“I’d Like to Shoot the Guy Who Thought of Comsats” 1983 Letter from Arthur C. Clarke
Greetings from beyond the paywall! We have been posting new content monthly on our Patreon Archive Feed – scans of vintage Locus and audio clips from author interviews and more – and wanted to share a little of what that feed looks like by making some of our earlier posts public. Check out this post featuring a letter from Arthur C. Clarke.
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From the post:
Arthur C. Clarke: “We’re burning down this place tomorrow”
Arthur Clarke’s regular correspondence with Locus editor Charles N. Brown filled our archives with plenty of interesting material–in this one Clarke casually mentions two weeks of rioting in Sri Lanka, where he was living at the time, referring to the Black July anti-Tamil genocide efforts that sparked a civil war in 1983.
Also included in this letter is his rejection of a $1,000,000 book contract, his run-in with Stephen King, and progress being made on Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey sequels.
In a 1945 letter to Wireless World, Clarke contributed to the idea of geostationary communications satellites, so his line near the end of this letter to Locus is a joke at his own expense.
