It’s the birthday of two hugely influential science fiction authors who were both fond of their middle initials: Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008, #nicelonglife), best known for the film and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Philip K. Dick (1928-1982, #diedtooyoung), best known for the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), adapted into the film Blade Runner (1982).

Clarke was born in the coastal town of Minehead, Somerset, England, the oldest of four children. When Clarke was 13, his father died—but that same year Clarke discovered the magazine Astounding Stories of Super-Science, and he was hooked. In 1934 he joined BIS, the British Interplanetary Society, which, while having a fairly lame acronym, promoted the human exploration of space. Clarke worked in civil service and then served in the Royal Air Force during WWII; he also began publishing science fiction short stories.

Post-war Clarke got a degree from King’s College in physics and math, did a stint as an editor at an actual physics journal, and then settled down to full-time writing and the business of being one of the “Big Three” of science fiction, along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Clarke would ultimately publish around a hundred books of science fiction, short story collections, and nonfiction; Childhood’s End (1953) is considered one of his greatest novels and tells how humankind’s encounter with an alien race results in an evolutionary leap. Clarke’s other best-known novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, started out as the short story “The Sentinel” (1951). The film, created by Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, is now considered to be one of the greatest and most influential movies of all time in any genre.

Clarke, who lived in Sri Lanka from 1956 on, was an expert scuba diver, reported on the Apollo II lunar landing in 1969 with Walter Cronkite, and was made a Knight Bachelor in 2000. So: full life. He married a woman briefly, divorced, and was partners with Sri Lankan Leslie Ekanayake for 30 years until that man’s death; Clarke continued living with Ekanayake’s brother’s family. When asked if he was gay, Clarke would reply, “No, merely mildly cheerful.” (Ha ha.)

NB: Clarke’s photo in Britannica shows a man who looks exactly like someone who would play golf with your grandfather.

Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago with a twin sister who did not survive more than a few weeks. His parents divorced when he was five and Dick was raised by his mother in Washington, D.C., and then California; Dick attended Berkeley High School with science fiction great Ursula K. Le Guin, though the two did not know each other. Dick studied briefly at UC Berkeley and began writing full-time after publishing his first story, “Roog,” in 1951.

He had a rocky life: his incredible literary productivity was fueled by literal handfuls of amphetamines, and he did other drugs as well: mescaline, LSD, sodium pentothal, PCP, and, yes, Vitamin C. (Not making this up.) Dick experienced hallucinations, visions, paranormal events, conspiracy theories, and five divorces, and not surprisingly wrote a great deal about the illusory nature of reality. He never attained in his lifetime the respect from the literary community that he craved, but since his death at the age of 53 he’s become one of the most influential science fiction authors in half a century. Dick’s Hugo Award-winning novel The Man in the High Castle (1962) is currently a series on Amazon in its final season. Other important works include Time out of Joint (1959), The Simulacra (1964), Do Androids Dream Etc., “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (adapted into the film Total Recall in 1990 and 2012), and A Scanner Darkly (1977; film 2006).

Have a bright and chilly Monday, please think twice before taking that huge dose of Vitamin C, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.