Arthur C. Clarke, one of the architects of modern science fiction, is dead at the age of 90, according to The New York Times and other reports.

The author of scores of books, Clarke had been ill for years, but was still widely seen and consulted as a sage both in science and science fiction, not only because of the stature of his fictional work but also because of the prescience of some of his early predictions, scoffed at the time, of how rocketships would be deployed to the moon and artificial satellites would revolutionize communication.

Clarke is also responsible for the observation that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (recently heard from the lips of Lex Luthor in Superman Returns), one of the so-called Clarke's Laws formulated in "Profiles of the Future" (1962).

His funeral will be "strictly secular" in accordance with his explicit instructions, according to the BBC. He was still writing when he died, working on a novel called The Last Theorem. Co-written with Frederik Pohl, The Last Theorem will be published later this year.

Clarke is perhaps best known for the uniquely collaborative co-creation with Stanley Kubrick of the book and film of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a true milestone in science fiction that legitimized the genre, while demonstrating its mass appeal and profitability. 2001 remains one of the seminal pieces of science fiction, but two works by Clarke had an even greater impact on me: Rendezvous With Rama (1972) and Childhood's End (1953). Rama was for me a highly effective example of pure science fiction, in which explorers for Earth try to sort out a mysterious, alien ship – a thirty-mile-long cylinder the turns out to contain an entire ecosystem. And Childhood's End is layered with all the bittersweet that would come with humanity's encounter with the galaxy beyond our atmosphere.

Clarke never stopped looking for where the extrapolation of technology, science, and "progress" would take us. He also had a way of re-seeing what's right in front of all of us. "Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe," he once told Kubrick, "and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering."