Arthur C. Clarke has left the first world. We now have only the virtual self he left behind in the form of his writing. Arthur C. Clarke the virtual person will be as interesting an engaging as Clarke the living person was. It will even grow and adapt. It will not be the same, there is change, and there is loss. Time transforms everything. We have lost a core, an engine, a spirit of creation. But that spirit now spreads outward into the world. The funeral is not the end of a hero's life.
I read Clarke first in the form of the novelization of 2001. It did not impress me, and I set the work, and the writer, aside. The movie moved me however, and still does. 2010 the movie did not move me, until its final sequences,where a new star was born.
I feel that way about the internet, it is our new star, giving light into darkness, changing the shape of the world, and, perhaps, a place where new life itself may be born.
What is going to happen next?
I don't know, something wonderful.
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