in the National Post
• The Guardian’s book blog
• Salon
• New York Post (”Literary Pug and Original Hipster Mailer, 84, Dies”)
• Christopher Hitchens in Slate

Some book-related links:

• Norma Gabler, the Texas textbook nitpicker who spent most of her life seeking out factual errors and “left-wing bias” in schoolbooks, is dead at 84. (Los Angeles Times)
• Kerouac’s On the Road – uncut and republished. (The Independent)
• Russia goes big on book advertising. (Moscow Times)
• Norman Mailer: Mr. Television. (Slate)
• The book every soldier in Iraq should read. (Harper’s)

Lloyd Alexander, the author of the cult favorite U.S. children’s series The Chronicles of Prydain, has passed away. According to the obituary that The Guardian posted today, Alexander actually died several weeks ago, on May 17, but the news appears to be getting out only now.

His first novels were for adults but, in the 1960s, despairing at the state of adult fiction, he switched to writing for children, an activity he described as “the most creative and liberating experience of my life.” It was certainly a hugely successful transition. He went on to write more than 35 books for children, attracting a passionately committed following and winning numerous awards. These included, in the U.S., the 1969 Newbery medal for The High King (1968), the penultimate title in his Chronicles of Prydain series, the 1971 National Book award for The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian (1970), the story of a poor fiddler who saves a princess from an unhappy marriage, and the 1982 American Book award for Westmark (1981), the first title in a series of the same name.

This Quillblogger happily recalls reading Alexander’s The Black Cauldron as a child, immediately after having seen the Disney movie adaptation; it was then that I discovered, probably for the first time, that the book is almost always better than the movie.

As you no doubt know by now, legendary author Kurt Vonnegut has died. The New York Times has a comprehensive obit, as does The L.A. Times, while Salon has a slightly quirkier homage – writer Andrew Leonard’s reminiscence of playing chess against Vonnegut as a 12-year-old back in the mid-1970s. (Salon has also posted an audio clip of Vonnegut reading from his best-known novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.) Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, meanwhile, has posted a satirical postcard that Vonnegut sent him “out of the blue a couple of years ago.” And for any and all background on Vonnegut, go to Vonnegutweb.

Matrix magazine’s newest issue features a 30-page tribute to poet and professor Robert Allen, who died last November from brain cancer. Allen was the editor of Matrix for a decade, working out of his office in Concordia University’s creative writing department.

Matrix’s tribute features prose, poetry, and photography from Golda Fried, David Solway, Anne Stone, Conundrum Press’s Andy Brown (who is also Matrix’s art director), current editor Jon Paul Fiorentino, and more. It also features previously unpublished poetry by Allen.

Click here to read Q&Q’s story on Allen’s passing. (OMNI subscription req’d.)

According to an article in the L.A. Times, Steve Rogers, the war-hero-turned-crime-fighter better known as Captain America, is dead as a door nail. It seems that his longtime publisher, Marvel Comics, has decided to let him die an agonizing death by gunfire in the latest issue of his eponymously titled series, and it’s not a hoax, an imaginary tale, or a special “What If?” issue.

The issue hit stands on Wednesday and shows the iconic hero gunned down on the steps of a federal courthouse; he was arriving there as a fugitive, a resistance leader to a federal Superhero Registration Act that has been a key Marvel story line for the last year.

That’s a pretty big bummer for comic fans, but as the Times points out, there are currently plans underway for a Captain America movie, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see how truly, deeply dead he is.