Arthur C. Clarke At 100
I never met Arthur C. Clarke, but in the last century, so long ago I was still a teenager and the last Apollo mission had returned from the moon less that a year before, I saw him give a talk at Bristol University in a packed lecture theatre in the Physics Department. I don't recall any useful details about his discussion of the moon landings and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but remember his affable charm and broad hint of a Somerset accent, and one anecdote - that he didn't realise that 2001's HAL was one letter ahead of IBM until someone pointed it out - because I'd read the same quip in his book about the making of the film.
Which was then and still is in my personal top five films, so I'm very pleased that my short story 'The Monoliths of Mars' will be included in an anthology which will be published in 2018 to commemorate and honour the centenary of Clarke's birth. More details can be found here. My contribution is a Quiet War story, and like all the other stories and articles in the anthology, it's exactly 2001 words long.