Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Clarke belongs to the big three of science fiction, and joining him in this honor are Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. By their powers combined, these guys helped bring the genre out of the pulp era and into its Golden Age.
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The Overlords use a device called the Stardrive to zip about the galaxy at speeds up to the velocity of light. But the Overlords—or should we say Clarke?—weren't the first to use this theoretical faster-than light (FTL) engine. Poul Anderson seems to have been the first science fiction writer to use the term in his novel Genius. Guess it's hard to patent an engine that doesn't technically exist.
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Arthur C. Clarke is a bona fide fancy-schmancy science fiction author, and this means that he has inspired plenty of real-life scientists, who have in turn named some of their fancy-schmancy discoveries after him. Perhaps the most impressive, though, is the orbit around Earth named after Clarke. Yep, it's called Clarke Orbit.
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