" Arthur C. Clarke is perhaps H.G. Wells’ truest heir not within the confines of science fiction but through the breadth of literature. Clarke, like Wells, was a realist and historian with more than a slash of mysticism, and it is that mysticism (The Time Machine for Wells; Childhood’s End for Clarke) which informed their work, differentiated it from most of their contemporaries and eventually made them central to the canon. Neither thought of himself as a mystic; both were committed rationalists. (Clarke’s 1992 eulogy on the death of Isaac Asimov mourned the loss of this great logical mind “At a time in human history when logic was never more needed.”) But the misty, lost far future of The Time Machine "

― Arthur C. Clarke , The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke