Hiranya Peiris

I have probably read every single one of Arthur C. Clarke's books.

That's right.

My father went on an international trip and he brought back a small telescope for me.

And Sri Lanka had very, very dark skies.

Just from my backyard, we could see, for example, Saturn's rings.

It was the first time I saw Jupiter's moons.

And I remember projecting solar flares and sunspots onto a sheet of white paper and looking at that.

Yeah, it was a great time.

That's right.

We had this kind of film festival of science fiction films from his personal library.

So I've seen his personal copy of 2001, Alien, Aliens, Star Trek, a motion picture.

That's right.

There was a kind of floating book ship, which came to the harbour in Colombo.

And my father took me and bought me a copy of A Brief History of Time.

This is the first time that I actually encountered cosmology, which is my current field of study.

It was very mind expanding.

I read it cover to cover.

I probably didn't understand everything, but I remember the diagrams from it to this day.

Like right at the end of the book, it talks about two-dimensional creatures who are trying to visualize three dimensions, and it's almost impossible.

And I think the thing that really fascinated me was that the book took me to places that didn't exist in the real world, but I could imagine them in my mind.