My godson once asked his Dad "did dinosaurs come before or after steam engines?" That's kind of cute, but even now I suffer from similar misconceptions. For example it only occurred to me quite recently that when my parents were young there weren't any motorways and that even if you did have a car, getting around those parts of the country ill serviced by rail was a very time consuming affair.

I think the first science fiction book I read was the sublime Tales from the White Hart. The stories have varying degrees of correspondence with reality; some of them are plain spoofs, others plain spooky.

As literature Science Fiction always seems to be on shaky ground. But then literature is just the stuff that's still considered to be "good" 100 years after everybody who knew the author is dead. To get to be literature you have to get popular enough to survive that 100 year gap without any support. The greatest literature has always been, first and foremost, great entertainment.

I'm not sure I'm claiming that Arthur C. Clarke wrote great literature though; some of his characters were astonishingly thinly painted. Nonetheless all of his writings are crammed with ideas. Things you just wouldn't think of normally. As a result they were rightly popular, so who knows - maybe they will survive that 100 year trial.

When I first read Tales, I had no idea that the author had invented anything - certainly not anything as exotic as the telecommunications satellite. Like my godson I didn't have much context to put the technology into. Logically they had to come after rockets, but how long had rockets been around?

Clarke inspired in me an early liking for Science Fiction. In turn it inspired a liking for Science. While I will never be a scientist, I am fascinated by science, interested in reading about it, and I don't doubt that this will be with me for the rest of my life. Along the way so far, I have learnt when rockets were invented and that Clarke's essay was the first published description of a relay satellite - so accurate that they couldn't be patented thereafter! I read his popularisation of the space elevator in The Fountains of Paradise, of virtual reality in The City and the Stars, and countless other ideas engagingly explained. I read other authors and other equally brilliant ideas, but rarely found them as densely packed as in Clarke's writing.

Somewhere along the way he famously said that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." His books were, therefore, a very advanced technology indeed.