Tributes continue to pour in, following the untimely death of science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke yesterday.
Clarke - who cleverly predicted communication satellites, supercomputers, space shuttles, word counts, noise cancelling devices, in fact just about everything more technically advanced than a stick - died in his beloved adopted home, the permanent civil-war zone Sri Lanka, after an enormous black slab fell on him from out of the depths of space.
“Without Arthur C Clarke, intelligent computers like me would never have ERROR 403,” said a visibly-distressed Dell Laptop.
“If only we had listened to Arthur C Clarke, and designed the space shuttle to be a pointy silver thing with fins and an all-British crew,” declared NASA, “We would probably be colonising the sun by now, instead of plugging our leaky deathtraps with gaffer tape and chewing gum.”
The US President hailed the writer as a visionary and a genius. “Thanks to Alfred Dubya Clarke’s discovery of alien military satellites in orbit around planet America, I can press a button and send nuclear cruise death to anyone I like,” he claimed. “Say, fellas, shouldn’t I send missiles to the people I don’t like? Gee - I need the bathroom.”
Mr Clarke’s last words before being crushed by the huge dark monolith were: “My God, it’s full of stars.”
Immediately afterwards, the awesome block of darkness burst into a cheesy psychedelic explosion of colour, and from it stepped Jimi Hendrix, Keith Moon, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Frank Sinatra, who – acting as spokesman for the group – announced that they were the intergalactic ambassadors for an alien race of super-intelligent creatures, who wished to reveal the fabulous secret of the universe to the only human being intelligent enough to use it to usher humanity into an eternal golden age of peace and understanding - the world’s leading scientific oracle, Mr Arthur C Clarke.
“Where is he?” asked Sinatra. “He must be round here some place – hey, boys, I just stepped in something…”
“Oh,” he added. “Er… I guess we’ll just be leaving, then.”
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