Arthur C. Clarke, 90, science fiction writer

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Arthur C. Clarke, 90, a visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died today in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, an aide said.

Mr. Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De Silva said.

Co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick's film

2001: A Space Odyssey

, Mr. Clarke was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer.

He was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits. He also joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite as commentator on the U.S. Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s.

Mr. Clarke's nonfiction books on space travel and his explorations of the Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science.

But it was his writing that shot him to his greatest fame and that gave him the greatest fulfillment.

"Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered," Mr. Clarke said recently. "I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer."

From 1950, he began a prolific output of both fiction and nonfiction, sometimes publishing three books in a year. Some of his best-known books are

Childhood's End

, 1953;

The Nine Billion Names of God

, 1967; and

Imperial Earth

, 1975

.

In 1989, two decades after the Apollo 11 moon landings, Mr. Clarke wrote: "

2001

was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out onto the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined."

Mr. Clarke won multiple Nebula and Hugo awards for science fiction, and in 1986 became Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He was awarded the CBE in 1989.

Born in Minehead, England, on Dec. 16, 1917, the son of a farmer, Arthur Charles Clarke became addicted to science fiction after buying copies of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories at Woolworth's. He devoured English writers H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon and wrote for his school magazine in his teens.

In the wartime Royal Air Force, he was put in charge of a new radar blind-landing system. It was an RAF memo he wrote in 1945 about the possibility of using satellites to revolutionize communications that led him to fame.

Mr. Clarke married in 1953, and was divorced in 1964. He had no children.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Clarke said he did not regret having never followed his novels into space, adding that he had arranged to have DNA from his hair sent into orbit.

"One day, some super civilization may encounter this relic from the vanished species and I may exist in another time," he said. "Move over, Stephen King."