It was Sam Frankel who first alerted me to the death of Sir Arthur C Clarke.

I’d like to add two personal recollections.

A while ago I wrote a review of the film Independence Day bewailing the fact that cinema-goers were always treated to such popcorn when so much good SF remained unfilmed. Independence Day started, if you’ll recall, with a lot of alien spaceships hovering over the Earth’s cities. Clarke’s Childhood’s End starts in exactly the same way, but becomes a lot more interesting. In response to my review, Clarke contacted me, both by phone (his Zummerzet accent undimmed by half a century living in Sri Lanka) and by fax – a tabulation of all his books, when they were published, and when they were optioned by film companies. None had been filmed, with the exception of 2001, which began life as a screenplay, anyway.

A while later, we at Nature thought we’d like to celebrate the upcoming millennium with a short series of one-page SF vignettes. This became the Futures series (still going strong) but back in 1999 I wondered whom we should ask to kick off the series – a ‘name’ familiar to every Nature reader. Clarke was the obvious choice, and he responded to my email by return, with a characteristic piece of vintage apocalypse. We sat on this for a while, as we decided how and when to launch the new series.

In the meantime I learned of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in which real-life famous people would mingle with their portraits and anyone lucky enough to attend. I learned that Clarke would be there, and through my indefatigable assistant at the time managed to blag a ticket. Hence my one and only meeting with Clarke. He looked frail, and was being pushed along in a wheelchair. But his mind was still as agile as ever. No sooner had I introduced myself than he snapped back -“when are you going to publish my story, then?”. Here, I thought, was a man with whom I could do business.