Mr Clarke played down his success in foretelling a globe-spanning network of communications satellites. “No one can predict the future,” he always maintained.

The author of almost 100 books, Mr Clarke was an ardent promoter of the idea that humanity’s destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth.

His father was a farmer; his mother a post office telegrapher.

The eldest of four children, he was educated as a scholarship student at a secondary school in the nearby town of Taunton.

He remembered a number of incidents in early childhood that awakened his scientific imagination, many to do with his works.

Clarke’s Laws

Among his legacies are Clarke’s Three Laws, provocative observations on science, science fiction and society that were published in his Profiles of the Future in 1962:

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

“Most technological achievements were preceded by people writing and imagining them. I’m sure we would not have had men on the Moon, if it had not been for H G Wells and Jules Verne.”