RIP

Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the epic film "2001: A Space Odyssey" and raised the idea of communications satellites in the 1940s, died Wednesday at age 90, an associate confirmed.

Clarke died early Wednesday at a hospital in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since the 1950s, said Scott Chase, the secretary of the nonprofit Arthur C. Clarke Foundation.

"He had been taken to hospital in what we had hoped was one of the slings and arrows of being 90, but in this case it was his final visit," Chase said.

Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick shared an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay for "2001."

The film grew out of Clarke's 1951 short story, "The Sentinel," about an alien artifact left on the moon.

CNN