I was a very young journalist of 17 or so when Arthur C Clarke invited me to celebrate his birthday before he returned to Ceylon, where he had recently settled. The party was scheduled for November 5 in north London. Flattered to be asked, I gave up plans to get drunk and do exciting things with explosives and set off into the terra incognita of Tottenham where Arthur's brother Fred lived a modest and respectable life. A bottle in my pocket, I knocked at the door to be greeted by Fred. "It's round the corner," he said. "I'm just off there myself." He turned a thoughtful eye on the bottle. "I don't think you'll need that."

Promising, I thought. Ego (Arthur's nickname since youth) has laid every-thing on. I let Fred place the bottle on the hallstand and followed him for a few hundred yards through misty streets, determinedly reenacting the Blitz with Roman Candles and Catherine Wheels, until we arrived at a church and one of those featureless halls of the kind where the Scouts held their regular meetings. Sure enough, inside was a group of mostly stunned friends and acquaintances holding what appeared to be teacups, one of which was shoved into my hand as I was greeted by Arthur in that Somerset-American acent that was all his own. "Welcome," he said. "Got everything you want?"

"Um," I stammered. "Is there only tea ?"

"Of course not!" beamed the mighty intelligence, who had already published the whole concept of satellite communications on which our modern world is based. "There's orange juice, too." He indicated a serving hatch. "But you'd better hurry, Mike. The film show's starting soon." I saw that ladies of the kind who help out at church socials were organising chairs. I strolled up to Ted Carnell who, in the 1930s, had founded New Worlds with Arthur and John Wyndham when it was still a mimeographed fanzine.

Ted had the air of melancholy satisfaction I'd spotted on the faces of boys at school as they saw you turn up beside them on the headmaster's carpet. It read "Caught you, too, did he?"

Once we were seated, Fred downed the lights and the real ordeal began. Arthur's early home movies of the Great Barrier Reef. The projector breaking down was the high point. When it did, the relief was tangible.

In spite of it all, my liking for Arthur continued. Everyone knew he was gay. In the 1950s I'd go out drinking with his boyfriend. We met his proteges, western and eastern, and their families: people who had only the most generous praise for his kindness. Self-absorbed he might be, and a teetotaller, but an impeccable gent through and through.

He had absolutely unshakeable (and why not?) faith in his own visions. After all, SatCom was by no means his only accurate prediction. He retained a faith in the power of reason and science to cure our ills. At one point, when the Tamil Tigers emerged on the Sri Lankan political scene, I asked if he wasn't worried. He assured me that it was all a misunderstanding and that the Tigers, who subsequently became expert terrorists, were basically sound chaps who'd soon give up their wild ideas.

His view of our world, rather like PG Wodehouse's (whom he resembled physically) didn't include much room for the Four Horsemen galloping through his rhododendrons. His preferred future was extremely Wellsian, full of brainy people sitting about in togas swapping theorems.

And he was unflappably The Ego. After we watched the preview of 2001, Brian Aldiss, JG Ballard and I all admitted it had left us a bit cold in the visionary department. He took our poor response with his usual amused forgiveness reserved for lesser mortals and told us how many millions the movie had already made in America.

Around that time, I was able to introduce Arthur to William Burroughs. Everyone invited to my party expected the master of optimistic hard SF and the master of satirical inner space to get on about as well as Attila the Hun and Pope Leo. In fact, they spent the entire evening deep in animated conversation, pausing only to sip their OJ and complain about the rock 'n' roll music on the hifi. At the end of the evening both were warm in their gratitude for the introduction.

I scarcely read a word of his, apart from a few classic short stories, though I came to publish him occasionally in New Worlds, and he knew I was broadly unfamiliar with his work.

He understood this to be my loss. And, as he became a massive bestseller, partly because of 2001 but perhaps even more because of his TV series investigating the paranormal, he didn't change. He would still turn up in the pub to show us brochures for his latest ventures and mention casually all the famous people who admired him, including Rupert Murdoch and Richard Nixon, showing us 10x8 glossies of himself with the world's movers and shakers.

He still understood that we would rather watch his home movies than enjoy a drunken evening playing with rockets whose only technical secrets lay in the length of their blue touch-paper. But, I have to admit, I became much warier of accepting his "party" invitations.

Angus Wilson once returned from Sri Lanka exasperatedly describing Arthur as the most egocentric person he had ever met. Yet somehow, in spite of everything, Arthur remained a beloved friend of whom I retain only the fondest memories. He was a sweet-natured optimist in a world of grief. I'm really going to miss him.