Arthur C. Clarke

Fire, earth and air take three of his ten planets each, with a single one in water, and four of the ten were retrograde. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind. The record says Clarke described the geostationary communications satellite in 1945, twenty years before one existed, co-wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, and lived in Sri Lanka for the last fifty years of his life.

Mercury sits at an awkward angle to Saturn at six hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, and the reading is thought meeting doubt: self-criticism, difficulty being understood, and a mind that treats its own uncertainty as evidence of stupidity when it is usually evidence of care. Difficulty being understood is the clause with a date attached to it, because describing a working satellite twenty years before anybody put one up is being understood late by definition.

It is worth noticing which direction that cuts. The reading is about a person feeling misunderstood, and the record describes a technical paper that was correct and ignored, which is a different thing: one is an internal state and the other is a publication history. A chart cannot tell them apart, and this entry is not going to turn a satellite into a feeling. The Moon sits in easy contact with Mars at just over a fifth of a degree, feelings translating into action cleanly, with its sign certain at twenty one degrees of Capricorn, which manages feeling rather than expressing it.

Mars sits in mild friction with Neptune at a third of a degree, will without direction: tiredness with no cause, and action undermined by uncertainty, which a bibliography of that size contradicts rather than confirms. The Moon sits in quiet contact with Uranus at under half a degree, comfortable with change: people who are not frightened by upheaval and who find routine harder than most, and fifty years in one country is the record's own answer to that. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were the four retrograde planets. He died at Colombo on 19 March 2008, at ninety. Nothing came inside three tenths of a degree of a natal planet that day. The Moon was gibbous and ninety four per cent lit.