Come World War Two, he volunteered for the RAF and became an early expert in radar technology. In 1945, this work led to an article in Wireless World, in which Flight Lt Clarke showed the possibility of finding an orbit, some 23,000 miles from Earth, that would enable a satellite to remain fixed, and to transmit radio and television signals. Satellites do now circle in what’s referred to as the Clarke orbit.

After the war, a fellowship to King’s College, London led to a first in maths and physics. By the 1950s, he was publishing both fiction and non-fiction, and winning awards, too. He would be renowned for more than half a century, consulted by the scientific community and spending his days fielding correspondence from around the world. In his later years, he seemed a relic from a distant era, his tax-free Sri Lankan lifestyle supported by a staff of valets and houseboys. And then of course there were those tabloid accusations of paedophilia.

The future is fantastic

Interestingly, his vision of the future has barely aged. Indeed, some of his predictions still seem impossibly distant. For example, life in Sri Lanka inspired his 1979 novel, The Fountains of Paradise, featuring a ‘space elevator’, a planet-to-space transportation system that would do away with the need for rocket travel. Those human settlements on Mars or Venus are decidedly behind schedule (we humans were expected to have set foot on both by 1980), and we’re still looking for the key that should have fully unlocked the languages of whales and dolphins by 1970.

Being a desk-bound writer, and later confined to a wheelchair by post-polio syndrome, travel occupied him greatly. He dreamt about teleportation years before Star Trek – which he in fact inspired. He predicted the (doomed) 1980s Hotol project, which envisaged a space plane that could get from England to Australia in 48 minutes, and the altogether more successful Apollo moon landings. He also imagined machines that would convey huge loads on a cushion of air, and later bought his own hovercraft. “I thought the hovercraft would be really big. I even went out and bought one. That was a mistake. Hovercraft are wonderful over ice and excellent for military purposes, but they've not become universal in the way I thought they would,” he once told the Daily Telegraph.