From the New York Times article:

Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died early Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.

Rohan de Silva, an aide to Mr. Clarke, said the author died after suffering from breathing problems, The Associated Press reported.

From his detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945, more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight, to his co-creation, with the director Stanley Kubrick, of the classic science fiction film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Mr. Clarke was both prophet and promoter of the idea that humanity’s destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth.

Full story here.

Fred Saberhagen, a giant in the SF&F genres, has passed away. Here’s the obituary from Locus (via BoingBoing):

SF and fantasy writer Fred Saberhagen, born 1930, died June 29, 2007, at the age of 77. He began publishing in 1961 with short stories in Galaxy and If magazines, and published collection Berserker in 1967, first in a series about interstellar killing machines programmed to destroy all life. Saberhagen’s 60+ books also included the Empire of the East sequence, beginning with The Broken Lands (1968), the Dracula sequence, beginning with The Dracula Tape (1975), and two books co-written with Roger Zelazny, Coils (1981) and The Black Throne (1990). His last book was Ardneh’s Sword (Tor, 2006).
• The family will announce a date for a Memorial Celebration later this year. Donations would be appreciated to Doctors without Borders, Catholic Relief, SFWA Emergency Medical Fund, and John 23rd Catholic Church in Albuquerque.
» Wikipedia entry
» Official site: Berserker.com

Kurt Vonnegut, one of the top science fiction writers of the twentieth century, died yesterday of brain injuries suffered from a fall. He was 84.

The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic.

“He was sort of like nobody else,” said Gore Vidal, who noted that he, Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were among the last writers around who served in World War II.

“He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn’t go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull.”

Rest in peace.

Link to the Yahoo News article

Legendary author Sidney Sheldon has died from pneumonia, his publicist told AFP, after a prolific career that saw him pen Oscar-winning screenplays and sell over 300 million books. He was 89.

Sheldon would also become the only writer to have won an Oscar, a Tony and an Edgar award, and was eventually the recipient of several prestigious honors which included a writing prize at France’s Deauville film festival.

Link to the full Yahoo! News article.

Art Buchwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning US writer and author of 33 books, has died at the age of 81, his son says.

Known for his wry humour, he published his final book, Too Soon to Say Goodbye, in November of last year.

The book includes his plan for getting a big newspaper obituary: Don’t die on the same day as a Nobel Prize winner.

He suffered from kidney failure a year ago and went into hospice, where he was not expected to live long.

But he defied doctors’ predictions, surviving for nearly a year despite refusing dialysis treatment.

Link to the BBC News article

Yahoo News reports:

British children’s author Philippa Pearce, best known for “Tom’s Midnight Garden,” has died aged 86, her publisher said on Wednesday.

Pearce suffered a stroke and passed away on December 21, according to Puffin, part of the Penguin Group publishers.

“Her books are outstanding, classics which have delighted and inspired generations of children and for many people ‘Tom’s Midnight Garden’ is their absolutely favorite children’s book.”

Read the full Yahoo News article here.  The Guardian has a more in-depth article here.

Pioneer science fiction author Jack Williamson has died at the age of 98 at his home in Portales, N.M., of natural causes.

‘Jack Williamson was one of the great science-fiction writers,’ writer Ray Bradbury told The Los Angeles Times Monday. ‘He did a series of novels which affected me as a young writer with dreams. I met him at 19, and he became my best friend and teacher.’

Full article here.

William Styron, the American novelist who wrote Sophie’s Choice, has died of pneumonia after a long illness. He was 81.

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Styron, who endured a lifelong battle with depression that took him through alcoholism to the brink of suicide in the 1980s, wrote two of America’s most controversial and highly regarded novels of the second half of the twentieth century: The Confessions of Nat Turner, the story of a black slave revolt published at the height of the civil rights movement, and Sophie’s Choice, the story of a haunted Holocaust survivor.

Fellow authors praised him today. “This is terrible,” said Kurt Vonnegut, the beat generation novelist and an old friend of Styron’s. “He was dramatic, he was fun. He was strong and proud and he was awfully good with the language. I hated to see him end this way.”

Norman Mailer, the writer and essayist, told The New York Times: “No other American writer of my generation has had so omnipresent and exquisite a sense of the elegiac. That is no mean virtue in these years.”

Read the full article here