Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) was a British writer and futurist, one of the foremost science-fiction authors of the twentieth century. An engineer by training and a president of the British Interplanetary Society, he set out the principle of the geostationary communications satellite as early as 1945. Author of 2001: A Space Odyssey (with Stanley Kubrick) and of many novels and essays, he combined rigorous scientific anticipation with visionary sweep. Settled in Sri Lanka from 1956, it was there that he wrote the foreword to this book in 1980.