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The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke #1-5
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
Author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Childhood's End, The City and the Stars, and the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke is the most celebrated science fiction author alive. He is—with H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein—one of the writers who define science fiction in our time. Now Clarke has cooperated in the preparation of a massive, definitive edition of his collected shorter works. From early work like "Rescue Party" and "The Lion of Comarre," through classics like "The Star," "Earthlight," "The Nine Billion Names of God," and "The Sentinel" (kernel of the later novel, and movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey), all the way to later work like "A Meeting with Medusa" and "The Hammer of God," this immense volume encapsulates one of the great SF careers of all time.
966 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
About the author
Arthur C. Clarke
1,416 books10.6k followersStories, works of noted British writer, scientist, and underwater explorer Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, include
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968).
This most important and influential figure in 20th century fiction spent the first half of his life in England and served in World War II as a radar operator before migrating to Ceylon in 1956. He co-created his best known novel and movie with the assistance of Stanley Kubrick.
Clarke, a graduate of King's College, London, obtained first class honours in physics and mathematics. He served as past chairman of the interplanetary society and as a member of the academy of astronautics, the royal astronomical society, and many other organizations.
He authored more than fifty books and won his numerous awards: the Kalinga prize of 1961, the American association for the advancement Westinghouse prize, the Bradford Washburn award, and the John W. Campbell award for his novel Rendezvous with Rama. Clarke also won the nebula award of the fiction of America in 1972, 1974 and 1979, the Hugo award of the world fiction convention in 1974 and 1980. In 1986, he stood as grand master of the fiction of America. The queen knighted him as the commander of the British Empire in 1989.
This most important and influential figure in 20th century fiction spent the first half of his life in England and served in World War II as a radar operator before migrating to Ceylon in 1956. He co-created his best known novel and movie with the assistance of Stanley Kubrick.
Clarke, a graduate of King's College, London, obtained first class honours in physics and mathematics. He served as past chairman of the interplanetary society and as a member of the academy of astronautics, the royal astronomical society, and many other organizations.
He authored more than fifty books and won his numerous awards: the Kalinga prize of 1961, the American association for the advancement Westinghouse prize, the Bradford Washburn award, and the John W. Campbell award for his novel Rendezvous with Rama. Clarke also won the nebula award of the fiction of America in 1972, 1974 and 1979, the Hugo award of the world fiction convention in 1974 and 1980. In 1986, he stood as grand master of the fiction of America. The queen knighted him as the commander of the British Empire in 1989.
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January 8, 2016
There are over 100 stories in this impressive collection ranging from 1937 (aged 20) to 1999 (aged 82) but the golden age of Clarke (as a short story writer) starts in the second half of the 1940s and ends in the early 1960s.
The falling off is not a matter of ability (since he could pull off some excellent work when he wanted to later in life) but lack of will in this medium. By the mid-1960s, he had made his name, was living well, basking in adulation and could concentrate on enjoying life and consulting.
Of course, the classic novels are of equal importance and these did continue well into the 1990s so, to some extent, what we see is as much about the decline of the short story-based science fiction magazine as anything else. In the 1970s, he is writing more for Playboy than the fans.
Fortunately, the vast bulk of stories in this collection come from this long Golden Age and only 11 or so stories are from after 1970 and some of those are good.
The stories of the late-1940s, 1950s and early 1960s are, however, fascinating, partly because what comes across is both Clarke the Briton and Clarke the Humanist. And, of course, he remained busy on books and influencing popular culture - there was certainly no falling off of the intellect.
There is material here for a major study of the relationship between scientific aspiration, a declining Britain and a rising America but this is not the place - suffice it to say that Clarke's slightly outsider status (as genre writer, perhaps as gay, as creative) provides major insights here.
There are themes, of course. There are surprisingly few references to aliens or alien perspectives (though there are some). The corpus concentrates above all on human aspirations and human reactions, human follies and human courage.
Of course, he cannot write well about women though he adapts well to changing mores in his last years (Clarke is nothing if not open-minded) but he can write brilliantly about the heroic engineer in ways that would do credit to the Soviet tradition.
Indeed, it is clear that he refuses to demonise Sovietism throughout while remaining someone who clearly loves America. His stance seems to be one of continuous humanistic scientific optimism and that there is no reason why capitalists and communists cannot share equally in what is to come.
One repeated theme is the scientist-engineer or the practical pilot or worker, faced with mortality (there are as likely as not to be no last minute rescues) and choosing existentially just to finish the job to provide that extra bit of knowledge for the species in its flight to the stars.
We should also note that Clarke is always a hard science writer. The fact that the predictions may not always come true (he often gets the idea right but not the timing) is irrelevant - most of what he proposes is not (at the time of writing) impossible or truly fantastic.
His attitude to the paranormal was famously open-minded: that possibility in science fiction can permit strange things if it can be rationally drawn from what is known - the classic 'magic as undiscovered science' meme - but there is very little of that in these stories. All is science.
It is no accident that the penultimate collaboration is with Stephen Baxter, another fine British hard science fiction writer, in a superb piece of alternate history that plays brilliantly with Clarke's 'pseudo-weaknesses' and shows them to be imaginative strengths.
In The Wire Continuum Baxter (since one suspects he is driving the narrative here) pays tribute to Clarke by taking the latter's first ever story about teleportation and creating from it a structured alternate history as if Clarke's mentality had been true to actual history.
In this case, Baxter has used something that is impossible or fantastic (teleportation) but the way it is 'played' acts as beautiful counterpoint to the hard science, shining a light on Clarke's themes in a way that can only be understood if you had read the preceding 948 pages.
Perhaps (roughly) a quarter of the stories are to be regarded as humorous in a rather 'jolly jape' English academic sort of way, exemplified by those collected as Tales from the White Hart' centred around its engineer-scientist Harry Purvis whose tall tales all seem to be based on hard science.
These Tales are early stuff but very well crafted with a distinctive style, including at one point a classic of the 'perfect murder' genre. They reflect the clubbability and conviviality of the early science fiction community in London. Later humour may often be more heavy-handed.
There are too many stories here to comment on any in particular. There are very few duds. Some are undoubted literary masterpieces. Most will stand the test of time and give insights not just into the man but his time. Some became the basis of books and, famously, films.
The abiding images he leaves are two-fold - the word painting of other worlds (mostly in our own solar system) so that you feel, rightly or wrongly, that 'you have been there' and of a sense of the heroic, of men for whom knowledge and discovery are greater than life itself.
Personally, I am less simpatico with this progressive heroism in reality but only a philistine would not see its beauty aesthetically much as even an atheist can see the beauty in a Baroque martyrdom or hear the beauty in a seventeenth century religious cantata.
The age of heroes is probably now dead even though the space travel exponents (who I tend to support for practical reasons related to the asteroid problem rather than out of ideological sentiment) would like it to be otherwise.
The Baxter story links the Clarkian universe - the travel to the stars in a world changed forever by hive minds and quantum technology - back to its roots: an older heroism of gallant spitfire pilots defending a soil that no longer has much meaning but where past heroism stands on the record.
Clarke, despite his adoption by American progressives and technologists, starts off as a quintessentially British writer and transforms himself - you can trace it in the trajectory of the stories - stage by stage into a cosmic universalist. Tracing that trajectory is fascinating in itself.
In Hegelian terms, British wartime heroism and scientific prowess is the thesis, the universal destiny of mankind is the antithesis and the synthesis is a heroic humanistic progressivism. I remind the reader that the motto of the Royal Air force was and is Per Ardua Ad Astra.
As a British reader of a certain age reading Clarke from 1937 to the end of the last century is a bitter-sweet experience. On the one hand, it reminds us of the death of an England which scarcely exists now and, on the other, offers an amazing world of possibilities on its funeral pyre.
Finally, you realise in reading these stories that Clarke was unusual in another respect - high intelligence capable of understanding and expanding imaginatively on extremely complex contemporary science and a humane understanding of human (or rather male) motivation.
Yes, his women are generally ciphers. His is a male universe and one suspects he knew that this was not the whole story from the hints in the later tales. Perhaps he knew that he could only think like a male but in every respect he was decent - anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-militarist.
The bottom line is that the collection shows that Arthur C. Clarke deserves his place as one of the great writers in the science fiction genre. The book is highly recommended albeit requiring considerable patience to get through its 966 relatively small print pages.
September 8, 2008
5.0 stars. I have not read all of the stories in the massive collection, but I have read:
The Star: (5.o stars)
9 Billions Names for God (5.0 stars)
The Sentinel (5.0 stars).
The Star: (5.o stars)
9 Billions Names for God (5.0 stars)
The Sentinel (5.0 stars).
May 12, 2019
A collection of stories of Arthur C. Clarke, in chronological order from the early 40’s until his death in 2000.
As part of the Big Three in sciencefiction, Arthur C. Clarke has left us an extensive oeuvre. In this book all his short stories are assembled and it gives a good overview of the themes that he used. The exploration and conquest of the solar system and the stars is mixed with evolution of the humans and its place amongst the stars. All in all, for someone with a taste for sciencefiction, a must read.
According to the author:
"Science fiction is something that could happen - but usually you wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn't happen - though often you only wish that it could"
As part of the Big Three in sciencefiction, Arthur C. Clarke has left us an extensive oeuvre. In this book all his short stories are assembled and it gives a good overview of the themes that he used. The exploration and conquest of the solar system and the stars is mixed with evolution of the humans and its place amongst the stars. All in all, for someone with a taste for sciencefiction, a must read.
According to the author:
"Science fiction is something that could happen - but usually you wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn't happen - though often you only wish that it could"
October 27, 2021
Volume davvero massiccio, contenente tutti i racconti di Clarke spesso anticipati da una breve introduzione a opera dello stesso autore.
Come spesso accade, ci sono perle, ci sono cose imbarazzanti e tanti racconti senza infamia né lode.
Da segnalare il ciclo del Cervo Bianco, fantomatico pub londinese luogo di ritrovo di scienziati e giornalisti, dove solitamente il buon Harry Purvis si esibisce in racconti assurdi e incredibili a base di missioni top secret, segreti scoperti per caso e storie di vita vissuta.
Non mi aspettavo comunque di trovare un autore così divertente e ironico, benché allo stesso tempo estremamente scientifico e, soprattutto, visionario.
Come spesso accade, ci sono perle, ci sono cose imbarazzanti e tanti racconti senza infamia né lode.
Da segnalare il ciclo del Cervo Bianco, fantomatico pub londinese luogo di ritrovo di scienziati e giornalisti, dove solitamente il buon Harry Purvis si esibisce in racconti assurdi e incredibili a base di missioni top secret, segreti scoperti per caso e storie di vita vissuta.
Non mi aspettavo comunque di trovare un autore così divertente e ironico, benché allo stesso tempo estremamente scientifico e, soprattutto, visionario.
Shelved as 'on-hold'
June 16, 2015LATEST STORY REVIEW UPDATE: Story # 15: "Transience".
15. Transience (1949) [5 pages] 4.5 Stars: A story that expresses that mankind is here for only a short span of time, temporarily! Man has come, and shall be gone, in the grand scheme of things. ~ June 16, 2015 ~
14. History Lesson (1949) [7 pages] 5 Stars: Five Thousand years after the Third Planet has lost its civilization due to an Ice Age, the now-progressed Venusians venture forth towards it, to learn the past of an advanced species. The story teaches us a lesson, on the limits of learning the truth from historical research! ~ June 15, 2015 ~
13. Nightfall (1947) [3 pages] 4 Stars: The last nuclear weapon explodes, mankind is annihilated, as 'the river takes its own new course'. ~ June 14, 2015 ~
12. Inheritance (1947) [7 pages] 3 Stars: When a dream that drives one man's destiny forward. (CNC-RR) ~ June 14, 2015 ~
11. The Fires Within (1947) [7 pages] 4 Stars: When sonar research is being developed as a means of geological surveying, what the researchers find is beyond our capabilities to understand as to how ... ...! ~ Nov 8, 2014 ~
10. Castaway (1947) [6 pages] 5 Stars: When an unusual ionised life-form from the photosphere of the sun drops into the Atlantic ocean on a planet now called as the Earth, it is aeons later when it is faced with a radiation so 'powerful' indeed which gives rise to its threat of annihilation. ~ Oct 4, 2014 ~
9. Technical Error (1946) [13 pages] 4.5 Stars: When the world's first superconductive generator goes awry, a man is found subjected to the 'yet-unknown' rules of lateral inversion. Superb use of the idea of stereo-isomerism in a short-story that I could have never thought of so easily. ~ July 17, 2014 ~
8. Rescue Party (1946) [21 pages] 4.5 Stars: Alveron and his kind, the lords of the Universe, approach Earth to rescue any survivors due to their sun about to become Nova in a few hours. The Paladorian, possessing no self-identity but still connected with an unknown link to its fellow-kinds who are scattered around the galaxy, is my personal favourite :) This story involves some good mystery. ~ May 21, 2014 ~
7. Loophole (1946) [6 pages] 5 Stars: In an epistolary form, Clarke describes Martians trying to suppress Mankind from achieving a technology and how that leads to an eventually much powerful expression of man's potential to harness the laws of physics, displaying a certainty of loopholes in any system. The causes of the end of WW2 are reflected at the beginning of this story. ~ Mar 27, 2014 ~
6. Whacky (1942) [2 pages] 4 Stars: This one took four rounds of reading in order for me to comprehend as much. Highly speculative, the story (I can say) can be interpreted in various ways while including elements of Dreams, a 'Creator' and Pre-Birth, Astral Travel, or even Death. Horror takes its own form when the reader's thinking mind is much into the ideas behind the writing of this story. ~ Mar 26, 2014~
5. The Awakening (1942) [3 pages] 5 Stars: For a man waiting to be awakened from a tomb after hundred years for a treatment to cure his heart, the repercussions of what he sees upon his awakening, remains a terrorizing idea by itself!. The story is food for further science fictional thinking. ~ Mar 26, 2014 ~
4. Reverie (1939) [2 pages] 3 Stars: A short essay on "All the ideas in Science Fiction have been used up!". ~ Mar 26, 2014 ~
3. Retreat from Earth (1938) [9 pages] 5 Stars: Earth-like Martians plan on occupying the mankind-inhabited 'Third' planet, which has already been occupied by extra-terrestrial creatures from millions of years ago that live amongst us in real life even to this day. Terrific detailing of the 'alien' form and its social structure. ~ Mar 25, 2014 ~
2. How We Went to Mars (1938) [8 pages] 3.5 Stars: A group of people build a rocket-based spaceship in the relative future, towards the late 1940's, to be amongst the first ones to blast off into further space. The group ends up travelling to Mars, and their adventures are described in the story. Contains more humour than the preceding story. ~ Mar 11, 2014 ~
1. Travel By Wire (1937) [4 pages] 4.0 Stars: In which they engage in the creation of a wired transporter (teleporter), and explain in short the various difficulties and mishaps that follow its invention and wide use. Contains a bit of humour. ~ Mar 10, 2014 ~
**CNC = Could Not Comprehend at all.
**CNC-RR = Could Not Comprehend well. A Re-Reading is required.
15. Transience (1949) [5 pages] 4.5 Stars: A story that expresses that mankind is here for only a short span of time, temporarily! Man has come, and shall be gone, in the grand scheme of things. ~ June 16, 2015 ~
14. History Lesson (1949) [7 pages] 5 Stars: Five Thousand years after the Third Planet has lost its civilization due to an Ice Age, the now-progressed Venusians venture forth towards it, to learn the past of an advanced species. The story teaches us a lesson, on the limits of learning the truth from historical research! ~ June 15, 2015 ~
13. Nightfall (1947) [3 pages] 4 Stars: The last nuclear weapon explodes, mankind is annihilated, as 'the river takes its own new course'. ~ June 14, 2015 ~
12. Inheritance (1947) [7 pages] 3 Stars: When a dream that drives one man's destiny forward. (CNC-RR) ~ June 14, 2015 ~
11. The Fires Within (1947) [7 pages] 4 Stars: When sonar research is being developed as a means of geological surveying, what the researchers find is beyond our capabilities to understand as to how ... ...! ~ Nov 8, 2014 ~
10. Castaway (1947) [6 pages] 5 Stars: When an unusual ionised life-form from the photosphere of the sun drops into the Atlantic ocean on a planet now called as the Earth, it is aeons later when it is faced with a radiation so 'powerful' indeed which gives rise to its threat of annihilation. ~ Oct 4, 2014 ~
9. Technical Error (1946) [13 pages] 4.5 Stars: When the world's first superconductive generator goes awry, a man is found subjected to the 'yet-unknown' rules of lateral inversion. Superb use of the idea of stereo-isomerism in a short-story that I could have never thought of so easily. ~ July 17, 2014 ~
8. Rescue Party (1946) [21 pages] 4.5 Stars: Alveron and his kind, the lords of the Universe, approach Earth to rescue any survivors due to their sun about to become Nova in a few hours. The Paladorian, possessing no self-identity but still connected with an unknown link to its fellow-kinds who are scattered around the galaxy, is my personal favourite :) This story involves some good mystery. ~ May 21, 2014 ~
7. Loophole (1946) [6 pages] 5 Stars: In an epistolary form, Clarke describes Martians trying to suppress Mankind from achieving a technology and how that leads to an eventually much powerful expression of man's potential to harness the laws of physics, displaying a certainty of loopholes in any system. The causes of the end of WW2 are reflected at the beginning of this story. ~ Mar 27, 2014 ~
6. Whacky (1942) [2 pages] 4 Stars: This one took four rounds of reading in order for me to comprehend as much. Highly speculative, the story (I can say) can be interpreted in various ways while including elements of Dreams, a 'Creator' and Pre-Birth, Astral Travel, or even Death. Horror takes its own form when the reader's thinking mind is much into the ideas behind the writing of this story. ~ Mar 26, 2014~
5. The Awakening (1942) [3 pages] 5 Stars: For a man waiting to be awakened from a tomb after hundred years for a treatment to cure his heart, the repercussions of what he sees upon his awakening, remains a terrorizing idea by itself!. The story is food for further science fictional thinking. ~ Mar 26, 2014 ~
4. Reverie (1939) [2 pages] 3 Stars: A short essay on "All the ideas in Science Fiction have been used up!". ~ Mar 26, 2014 ~
3. Retreat from Earth (1938) [9 pages] 5 Stars: Earth-like Martians plan on occupying the mankind-inhabited 'Third' planet, which has already been occupied by extra-terrestrial creatures from millions of years ago that live amongst us in real life even to this day. Terrific detailing of the 'alien' form and its social structure. ~ Mar 25, 2014 ~
2. How We Went to Mars (1938) [8 pages] 3.5 Stars: A group of people build a rocket-based spaceship in the relative future, towards the late 1940's, to be amongst the first ones to blast off into further space. The group ends up travelling to Mars, and their adventures are described in the story. Contains more humour than the preceding story. ~ Mar 11, 2014 ~
1. Travel By Wire (1937) [4 pages] 4.0 Stars: In which they engage in the creation of a wired transporter (teleporter), and explain in short the various difficulties and mishaps that follow its invention and wide use. Contains a bit of humour. ~ Mar 10, 2014 ~
**CNC = Could Not Comprehend at all.
**CNC-RR = Could Not Comprehend well. A Re-Reading is required.
August 25, 2017
This is a near chronological collection of the stories of the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008). Clarke was considered one of the "big three" of science fiction writers during the golden age of the genre, the other two were Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. He's credited with inspiring the idea of using satellites to relay information and, of course, wrote the screenplay of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I tried to read this book last summer and just wasn't in the right mental place for it. Part of the problem is that before WWII Clarke was in his teens and writing fan fiction for small British sci-fi venues. They're definitely not his best work, but going through them this time I was better able to pay attention to his growth as a writer.
So in these stories you'll often find nuggets of later works. There is an early version of Childhood's End, the novel in which earth gives control to an alien race that remains hidden for years, only their voices available, because they know their appearance is similar to depictions of Satan. There is also a story that he recycled into the extended version of 2001. These are interesting looks at his development and process.
It's also easy to spot some of the odd tricks he would use. Many of the early stories, and a few later ones, turn to O. Henry type surprise endings. He was especially fond of a kind of context switch where "I'm telling the story so you think it's about A when it's actually about B." One example is a story about a discussion on the odd behaviors of aliens on a newly discovered planet. In the last few lines it's clear these are aliens talking about us.
Clarke was fond of humorous stories, and this book includes his Tales of the White Hart stories in which a group of friends gathers in a pub called The White Hart and tell long, convoluted stories on one theme or another. Or there's the story of alien beings who try to send a psychic message to humanity warning that the sun will soon go nova but that the aliens can save us. It's unfortunate that the only person they can connect with psychically is a depressed drunk who forgets the message the next morning.
Many of the stories are also very much of their time. Until we were able to send probes to various planets, or were able to take more sensitive telescopic measurements of the chemical makeup of planetary atmosphere, we could only guess what was in our own solar system. Thus there was the regular thought that Venus was a place of constant rain with possible alien life forms ... not the superheated rock surrounded by poison gases we know it to be now. There was also the assumption that Mars either supported or had supported in the past more aliens. It took our own science to inform us how alone we really are in the light of our sun.
But then there's a really brilliant story about Jupiter being explored in a craft piloted by a man who had been injured and is now half mechanical and half human. He lowers his craft into the stormy clouds of Jupiter to find creatures made of bubbles and as large as three football fields, these chased by manta-like creatures that glide through the storms. As he leaves the planet the man runs through the thought that he is half machine and half human, a halfway point between humanity and what humanity will become.
Not overtly political Clarke is still a humanist and generally an optimist. There are only a few dystopian futures in these stories. Most are sometimes flawed humans continuing their push to explore space. Even Russians are treated as decent people, this from a cold war era author.
This is the kind of book you can take on in small bites. I'm all for using short story volumes to fill time on bus rides and coffee breaks. This, however, is really a book that should be plowed through to get a sense of the life work of an influential author. It's especially interesting to read some of Clarke's own notes on what inspired the stories or why they were solicited from publishers in his later years. Science fiction writers and fans will see the seed ideas for later tropes used throughout the genre, as well as his eventual understanding that character drives good fiction and the rest is just decoration. Important and thrilling decoration but decoration all the same. They are also informed by his education in mathematics and physics, while they're fed by his own love of the science fiction genre.
I tried to read this book last summer and just wasn't in the right mental place for it. Part of the problem is that before WWII Clarke was in his teens and writing fan fiction for small British sci-fi venues. They're definitely not his best work, but going through them this time I was better able to pay attention to his growth as a writer.
So in these stories you'll often find nuggets of later works. There is an early version of Childhood's End, the novel in which earth gives control to an alien race that remains hidden for years, only their voices available, because they know their appearance is similar to depictions of Satan. There is also a story that he recycled into the extended version of 2001. These are interesting looks at his development and process.
It's also easy to spot some of the odd tricks he would use. Many of the early stories, and a few later ones, turn to O. Henry type surprise endings. He was especially fond of a kind of context switch where "I'm telling the story so you think it's about A when it's actually about B." One example is a story about a discussion on the odd behaviors of aliens on a newly discovered planet. In the last few lines it's clear these are aliens talking about us.
Clarke was fond of humorous stories, and this book includes his Tales of the White Hart stories in which a group of friends gathers in a pub called The White Hart and tell long, convoluted stories on one theme or another. Or there's the story of alien beings who try to send a psychic message to humanity warning that the sun will soon go nova but that the aliens can save us. It's unfortunate that the only person they can connect with psychically is a depressed drunk who forgets the message the next morning.
Many of the stories are also very much of their time. Until we were able to send probes to various planets, or were able to take more sensitive telescopic measurements of the chemical makeup of planetary atmosphere, we could only guess what was in our own solar system. Thus there was the regular thought that Venus was a place of constant rain with possible alien life forms ... not the superheated rock surrounded by poison gases we know it to be now. There was also the assumption that Mars either supported or had supported in the past more aliens. It took our own science to inform us how alone we really are in the light of our sun.
But then there's a really brilliant story about Jupiter being explored in a craft piloted by a man who had been injured and is now half mechanical and half human. He lowers his craft into the stormy clouds of Jupiter to find creatures made of bubbles and as large as three football fields, these chased by manta-like creatures that glide through the storms. As he leaves the planet the man runs through the thought that he is half machine and half human, a halfway point between humanity and what humanity will become.
Not overtly political Clarke is still a humanist and generally an optimist. There are only a few dystopian futures in these stories. Most are sometimes flawed humans continuing their push to explore space. Even Russians are treated as decent people, this from a cold war era author.
This is the kind of book you can take on in small bites. I'm all for using short story volumes to fill time on bus rides and coffee breaks. This, however, is really a book that should be plowed through to get a sense of the life work of an influential author. It's especially interesting to read some of Clarke's own notes on what inspired the stories or why they were solicited from publishers in his later years. Science fiction writers and fans will see the seed ideas for later tropes used throughout the genre, as well as his eventual understanding that character drives good fiction and the rest is just decoration. Important and thrilling decoration but decoration all the same. They are also informed by his education in mathematics and physics, while they're fed by his own love of the science fiction genre.
February 12, 2012
Included stories:
Travel by Wire!
How We Went to Mars
Retreat From Earth
Reverie
The Awakening
Whacky
Loophole
Rescue Party
Technical Error
Castaway
The Fires Within
Inheritance
Nightfall
History Lesson
Transience
The Wall of Darkness
The Lion of Comarre
The Forgotten Enemy
Hide-and-Seek
Breaking Strain
Nemesis
Guardian Angel
Time's Arrow
A Walk in the Dark
Silence Please
Trouble With the Natives
The Road to the Sea
The Sentinel
Holiday on the Moon
Earthlight
Second Dawn
Superiority
'If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth...'
All the Time in the World
The Nine Billion Names of God
The Possessed
The Parasite
Jupiter Five
Encounter In the Dawn
The Other Tiger
Publicity Campaign
Armaments Race
The Deep Range
No Morning After
Big Game Hunt
Patent Pending
Refugee
The Star
What Goes Up
Venture to the Moon
The Pacifist
The Reluctant Orchid
Moving Spirit
The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch
The Ultimate Melody
The Next Tenants
Cold War
Sleeping Beauty
Security Check
The Man Who Ploughed the Sea
Critical Mass
The Other Side of the Sky
Let There Be Light
Out of the Sun
Cosmic Casanova
The Songs of Distant Earth
A Slight Case of Sunstroke
Who's There?
Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting...
I Remember Babylon
Trouble With Time
Into the Comet
Summertime on Icarus
Saturn Rising
Death and the Senator
Before Eden
Hate
Love that Universe
Dog Star
Maelstrom II
An Ape About the House
The Shining Ones
The Secret
Dial F For Frankenstein
The Wind from the Sun
The Food of the Gods
The Last Command
Light of Darkness
The Longest Science-fiction Story Ever Told
Playback
The Cruel Sky
Herbert George Morley Roberts Wells, Esq.
Crusade
Neutron Tide
Reunions
Transit of Earth
A Meeting With Medusa
Quarantine
'siseneG'
The Steam-powered Word Processor
On Golden Seas
The Hammer of God
The Wire Continuum
Improving the Neighbourhood
Travel by Wire!
How We Went to Mars
Retreat From Earth
Reverie
The Awakening
Whacky
Loophole
Rescue Party
Technical Error
Castaway
The Fires Within
Inheritance
Nightfall
History Lesson
Transience
The Wall of Darkness
The Lion of Comarre
The Forgotten Enemy
Hide-and-Seek
Breaking Strain
Nemesis
Guardian Angel
Time's Arrow
A Walk in the Dark
Silence Please
Trouble With the Natives
The Road to the Sea
The Sentinel
Holiday on the Moon
Earthlight
Second Dawn
Superiority
'If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth...'
All the Time in the World
The Nine Billion Names of God
The Possessed
The Parasite
Jupiter Five
Encounter In the Dawn
The Other Tiger
Publicity Campaign
Armaments Race
The Deep Range
No Morning After
Big Game Hunt
Patent Pending
Refugee
The Star
What Goes Up
Venture to the Moon
The Pacifist
The Reluctant Orchid
Moving Spirit
The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch
The Ultimate Melody
The Next Tenants
Cold War
Sleeping Beauty
Security Check
The Man Who Ploughed the Sea
Critical Mass
The Other Side of the Sky
Let There Be Light
Out of the Sun
Cosmic Casanova
The Songs of Distant Earth
A Slight Case of Sunstroke
Who's There?
Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting...
I Remember Babylon
Trouble With Time
Into the Comet
Summertime on Icarus
Saturn Rising
Death and the Senator
Before Eden
Hate
Love that Universe
Dog Star
Maelstrom II
An Ape About the House
The Shining Ones
The Secret
Dial F For Frankenstein
The Wind from the Sun
The Food of the Gods
The Last Command
Light of Darkness
The Longest Science-fiction Story Ever Told
Playback
The Cruel Sky
Herbert George Morley Roberts Wells, Esq.
Crusade
Neutron Tide
Reunions
Transit of Earth
A Meeting With Medusa
Quarantine
'siseneG'
The Steam-powered Word Processor
On Golden Seas
The Hammer of God
The Wire Continuum
Improving the Neighbourhood
March 30, 2023
ENGLISH: This collection contains the 104 stories written by Arthur C. Clarke, most of which have appeared in other smaller collections. As I have reviewed those collections before, I'll review here the 19 stories that are not contained in them, although the number of stars given applies to the whole collection. These are the stories I liked best:
The lion of Comarre: A possible antecedent of the film The Matrix, with benevolent machines.
Holiday on the moon: As usual in Clarke's stories, his predictions for space exploration are all wrong, but the story is appealing.
Earthlight and The deep range: Two interesting stories that Clarke later expanded to full novels with the same titles.
ESPAÑOL: Esta colección contiene los 104 cuentos escritos por Arthur C. Clarke. Casi todos ellos han aparecido en otras colecciones más reducidas, que yo he revisado antes. Aquí sólo revisaré los 19 cuentos que no aparecen en ellas, aunque el número de estrellas que he dado se aplica a la colección completa. Estos son los cuentos que más me han gustado:
El león de Comarre: Posible antecedente de la película The Matrix, pero donde las máquinas son benévolas.
Vacaciones en la luna: Como suele ocurrir en los cuentos de Clarke, sus predicciones sobre la exploración espacial están todas mal, pero la historia es interesante.
Luz de la Tierra y En las profundidades: Dos cuentos interesantes que Clarke expandió después con los mismos títulos a novelas largas.
The lion of Comarre: A possible antecedent of the film The Matrix, with benevolent machines.
Holiday on the moon: As usual in Clarke's stories, his predictions for space exploration are all wrong, but the story is appealing.
Earthlight and The deep range: Two interesting stories that Clarke later expanded to full novels with the same titles.
ESPAÑOL: Esta colección contiene los 104 cuentos escritos por Arthur C. Clarke. Casi todos ellos han aparecido en otras colecciones más reducidas, que yo he revisado antes. Aquí sólo revisaré los 19 cuentos que no aparecen en ellas, aunque el número de estrellas que he dado se aplica a la colección completa. Estos son los cuentos que más me han gustado:
El león de Comarre: Posible antecedente de la película The Matrix, pero donde las máquinas son benévolas.
Vacaciones en la luna: Como suele ocurrir en los cuentos de Clarke, sus predicciones sobre la exploración espacial están todas mal, pero la historia es interesante.
Luz de la Tierra y En las profundidades: Dos cuentos interesantes que Clarke expandió después con los mismos títulos a novelas largas.
January 1, 2020
It's weird that my first book of 2020 should be a 966-page volume but for the record I was reading it for most of December. I love Clarke's short stories - I grew up on them - and it was a pleasure to read so many of them all at once. It's interesting that a lot of the truly great ones - "The Sentinel", "The Star", "The Nine Billion Names of God", "Venture to the Moon" - are all very early on. He becomes less prodigiously prolific with time so the last ten or so stories cover 1970-2000, and none of the late ones really stand out (save perhaps "Dial F for Frankenstein", which seems derivative only because Clarke did it first).
Random observations: of course, Clarke's vision of the future is vastly dated (like Asimov, he seemed to think computers would get bigger and bigger, not smaller) and he really thought Mars was just around the corner after the Moon. Famously, he understood technological change but not social change - his stories set in far distant futures (or even jolly old 2020) have fifties nuclear families and social mores. He is spectacularly, catastrophically sexist. Across nearly a thousand pages I spotted exactly one story with a main character who is an adult woman whose role in the story is not to be a foil to a man. Mostly, they're sexist by omission; it's the "White Hart" stories, the shaggy-dog-story-style stories from the mid-fifities, that I found shockingly, appallingly misogynist. If you want to skip one in this collection, make it "The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch".
That said - if you can put that aside - it's hard not to feel a lot of affection for his warm and loving stories set in an optimistic Golden Age. And while I am not qualified to comment on Clarke as a queer writer of SF in his historical context, he *was* a queer SF writer, and possibly the most influential of all time. I'm pleased to know it.
Random observations: of course, Clarke's vision of the future is vastly dated (like Asimov, he seemed to think computers would get bigger and bigger, not smaller) and he really thought Mars was just around the corner after the Moon. Famously, he understood technological change but not social change - his stories set in far distant futures (or even jolly old 2020) have fifties nuclear families and social mores. He is spectacularly, catastrophically sexist. Across nearly a thousand pages I spotted exactly one story with a main character who is an adult woman whose role in the story is not to be a foil to a man. Mostly, they're sexist by omission; it's the "White Hart" stories, the shaggy-dog-story-style stories from the mid-fifities, that I found shockingly, appallingly misogynist. If you want to skip one in this collection, make it "The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch".
That said - if you can put that aside - it's hard not to feel a lot of affection for his warm and loving stories set in an optimistic Golden Age. And while I am not qualified to comment on Clarke as a queer writer of SF in his historical context, he *was* a queer SF writer, and possibly the most influential of all time. I'm pleased to know it.
June 29, 2009
I nearly finished the first two volumes and then had to stop for my exams. Intend to start all over again in the future.
I liked most of the stories I've read so far but "Retreat from Earth" (1938) and "Breaking Strain" (1949), both in Vol.1, are among my all time favourites.
I liked most of the stories I've read so far but "Retreat from Earth" (1938) and "Breaking Strain" (1949), both in Vol.1, are among my all time favourites.
September 29, 2015
If you're a SF fan and I have to explain to you who Arthur C Clarke is, then this may be the greatest gift anyone can give you beyond a time machine that will take you back in time to explain who Arthur C Clarke is to your past self so that when I ask you about him in the future you don't give me a blank look and I don't subsequently make fun of you. It's nice that one book can prevent all that.
When you come up with a short list of SF authors that pretty much defined the genre back when it was starting to codify into an actual genre and not just a series of weird stories that sometimes involved aliens coming to Earth to steal their women, most people will include Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke. And while all three had their successes, Clarke seemed to stake out a nice clear-eyed middle ground between Asimov's thoughtful slabs of ice water and Heinlein's quick tales of pluck and radical derring-do, relaying an optimistic view of the future that didn't shy away from the new dangers that would have to be faced but balancing all the far-flung science with a humanistic bent that kept it grounded in a reality that just happened to include spaceships and aliens. And while his best known works are probably novels "(Childhood's End", "Rendezvous With Rama", "2001", "The Fountains of Paradise"), he also wrote an incredible number of short stories over the course of his extremely long career, many of which acted as staging grounds to be expanded into novels.
This collection, probably the only Clarke short story collection you will ever need, contains over a hundred of his short stories, from his first in 1937 to the first SF story published in "Nature" magazine in 1999. There are probably omissions here and there and some of those omissions might be someone's favorite but for the most part all the hits are here, and quite a bit more besides. While some people complained about rampant typos, I didn't notice more than a few here and there and considering how many short story collections you'd have to acquire to get all this, it's probably safe to say that it's essential.
One of the interesting things to note is that out of the whole, there are very few duffers in the bunch, implying that he was remarkably consistent over the course of his career, even if not all of them hit with the same impact. Another thing to note is how his style falls into place fairly early and really doesn't change too much over the course of the decades, there are very few radical leaps into experimentation (one late story plays with format slightly, and not completely successfully) and his prose remains amazingly clear and functional, never delving into pure robotic conveyance but only rarely making the leaps into pure poetry that his contemporaries were sometimes capable of.
What sets Clarke apart for me is his vision of the future. Without staking out a formal "Future History" like Asimov and Heinlein and others did, he posits a future that ranges from the twenty-first century to centuries later that speak of a calm optimism, a sense of mundane wonder where travels between planets and visits to the stars are commonplace, where even the dangers have an aura of "Wow, how is that possible?" about them, where contact with aliens is a cause for a leap forward, and contemplation. He creates futures that you want to live in and puts people in the jobs we can see ourselves doing, stripping them of heroics and turning them into amazing experiences that are still all in a day's work. With Clarke, you feel the stillnesses between the stars and the gritty winds of Mars, the quiet hum of a functional space ship, and the groaning tick of rapidly dwindling time when it's clear the universe isn't waiting for you. In a present where fiction seems to be fascinated by psychological distortions or formal rules breaking, his stories are a call back to a time when it seemed like the future was a vast country that held nothing but infinite possibilities if handled right and we weren't on a one way trip to Dystopia-ville (though more than one story features aliens assuming that we're a threat to everything and wiping us out). He's straightforward and tricky at the same time, earnest but never cloying, insistent that technology can help us reach that future while never forgetting that it depends on the people managing it.
His bread and butter stories seem to involve people dealing with new technologies or encountering problems specific to the future and forced to use their wits or rely on luck to get them out of the jam (a man stuck on the hot side of an asteroid, another trapped in a ship that is going to orbit straight into the surface of the moon), their plights dependent on us buying the context of their well sketched and grounded future, a place where anything could happen, even the bad stuff. But in Clarke's stories, the nimble mind can always find a way out.
For me, his best stories involve an underlying spirituality that is based more on wonder at the workings of the universe than a faith in any specific god (he didn't subscribe to any religion), something that suggests that God is in the details and that the universe is a far more fascinating place that we can ever imagine, even with the assistance of a higher power ("The Nine Billion Names of God" most notably, both serious and playful about the concept). His stories nod toward history not in the sense of what we see in our lifetimes but the slow drift of evolution ("Guardian Angel", the kernel of what would later become "Childhood's End") and in that sense set him apart from his more serious minded colleagues, who tended to be about all science all the time . . . Clarke never dove completely into the paranormal but was clearly fascinated by all that we could never understand.
In that sense, this tome is full of riches, from the aforementioned stories to the lyrical gems like "The Distant Songs of Earth" and a host of classics too many to name. If there's any quibble it's that there's almost too much to digest here and it's best taken in small doses, especially since while his subject matter varies wildly, a lot of the stories are often written in a "Twilight Zone" type format, presenting a scenario and then upending it with a conclusion that brings an unexpected twist to the proceedings (the "White Hart" tales, while clever, also seem to be somewhat endless in number and after what feels like the fiftieth one in a row you may find yourself begging for mercy, even if in a minor fashion). Later in his life he seems more concerned with the Earth falling to pieces, but he never loses sight of the future as a place that we can all live in, that we're living in every day. While some of the predictions here (as much as they are predictions and not just dramatic license) can come across as dated, especially the stuff about the other planets in the solar system (and you also start to wish for a female lead character, as it's a boy's club with a few rare exceptions) one thing the stories never come across as is hokey. No matter what era they're written in, Clarke's voice keeps them from achieving the corn that so many of his peers were unable to shake and while some of the science dates the era of the tales (as well as all the Cold War concerns, though Clarke was also daring enough to depict the Russians in a sympathetic light), the tales themselves achieve an odd timelessness. At times Clarke seems to be trying to write the future he wanted to see, all the while understanding that if he wouldn't be around to see it then he could bring it about for us by inspiring us to see the stars as more than twinkling points of light, understanding as less an obstacle and more a goal, and the space between planets as no different than the spaces between each other, more fascinating the closer you get and fraught with challenges that both must overcome for progress to occur, and a trajectory that bends ever upward if only we never lose sight of what it means to be truly boundless.
When you come up with a short list of SF authors that pretty much defined the genre back when it was starting to codify into an actual genre and not just a series of weird stories that sometimes involved aliens coming to Earth to steal their women, most people will include Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke. And while all three had their successes, Clarke seemed to stake out a nice clear-eyed middle ground between Asimov's thoughtful slabs of ice water and Heinlein's quick tales of pluck and radical derring-do, relaying an optimistic view of the future that didn't shy away from the new dangers that would have to be faced but balancing all the far-flung science with a humanistic bent that kept it grounded in a reality that just happened to include spaceships and aliens. And while his best known works are probably novels "(Childhood's End", "Rendezvous With Rama", "2001", "The Fountains of Paradise"), he also wrote an incredible number of short stories over the course of his extremely long career, many of which acted as staging grounds to be expanded into novels.
This collection, probably the only Clarke short story collection you will ever need, contains over a hundred of his short stories, from his first in 1937 to the first SF story published in "Nature" magazine in 1999. There are probably omissions here and there and some of those omissions might be someone's favorite but for the most part all the hits are here, and quite a bit more besides. While some people complained about rampant typos, I didn't notice more than a few here and there and considering how many short story collections you'd have to acquire to get all this, it's probably safe to say that it's essential.
One of the interesting things to note is that out of the whole, there are very few duffers in the bunch, implying that he was remarkably consistent over the course of his career, even if not all of them hit with the same impact. Another thing to note is how his style falls into place fairly early and really doesn't change too much over the course of the decades, there are very few radical leaps into experimentation (one late story plays with format slightly, and not completely successfully) and his prose remains amazingly clear and functional, never delving into pure robotic conveyance but only rarely making the leaps into pure poetry that his contemporaries were sometimes capable of.
What sets Clarke apart for me is his vision of the future. Without staking out a formal "Future History" like Asimov and Heinlein and others did, he posits a future that ranges from the twenty-first century to centuries later that speak of a calm optimism, a sense of mundane wonder where travels between planets and visits to the stars are commonplace, where even the dangers have an aura of "Wow, how is that possible?" about them, where contact with aliens is a cause for a leap forward, and contemplation. He creates futures that you want to live in and puts people in the jobs we can see ourselves doing, stripping them of heroics and turning them into amazing experiences that are still all in a day's work. With Clarke, you feel the stillnesses between the stars and the gritty winds of Mars, the quiet hum of a functional space ship, and the groaning tick of rapidly dwindling time when it's clear the universe isn't waiting for you. In a present where fiction seems to be fascinated by psychological distortions or formal rules breaking, his stories are a call back to a time when it seemed like the future was a vast country that held nothing but infinite possibilities if handled right and we weren't on a one way trip to Dystopia-ville (though more than one story features aliens assuming that we're a threat to everything and wiping us out). He's straightforward and tricky at the same time, earnest but never cloying, insistent that technology can help us reach that future while never forgetting that it depends on the people managing it.
His bread and butter stories seem to involve people dealing with new technologies or encountering problems specific to the future and forced to use their wits or rely on luck to get them out of the jam (a man stuck on the hot side of an asteroid, another trapped in a ship that is going to orbit straight into the surface of the moon), their plights dependent on us buying the context of their well sketched and grounded future, a place where anything could happen, even the bad stuff. But in Clarke's stories, the nimble mind can always find a way out.
For me, his best stories involve an underlying spirituality that is based more on wonder at the workings of the universe than a faith in any specific god (he didn't subscribe to any religion), something that suggests that God is in the details and that the universe is a far more fascinating place that we can ever imagine, even with the assistance of a higher power ("The Nine Billion Names of God" most notably, both serious and playful about the concept). His stories nod toward history not in the sense of what we see in our lifetimes but the slow drift of evolution ("Guardian Angel", the kernel of what would later become "Childhood's End") and in that sense set him apart from his more serious minded colleagues, who tended to be about all science all the time . . . Clarke never dove completely into the paranormal but was clearly fascinated by all that we could never understand.
In that sense, this tome is full of riches, from the aforementioned stories to the lyrical gems like "The Distant Songs of Earth" and a host of classics too many to name. If there's any quibble it's that there's almost too much to digest here and it's best taken in small doses, especially since while his subject matter varies wildly, a lot of the stories are often written in a "Twilight Zone" type format, presenting a scenario and then upending it with a conclusion that brings an unexpected twist to the proceedings (the "White Hart" tales, while clever, also seem to be somewhat endless in number and after what feels like the fiftieth one in a row you may find yourself begging for mercy, even if in a minor fashion). Later in his life he seems more concerned with the Earth falling to pieces, but he never loses sight of the future as a place that we can all live in, that we're living in every day. While some of the predictions here (as much as they are predictions and not just dramatic license) can come across as dated, especially the stuff about the other planets in the solar system (and you also start to wish for a female lead character, as it's a boy's club with a few rare exceptions) one thing the stories never come across as is hokey. No matter what era they're written in, Clarke's voice keeps them from achieving the corn that so many of his peers were unable to shake and while some of the science dates the era of the tales (as well as all the Cold War concerns, though Clarke was also daring enough to depict the Russians in a sympathetic light), the tales themselves achieve an odd timelessness. At times Clarke seems to be trying to write the future he wanted to see, all the while understanding that if he wouldn't be around to see it then he could bring it about for us by inspiring us to see the stars as more than twinkling points of light, understanding as less an obstacle and more a goal, and the space between planets as no different than the spaces between each other, more fascinating the closer you get and fraught with challenges that both must overcome for progress to occur, and a trajectory that bends ever upward if only we never lose sight of what it means to be truly boundless.
January 27, 2022
Well you got "2001" wrong, and "2010"...and just about everything else.
In my late teens and early twenties, I adored Clarke's works and thought him a true visionary. Now that I reread some of his stuff, it turns out he was totally wrong about most of his predictions. No Moon-base. No manned expeditions to Jupiter/Mars(yet) or beyond. No visits by aliens (that we know of). And the racist and sexist views! Unsurprisingly, to me at least, I found his works now, to be outdated, inaccurate and boring, but there is still no doubting his writing talent.
In my late teens and early twenties, I adored Clarke's works and thought him a true visionary. Now that I reread some of his stuff, it turns out he was totally wrong about most of his predictions. No Moon-base. No manned expeditions to Jupiter/Mars(yet) or beyond. No visits by aliens (that we know of). And the racist and sexist views! Unsurprisingly, to me at least, I found his works now, to be outdated, inaccurate and boring, but there is still no doubting his writing talent.
May 5, 2023
I loved it. Clarke is brilliant with short stories and most of them were enjoyable. Some of his concepts and characters will stay with me.
Not collected in book form or books that I haven't reviewed
How we went to mars ⭐⭐
Reverie ⭐⭐
Holiday on the moon ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Earthlight ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Quarantine ⭐⭐⭐
The Hammer of God ⭐⭐⭐
The Wire Continuum (with Stephen Baxter) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Improving the Neighbourhood ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
"sisene G" ⭐⭐⭐
The Steam Powered Word Processor ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The other tiger ⭐⭐⭐
The deep range ⭐
On Golden Seas ⭐⭐⭐
Guardian Angel ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Lion of Comarre ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The ones I've reviewed in his other books
Travel by Wire ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Retreat from earth ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The awakening ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Whacky ⭐⭐⭐
Loophole ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rescue Party ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Technichal Error ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Castaway ⭐⭐⭐
The Fires Within ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Inheritance ⭐⭐⭐
Nightfall ⭐⭐
History Lesson ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Transcience ⭐⭐⭐
The Wall of Darkness ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Forgotten Enemy ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Hide and Seek ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Breaking strain ⭐⭐⭐
Nemesis ⭐⭐⭐
Time's Arrow ⭐⭐⭐
A walk in the dark ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Silence please ⭐⭐⭐
Trouble with the natives ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The road to the sea ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Sentinel ⭐⭐⭐
Second dawn ⭐⭐⭐
Superiority ⭐⭐⭐⭐
If I forget thee, oh Earth ⭐⭐⭐
All the time in the world ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The nine billion names of God ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The possessed ⭐⭐
The parasite ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Jupiter Five ⭐⭐⭐
Encounter in the dawn ⭐⭐⭐
Publicity Campaign ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Armaments Race ⭐⭐⭐
No morning after ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Big Game Hunt ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Patent pending ⭐⭐⭐
Refugee ⭐⭐
The Star ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The pacifist ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Venture to the moon ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The reluctant orchid ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐😂
Moving spirit ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The defenestration of Ermintrude Inch ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The ultimate melody ⭐⭐⭐⭐
the next tennants ⭐⭐⭐
Cold war ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Sleeping beauty ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Security check ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Man Who Plough the Sea ⭐⭐⭐
Critical Mass ⭐⭐⭐
The other side of the sky ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Over the Sun ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Cosmic Casanova ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The songs of distant Earth ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
A Slight Case of Sunstroke ⭐⭐⭐
Who's there? ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Out of the Cradle ⭐⭐⭐⭐
I Remember Babylon ⭐⭐⭐
Trouble with Time ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Into the Comet ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Summertime on Icarus ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Saturn Rising ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Death and the Senator ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Before Eden ⭐⭐⭐
Hate ⭐⭐⭐
Love that Universe ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Dog Star ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Maelstrom II ⭐⭐⭐
An Ape about the House ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Shining Ones ⭐⭐⭐
The Secret ⭐⭐⭐
Dial F for Frankenstein ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Wind from the Sun ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Food of the Gods ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Last Command ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Light of Darkness ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever ⭐⭐⭐
Playback ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Cruel Sky ⭐⭐
Herbert George Morley Robert Wells, Esq. ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Crusade ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Neutron Tide ⭐⭐
Reunion ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Transit of Earth ⭐⭐⭐
A Tale from Medusa ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Not collected in book form or books that I haven't reviewed
How we went to mars ⭐⭐
Reverie ⭐⭐
Holiday on the moon ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Earthlight ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Quarantine ⭐⭐⭐
The Hammer of God ⭐⭐⭐
The Wire Continuum (with Stephen Baxter) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Improving the Neighbourhood ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
"sisene G" ⭐⭐⭐
The Steam Powered Word Processor ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The other tiger ⭐⭐⭐
The deep range ⭐
On Golden Seas ⭐⭐⭐
Guardian Angel ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Lion of Comarre ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The ones I've reviewed in his other books
Travel by Wire ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Retreat from earth ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The awakening ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Whacky ⭐⭐⭐
Loophole ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rescue Party ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Technichal Error ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Castaway ⭐⭐⭐
The Fires Within ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Inheritance ⭐⭐⭐
Nightfall ⭐⭐
History Lesson ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Transcience ⭐⭐⭐
The Wall of Darkness ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Forgotten Enemy ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Hide and Seek ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Breaking strain ⭐⭐⭐
Nemesis ⭐⭐⭐
Time's Arrow ⭐⭐⭐
A walk in the dark ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Silence please ⭐⭐⭐
Trouble with the natives ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The road to the sea ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Sentinel ⭐⭐⭐
Second dawn ⭐⭐⭐
Superiority ⭐⭐⭐⭐
If I forget thee, oh Earth ⭐⭐⭐
All the time in the world ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The nine billion names of God ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The possessed ⭐⭐
The parasite ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Jupiter Five ⭐⭐⭐
Encounter in the dawn ⭐⭐⭐
Publicity Campaign ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Armaments Race ⭐⭐⭐
No morning after ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Big Game Hunt ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Patent pending ⭐⭐⭐
Refugee ⭐⭐
The Star ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The pacifist ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Venture to the moon ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The reluctant orchid ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐😂
Moving spirit ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The defenestration of Ermintrude Inch ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The ultimate melody ⭐⭐⭐⭐
the next tennants ⭐⭐⭐
Cold war ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Sleeping beauty ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Security check ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Man Who Plough the Sea ⭐⭐⭐
Critical Mass ⭐⭐⭐
The other side of the sky ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Over the Sun ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Cosmic Casanova ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The songs of distant Earth ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
A Slight Case of Sunstroke ⭐⭐⭐
Who's there? ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Out of the Cradle ⭐⭐⭐⭐
I Remember Babylon ⭐⭐⭐
Trouble with Time ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Into the Comet ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Summertime on Icarus ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Saturn Rising ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Death and the Senator ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Before Eden ⭐⭐⭐
Hate ⭐⭐⭐
Love that Universe ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Dog Star ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Maelstrom II ⭐⭐⭐
An Ape about the House ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Shining Ones ⭐⭐⭐
The Secret ⭐⭐⭐
Dial F for Frankenstein ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Wind from the Sun ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Food of the Gods ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Last Command ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Light of Darkness ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever ⭐⭐⭐
Playback ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Cruel Sky ⭐⭐
Herbert George Morley Robert Wells, Esq. ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Crusade ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Neutron Tide ⭐⭐
Reunion ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Transit of Earth ⭐⭐⭐
A Tale from Medusa ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
August 3, 2022
Each short story is not as good as all of the short stories together and it is the whole that makes this book worth reading.
Arthur C. Clarke saw what others could not as with satellites before their time, and saw what others should not as when he thinks Pons and Fleischman should get a Nobel Prize for their pseudo-science Tom-foolery for their cold-fusion confusion. The last line in this book was a dedication to them and their slippery conclusions as if Clarke was purposedly trying to deflate my opinion of him, by 1999, the year of the last story, the whole world knew cold fusion at room temperature was not worthy of further consideration and at best was a series of measurement errors and poor lab prep.
At times, the short story format is obviously flawed, but all of the stories together in one place in chronological order makes the whole worthy of digesting the morsels for a pleasing repast. My wife gave up on these, and it was only a dogged steadfastness that allowed me to endure to the end.
Arthur C. Clarke saw what others could not as with satellites before their time, and saw what others should not as when he thinks Pons and Fleischman should get a Nobel Prize for their pseudo-science Tom-foolery for their cold-fusion confusion. The last line in this book was a dedication to them and their slippery conclusions as if Clarke was purposedly trying to deflate my opinion of him, by 1999, the year of the last story, the whole world knew cold fusion at room temperature was not worthy of further consideration and at best was a series of measurement errors and poor lab prep.
At times, the short story format is obviously flawed, but all of the stories together in one place in chronological order makes the whole worthy of digesting the morsels for a pleasing repast. My wife gave up on these, and it was only a dogged steadfastness that allowed me to endure to the end.
July 9, 2023
Finally, after more than three years of intermittent reading, i finished this huge collection of Arthur C Clarke's short stories. It was a great read with many mind-bending ideas told in science fiction short stories. Some of them novella-sized, and some merely one page long.
March 9, 2020
Per farvi capire: mi sono detto vabbè, leggo uno due racconti, e poi lo inframezzo ad altro, e invece è finita che ho letto unicamente 'sto mastodonte.
Il volume raccoglie quasi tutti i racconti scritti da Arthur C. Clarke dagli anni '30 fino agli anni '90, anche se il grosso della sua produzione si concentra fondamentalmente nel ventennio fra 1950 e 1970. Quindi non credo abbia molto senso parlare dei singoli racconti, perché sono così tanti che sarebbe soltanto uno vuotissimo elenco piuttosto inutile. Clarke, pur nell'eterogeneità dei suoi racconti (non si prova mai una sensazione di stanchezza leggendolo o di ripetitività) torna quasi sempre su temi a lui piuttosto cari e ne costituiscono il centro e motore della sua narrazione: l'avventura e la meraviglia, ovvero l'umanità, ovvero, ancora, quella spinta che fa muovere l'umanità in avanti.
La fantascienza di Clarke è una fantascienza che si basa raramente su dei personaggi. Le persone che affollano i racconti di Clarke sono poco più che dei McGuffin narrativi. L'ultimo scudo prima di cedere alla sperimentazione totale e abbandonare ogni linea narrativa a favore di una pure descrizione. Non che siano racconti piatti, sia chiaro. Anzi, in alcuni il colpo di scena è fondamentale e costruito perfettamente (ci arriviamo dopo). Quello che intendo è che ciò che muove Clarke nella costruzione dei suoi racconti non è tanto l'idea della costruzione di una narrazione perfetta, di uno scavo psicologico o che, quanto più l'idea di costruire quasi una mitologia della futura era spaziale. Clarke ci racconta di gare fra navi che si muovono grazie a vele solari, dell'esplorazione di Giove, della morte di una creatura proveniente dagli abissi solari e così via. Sono racconti in cui la costruzione narrativa sembra cedere completamente alla pura descrizione: non accade nulla (o quasi), se non la meraviglia stessa. In questo risulta lampante un racconto (non riuscitissimo, ma non importa) sulla vacanza di una famiglia sulla Luna. Scritto per una rivista per ragazze, "Vacanza sulla Luna" non ha altro scopo che spronare le lettrici a essere curiose, proprio come la protagonista del racconto che dopo aver visto la vita sulla Luna, "aveva trovato la propria ambizione [...]. La attendevano anni di studi, ma alla fine si sarebbe dedicata anche lei alla ricerca dei segreti delle stelle". L'importanza della fantascienza per Clarke - una fantascienza, tra l'altro, profondamente legata alla scienza, estremamente hard - è detta fuor di ogni metafora in un altro dei racconti: "Hai dato loro qualcosa a cui pensare, hai infuso un po' di emozione nelle loro vite. Meno di uno su un milione viaggerà ai pianeti giganti esterni, ma l'intera razza umana ci andrà con l'immaginazione".
Questa raccolta, si diceva prima, va dagli anni '30 alla fine del secolo. E' interessante, allora, vedere non soltanto come si sposti man mano la conoscenza scientifica di Clarke e del mondo (gli alieni che prima sono marziani e poi man mano si spostano prima temporalmente poi geograficamente), ma soprattutto le paure che Clarke rielabora nei suoi racconti. In particolar modo a far da padrone, come d'altronde in tutta la fantascienza del Secondo Novecento, è la Guerra Fredda e l'Atomica. La costante tensione fra USA e URSS e l'angosciante Spada di Damocle che era l'atomica (nella sua tra l'altro duplice natura di arma e strumento energetico del futuro) viene ripreso e rielaborato in infinite variazioni, quasi tutte esplicite e urgenti ("Ho lavorato tutta la vita per approfondire la mia conoscenza della mente, ma adesso mi chiedo se per caso io non abbia introdotto nel nostro mondo una forza troppo potente e troppo pericolosa perché sia possibile controllarla"). Poche cose stanno a cuore a Clarke quanto sottolineare la follia e la violenza che soggiace al conflitto umano. Quella di Clarke, infatti, è una fantascienza che è tanto poco umana nella sua componente narrativa, quanto lo è al contrario nel suo idealismo. In particolar modo, se la violenza è ciò che lo terrorizza maggiormente per il suo orrore e la sua distruzione, ciò che Clarke pare ammirare di più nell'uomo è la sua scintilla verso l'indipendenza, la curiosità, proprio ciò che cerca di stimolare con i suoi racconti. Alcuni racconti diventano, allora, veri e propri pamphlet all'avventura umana, uno su tutti "Fuori dalla culla, su un'orbita infinita" che racconta della nascita dell'uomo come essere spaziale. Emblematico come in un racconto sulla lotta fra Terra e le sue colonie, l'inglesissimo Clarke si schieri dalla parte delle colonie dopo aver paragonato la situazione a quella settecentesca fra Inghilterra e Stati Uniti.
Il dualismo dell'atomica si rispecchia anche in una delle fisse del periodo più tardo (come, in d'altronde, ogni strumento tecnologico di cui ci parla Clarke): l'intelligenza artificiale, o, meglio, dato che comunque stiamo ancora negli anni '70-'80, la progressiva computerizzazione del mondo. In particolare, la perdita di controllo dei diversi processi a favore di una completa meccanicizzazione di ogni processo. Ma Clarke, proprio per il discorso della spinta di prima, è la persona più lontana da ogni conservatorismo che possa venire in mente. Nella sua descrizione di un mondo che sembra quasi abdicare per una nuova realtà, si ha quasi l'impressione che egli stia dalla parte dei nuovi venuti. Clarke, in questo, è sempre costantemente curioso per quello che sta dietro l'angolo (o infiniti angoli dopo). E' mosso da una curiosità infantile così forte che ogni forma di nostalgia gli è preclusa. All'opposto, leggendo i racconti di Clarke si prova un fortissimo senso di frenesia verso un futuro che ancora non è accaduto e che sta accadendo ancora troppo lentamente - in questo è sorprendente e beffarda la controstoria che mettono su lui e Baxter nel penultimo racconto, mostrando un presente alternativo in cui staremmo viaggiando attraverso le stelle.
Clarke è un grande narratore di atmosfere spaziali, proprio come i quadri di Chesley Bonestell, che non a caso è citato diverse volte esplicitamente da Clarke stesso. Ma Clarke è anche un narratore fenomenale nel creare tensione e colpi di scena. La costruzione della tensione è opposta a quella del colpo di scena. Cioè, non solo in Clarke, eh, proprio in generale, come diceva Hitchcock. La tensione si basa su una cosa, di solito brutta, che sai che sta per accadere e quando accade è quasi una liberazione per l'angoscia accumulata fino a quel momento, il colpo di scena, invece, è normalmente inaspettato e cambia il punto di vista fino a quel momento con cui hai visto la storia. E fin qui, ok. Clarke è maestro in entrambe.
Il racconto più emblematico di come Clarke riesca a gestire la tensione è forse "Strada buia". Il racconto è di una semplicità disarmante: un uomo su un pianeta o che so io, è costretto a farsi gli ultimi chilometri verso una città, attraversando un canyon buio. Clarke non fa altro per tutto il racconto che descrivere questa camminata e l'ansia crescente dell'uomo nel trovarsi in un luogo buio e sconosciuto, con chissà che creature che potrebbero sbucare da un momento all'altro. Per tutto il racconto si ha la sensazione di una tensione che cresce lentamente e inesorabilmente e che Clarke non allenta mai veramente, ma che anzi porta al suo apice nell'ultima riga del racconto, lasciando il lettore in un sospeso che è l'ignoto.
La gestione, invece, del colpo di scena è profondamente legata alla concezione umanistica che ha Clarke. Anche qua, un racconto che rende piuttosto chiara la cosa è "L'ultimo ordine". Che è lungo manco due pagine e ha l'incipit più di impatto di forse l'intera raccolta: c'è stata una guerra enorme, ha devastato mezza terra, ma un battaglione nascosto - che doveva fungere da distruzione mutua assicurata (e torna l'atomica) - si prepara ad attaccare la parte vincitrice per vendicarsi. Ora, il colpo di scena qua sta nel fatto che Clarke ci fa implicitamente immedesimare in una specifica fazione (che siano gli americani, i bianchi, gli umani stessi) per poi rivelare che siamo dalla parte opposta (russi, neri, alieni). E' un'empatia forzata e sconvolgente. Siamo negli anni del maccartismo e della caccia al diverso. Gli anni del segregazionismo e dell'eurocentrismo. Clarke attraverso il colpo di scena sferra un attacco senza mezza misure a qualsiasi paletto ideologico. Costringe il lettore a immedesimarsi nell'Altro, fingendo che sia un Noi condiviso, e soltanto alla fine gli rivela come sia sempre stato l'Altro. Non è soltanto un mettersi nei panni dell'altro, ma un riconoscere che l'altro è un Noi. Proprio per il discorso che l'umanità per Clarke è tale solo se condivisa.
La fantascienza di Clarke, allora, è al contempo una fantascienza tanto ingegneristica quanto utopistica, una fantascienza scritta da un uomo che sa quanto può essere distruttivo l'animo umano e di quanto al contempo sia dotato di grandezza. E' la fantascienza di un uomo che cerca disperatamente di stuzzicare la meraviglia, di suggerire un futuro fatto di stelle, con la costante paura che la distruzione sia dietro l'angolo.
Il volume raccoglie quasi tutti i racconti scritti da Arthur C. Clarke dagli anni '30 fino agli anni '90, anche se il grosso della sua produzione si concentra fondamentalmente nel ventennio fra 1950 e 1970. Quindi non credo abbia molto senso parlare dei singoli racconti, perché sono così tanti che sarebbe soltanto uno vuotissimo elenco piuttosto inutile. Clarke, pur nell'eterogeneità dei suoi racconti (non si prova mai una sensazione di stanchezza leggendolo o di ripetitività) torna quasi sempre su temi a lui piuttosto cari e ne costituiscono il centro e motore della sua narrazione: l'avventura e la meraviglia, ovvero l'umanità, ovvero, ancora, quella spinta che fa muovere l'umanità in avanti.
La fantascienza di Clarke è una fantascienza che si basa raramente su dei personaggi. Le persone che affollano i racconti di Clarke sono poco più che dei McGuffin narrativi. L'ultimo scudo prima di cedere alla sperimentazione totale e abbandonare ogni linea narrativa a favore di una pure descrizione. Non che siano racconti piatti, sia chiaro. Anzi, in alcuni il colpo di scena è fondamentale e costruito perfettamente (ci arriviamo dopo). Quello che intendo è che ciò che muove Clarke nella costruzione dei suoi racconti non è tanto l'idea della costruzione di una narrazione perfetta, di uno scavo psicologico o che, quanto più l'idea di costruire quasi una mitologia della futura era spaziale. Clarke ci racconta di gare fra navi che si muovono grazie a vele solari, dell'esplorazione di Giove, della morte di una creatura proveniente dagli abissi solari e così via. Sono racconti in cui la costruzione narrativa sembra cedere completamente alla pura descrizione: non accade nulla (o quasi), se non la meraviglia stessa. In questo risulta lampante un racconto (non riuscitissimo, ma non importa) sulla vacanza di una famiglia sulla Luna. Scritto per una rivista per ragazze, "Vacanza sulla Luna" non ha altro scopo che spronare le lettrici a essere curiose, proprio come la protagonista del racconto che dopo aver visto la vita sulla Luna, "aveva trovato la propria ambizione [...]. La attendevano anni di studi, ma alla fine si sarebbe dedicata anche lei alla ricerca dei segreti delle stelle". L'importanza della fantascienza per Clarke - una fantascienza, tra l'altro, profondamente legata alla scienza, estremamente hard - è detta fuor di ogni metafora in un altro dei racconti: "Hai dato loro qualcosa a cui pensare, hai infuso un po' di emozione nelle loro vite. Meno di uno su un milione viaggerà ai pianeti giganti esterni, ma l'intera razza umana ci andrà con l'immaginazione".
Questa raccolta, si diceva prima, va dagli anni '30 alla fine del secolo. E' interessante, allora, vedere non soltanto come si sposti man mano la conoscenza scientifica di Clarke e del mondo (gli alieni che prima sono marziani e poi man mano si spostano prima temporalmente poi geograficamente), ma soprattutto le paure che Clarke rielabora nei suoi racconti. In particolar modo a far da padrone, come d'altronde in tutta la fantascienza del Secondo Novecento, è la Guerra Fredda e l'Atomica. La costante tensione fra USA e URSS e l'angosciante Spada di Damocle che era l'atomica (nella sua tra l'altro duplice natura di arma e strumento energetico del futuro) viene ripreso e rielaborato in infinite variazioni, quasi tutte esplicite e urgenti ("Ho lavorato tutta la vita per approfondire la mia conoscenza della mente, ma adesso mi chiedo se per caso io non abbia introdotto nel nostro mondo una forza troppo potente e troppo pericolosa perché sia possibile controllarla"). Poche cose stanno a cuore a Clarke quanto sottolineare la follia e la violenza che soggiace al conflitto umano. Quella di Clarke, infatti, è una fantascienza che è tanto poco umana nella sua componente narrativa, quanto lo è al contrario nel suo idealismo. In particolar modo, se la violenza è ciò che lo terrorizza maggiormente per il suo orrore e la sua distruzione, ciò che Clarke pare ammirare di più nell'uomo è la sua scintilla verso l'indipendenza, la curiosità, proprio ciò che cerca di stimolare con i suoi racconti. Alcuni racconti diventano, allora, veri e propri pamphlet all'avventura umana, uno su tutti "Fuori dalla culla, su un'orbita infinita" che racconta della nascita dell'uomo come essere spaziale. Emblematico come in un racconto sulla lotta fra Terra e le sue colonie, l'inglesissimo Clarke si schieri dalla parte delle colonie dopo aver paragonato la situazione a quella settecentesca fra Inghilterra e Stati Uniti.
Il dualismo dell'atomica si rispecchia anche in una delle fisse del periodo più tardo (come, in d'altronde, ogni strumento tecnologico di cui ci parla Clarke): l'intelligenza artificiale, o, meglio, dato che comunque stiamo ancora negli anni '70-'80, la progressiva computerizzazione del mondo. In particolare, la perdita di controllo dei diversi processi a favore di una completa meccanicizzazione di ogni processo. Ma Clarke, proprio per il discorso della spinta di prima, è la persona più lontana da ogni conservatorismo che possa venire in mente. Nella sua descrizione di un mondo che sembra quasi abdicare per una nuova realtà, si ha quasi l'impressione che egli stia dalla parte dei nuovi venuti. Clarke, in questo, è sempre costantemente curioso per quello che sta dietro l'angolo (o infiniti angoli dopo). E' mosso da una curiosità infantile così forte che ogni forma di nostalgia gli è preclusa. All'opposto, leggendo i racconti di Clarke si prova un fortissimo senso di frenesia verso un futuro che ancora non è accaduto e che sta accadendo ancora troppo lentamente - in questo è sorprendente e beffarda la controstoria che mettono su lui e Baxter nel penultimo racconto, mostrando un presente alternativo in cui staremmo viaggiando attraverso le stelle.
Clarke è un grande narratore di atmosfere spaziali, proprio come i quadri di Chesley Bonestell, che non a caso è citato diverse volte esplicitamente da Clarke stesso. Ma Clarke è anche un narratore fenomenale nel creare tensione e colpi di scena. La costruzione della tensione è opposta a quella del colpo di scena. Cioè, non solo in Clarke, eh, proprio in generale, come diceva Hitchcock. La tensione si basa su una cosa, di solito brutta, che sai che sta per accadere e quando accade è quasi una liberazione per l'angoscia accumulata fino a quel momento, il colpo di scena, invece, è normalmente inaspettato e cambia il punto di vista fino a quel momento con cui hai visto la storia. E fin qui, ok. Clarke è maestro in entrambe.
Il racconto più emblematico di come Clarke riesca a gestire la tensione è forse "Strada buia". Il racconto è di una semplicità disarmante: un uomo su un pianeta o che so io, è costretto a farsi gli ultimi chilometri verso una città, attraversando un canyon buio. Clarke non fa altro per tutto il racconto che descrivere questa camminata e l'ansia crescente dell'uomo nel trovarsi in un luogo buio e sconosciuto, con chissà che creature che potrebbero sbucare da un momento all'altro. Per tutto il racconto si ha la sensazione di una tensione che cresce lentamente e inesorabilmente e che Clarke non allenta mai veramente, ma che anzi porta al suo apice nell'ultima riga del racconto, lasciando il lettore in un sospeso che è l'ignoto.
La gestione, invece, del colpo di scena è profondamente legata alla concezione umanistica che ha Clarke. Anche qua, un racconto che rende piuttosto chiara la cosa è "L'ultimo ordine". Che è lungo manco due pagine e ha l'incipit più di impatto di forse l'intera raccolta: c'è stata una guerra enorme, ha devastato mezza terra, ma un battaglione nascosto - che doveva fungere da distruzione mutua assicurata (e torna l'atomica) - si prepara ad attaccare la parte vincitrice per vendicarsi. Ora, il colpo di scena qua sta nel fatto che Clarke ci fa implicitamente immedesimare in una specifica fazione (che siano gli americani, i bianchi, gli umani stessi) per poi rivelare che siamo dalla parte opposta (russi, neri, alieni). E' un'empatia forzata e sconvolgente. Siamo negli anni del maccartismo e della caccia al diverso. Gli anni del segregazionismo e dell'eurocentrismo. Clarke attraverso il colpo di scena sferra un attacco senza mezza misure a qualsiasi paletto ideologico. Costringe il lettore a immedesimarsi nell'Altro, fingendo che sia un Noi condiviso, e soltanto alla fine gli rivela come sia sempre stato l'Altro. Non è soltanto un mettersi nei panni dell'altro, ma un riconoscere che l'altro è un Noi. Proprio per il discorso che l'umanità per Clarke è tale solo se condivisa.
La fantascienza di Clarke, allora, è al contempo una fantascienza tanto ingegneristica quanto utopistica, una fantascienza scritta da un uomo che sa quanto può essere distruttivo l'animo umano e di quanto al contempo sia dotato di grandezza. E' la fantascienza di un uomo che cerca disperatamente di stuzzicare la meraviglia, di suggerire un futuro fatto di stelle, con la costante paura che la distruzione sia dietro l'angolo.
February 29, 2024
Crikey! how does one review a wriiter like Arthur C. Clarke? The Anglican subconscious has reached an interesting, perhaps disturbing, level of study. Here I present a book that I would turn to when I experienced insomnia, and it was quite effective - maybe affective. Nevertheless, my favorite genre is science-fiction, and I've consumed a lot of it, so it's relaxing, and I absorb it easily. As well, I can absorb the imagery of English language, and there's the rub, yes? Permiscuity has expressed itself quite well in English. The American revolution wasn't about disguarding English heritage; the deep view, it was about the definition of slavery, which is still argued to this day - dude, it's some twisted family values. Arthur C. Clarke presents an interesting view of how, regardless of deep patriotism, English culture kept going native during it's imperialist stages, and despite it's attempts to civilize the world, the world civilized the English. Consequently, the English subconscious is saturated with these foreign influences. I get a tickle when I stream NASA, and there's all these different English accents - particularly the engineers - which span from Texans to Germans and Chinese. Such are my dreams from reading the works of authors like Clarke. Sure, Clarke goes into alternate timelines and futurist fantasy, but I cannot ignore the Anglican subconscious, which is like cultural memory, and it has been suggested that it might be genetic, but that's more circumstantial than a realistic view, but it is a fact that the English are quite literate and devour the writings of the adventurous types. Thus, I am fascinated at how English take fearlessly pride at being polluted by ideals while holding true to their own culture; essentially, they celebrate diversty. However, diversity isn't without adversity in a day to day reality; meaning, different cultures require a bit of study. Your neighbor runs their household a little diffferently than you, and they might appear very odd, but it's very likely the challenges life forced on them are different than the challeges given you, yet that doesn't mean you should change your program; quite the contrary, here's an opportunity for contrast, and good data comes from a refined perspective, which is the ideal of scientific method in terms of your perspective surviving a review of your pears. Halt! Being the literate creatures that absorb the tales of adventurers, history teaches us that the vanity of famous men has lead to madness, violence, and extreme selfishness that, in many cases, lead to absurd wars that killed thousands. Well, somebody lived to tell the tale, yet that person was at least wise enough to express the story in a way that it had some chance of survival. Adversity is a strange beast, which tends to thrive on being a unique puzzle that thrives on being novel. I think of how New York City naturally divided into burbs of culture, and the lovely question of, "shall we go to China-town or dine on Italian?". Such is the fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, in which only the abstract can express both reality and fantasy. That ability defines great intellectual writers. If normal actually existed, I'm certain humans would be bored to extinction.
August 8, 2016
It is hard to rate a book like this - a massive collection of stories, in which inevitably there are both good ones and not-so-good ones; especially more so since I am only halfway through the book, and it is possible (though statistically unlikely) that the other half of the book my tilt my overall impression of it in one or the other direction.
A.C.Clarke wrote a few practically brilliant stories; entertaining to read, and more importantly they are stories with clever ideas behind them. Some of them really made me smile a lot, as I was very delighted by them. 'The Lion of Comarre' seems to have stuck with me as an example of one of my favourite stories so far, (and certainly the only one of my favourites I remember the name of).
There are also quite a few pretty mediocre stories - but you could only expect that from someone who was writing practically as a full-time job, and keeping in mind that this is the full collection of his stories - ie all stories Clarke ever wrote.
With this in mind, I would have perhaps given the collection another star, weren't it for one quite frustrating fact: the evident misogynism that runs through Clarke's writings.
I really find this quite debilitating and hard to swallow. One would expect that a man interested in science and its imaginative applications would at best be open-minded enough, and at least have other things on his mind than going through the bother of hating women.
To be honest, in most, that is, nearly all of his stories so far, is hard to speak directly of misogynism, although one may suspect it. (To me at least it seems that a perfectly disinterested agent just wouldn't have chosen to write like this:) Clarke simply doesn't ever speak of women, all his characters - literally, 99% of them - are male. Most of these characters are people that would populate a SF story - they are scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs of various sorts. If a woman ever appears, she would be merely the crush, sweetheart, or wife of one of those people; else she would be a scientist's secretary. In one story so far there has been an interesting female character, although we find out at the end of the story that she was actually not human, but a member of an alien race that happened to 'rent' a woman's body for a few hours.
So far nothing unusual; it is far from a newsflash that most of the characters in the genre during most of the twentieth century had been male. And I don't necessarily mind this too much: when you read a short story and it happens that its characters (usually no more than 4 or 5 people) are all male, you might or might not notice this (after all, gender is quite inconsequential for the plot of 99% of SF) and just go along with the story. The protagonist is having a walk on the surface of the Moon; they happen to be called Jim. They could have been called Sarah, but who cares? It's just a person walking on the Moon. Tell me about what the walk was like, what did the protagonist see - and who cares about their gender. I certainly don't. It does, of course, become disconcerning when you read more and more stories, and in all of them all the protagonists are male. But in any case you just shrug your shoulders, thinking 'that was the fashion at the time, and the author - he really didn't care about gender either - he just went along with the popular choice of male protagonists', and you go on reading. The fact that all protagonists are male would not spoil your stories.
But the matters are quite the worse when Clarke actually invokes female characters in his stories. For when he does his limited understanding of the half of human race becomes lamentably apparent. He doesn't think they are particularly smart. They can do little but ask the male scientists stupid questions - as that 16-year-old girl who visits her father working on the Moon, and is surprised to learn that the Seas on the Moon don't have water in them. (Really? At 16, and given that you father kind of has been working there for decades? Clarke could have made her younger brother ask the question - but I guess he was, as narrator lets us know, already busying himself in learning how the machines on the Moon work.) When women are not showing inadequacy themselves it is normally because they are told to 'be dearies and don't ask any more questions' or are in some other ways inhibited from taking action. One of the stories begins with mentioning that sometimes ladies could be seen visiting a pub-space where scientists, writers, and so on, met to discuss ideas. Immediately after this remark we are informed by the narrator that 'you see, we were having light-hearted talk as well, not only grave scientific discussions.' Later in the story, we are told about a man who invented a device for recording and reproducing sexual experience (ie like a video for the senses) - and in case you wondered that meant that he could now dispense with his girlfriend. We are told so matter-of-factly that he now no longer had use of his girlfriend that any desire to spot some hidden humour behind the narration would be an example of delusional wishful thinking.
And what really got me to talk about the misogynism at such length is one other thing in this same story; Clarke's impoverished understanding of sex. After the above-mentioned device about recording and reproducing sexual experience has been created, we are told at great lenght about its potential commercial use. But guess what? It seems like the TV-like device is for men only. Apparently it never occurs to Clarke that the device could be used to record and reproduce a female sexual experience as well as a male one. He seems to think it's not of importance that women enjoy themselves; or does he think that they don't enjoy themselves? The scientist persuades a couple to record them having sex - but he only records the male experience; why not the female one as well? We are told how the device will be a huge success because men will enjoy it - what about women? Really, Clarke? Now, this is quite something - to let your misogynism get in the way even of your own fictional inventions' applications. To blind you so much as to not realize an easy possibility like this. I expected better of you.
Disappointedly yours,
Reader
A.C.Clarke wrote a few practically brilliant stories; entertaining to read, and more importantly they are stories with clever ideas behind them. Some of them really made me smile a lot, as I was very delighted by them. 'The Lion of Comarre' seems to have stuck with me as an example of one of my favourite stories so far, (and certainly the only one of my favourites I remember the name of).
There are also quite a few pretty mediocre stories - but you could only expect that from someone who was writing practically as a full-time job, and keeping in mind that this is the full collection of his stories - ie all stories Clarke ever wrote.
With this in mind, I would have perhaps given the collection another star, weren't it for one quite frustrating fact: the evident misogynism that runs through Clarke's writings.
I really find this quite debilitating and hard to swallow. One would expect that a man interested in science and its imaginative applications would at best be open-minded enough, and at least have other things on his mind than going through the bother of hating women.
To be honest, in most, that is, nearly all of his stories so far, is hard to speak directly of misogynism, although one may suspect it. (To me at least it seems that a perfectly disinterested agent just wouldn't have chosen to write like this:) Clarke simply doesn't ever speak of women, all his characters - literally, 99% of them - are male. Most of these characters are people that would populate a SF story - they are scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs of various sorts. If a woman ever appears, she would be merely the crush, sweetheart, or wife of one of those people; else she would be a scientist's secretary. In one story so far there has been an interesting female character, although we find out at the end of the story that she was actually not human, but a member of an alien race that happened to 'rent' a woman's body for a few hours.
So far nothing unusual; it is far from a newsflash that most of the characters in the genre during most of the twentieth century had been male. And I don't necessarily mind this too much: when you read a short story and it happens that its characters (usually no more than 4 or 5 people) are all male, you might or might not notice this (after all, gender is quite inconsequential for the plot of 99% of SF) and just go along with the story. The protagonist is having a walk on the surface of the Moon; they happen to be called Jim. They could have been called Sarah, but who cares? It's just a person walking on the Moon. Tell me about what the walk was like, what did the protagonist see - and who cares about their gender. I certainly don't. It does, of course, become disconcerning when you read more and more stories, and in all of them all the protagonists are male. But in any case you just shrug your shoulders, thinking 'that was the fashion at the time, and the author - he really didn't care about gender either - he just went along with the popular choice of male protagonists', and you go on reading. The fact that all protagonists are male would not spoil your stories.
But the matters are quite the worse when Clarke actually invokes female characters in his stories. For when he does his limited understanding of the half of human race becomes lamentably apparent. He doesn't think they are particularly smart. They can do little but ask the male scientists stupid questions - as that 16-year-old girl who visits her father working on the Moon, and is surprised to learn that the Seas on the Moon don't have water in them. (Really? At 16, and given that you father kind of has been working there for decades? Clarke could have made her younger brother ask the question - but I guess he was, as narrator lets us know, already busying himself in learning how the machines on the Moon work.) When women are not showing inadequacy themselves it is normally because they are told to 'be dearies and don't ask any more questions' or are in some other ways inhibited from taking action. One of the stories begins with mentioning that sometimes ladies could be seen visiting a pub-space where scientists, writers, and so on, met to discuss ideas. Immediately after this remark we are informed by the narrator that 'you see, we were having light-hearted talk as well, not only grave scientific discussions.' Later in the story, we are told about a man who invented a device for recording and reproducing sexual experience (ie like a video for the senses) - and in case you wondered that meant that he could now dispense with his girlfriend. We are told so matter-of-factly that he now no longer had use of his girlfriend that any desire to spot some hidden humour behind the narration would be an example of delusional wishful thinking.
And what really got me to talk about the misogynism at such length is one other thing in this same story; Clarke's impoverished understanding of sex. After the above-mentioned device about recording and reproducing sexual experience has been created, we are told at great lenght about its potential commercial use. But guess what? It seems like the TV-like device is for men only. Apparently it never occurs to Clarke that the device could be used to record and reproduce a female sexual experience as well as a male one. He seems to think it's not of importance that women enjoy themselves; or does he think that they don't enjoy themselves? The scientist persuades a couple to record them having sex - but he only records the male experience; why not the female one as well? We are told how the device will be a huge success because men will enjoy it - what about women? Really, Clarke? Now, this is quite something - to let your misogynism get in the way even of your own fictional inventions' applications. To blind you so much as to not realize an easy possibility like this. I expected better of you.
Disappointedly yours,
Reader
September 3, 2020
"Under the stars, the lonely figure walked homeward across a nameless land. Behind him the river flowed softly to the sea, winding through the fertile plains on which, more than a thousand centuries ahead, Yaan's descendants would build the great city they were to call Babylon.
I only read Encounter at Dawn, and I will go back to the rest one day, but I currently going through the Space Odyssey collection and this has been reported as being a pre-cursor for the first book, this and The Sentinel. I love ACC's writing style, its easy going, rich and sciencey. I have only read the four Space Odyssey bookes, 2001 about 5 times and the other 3 only once each, but I am going re-read and then probably go on to his other works becasue I am really diggin him right now, old Stevie boy will need to take a back seat for this Autumn...
I only read Encounter at Dawn, and I will go back to the rest one day, but I currently going through the Space Odyssey collection and this has been reported as being a pre-cursor for the first book, this and The Sentinel. I love ACC's writing style, its easy going, rich and sciencey. I have only read the four Space Odyssey bookes, 2001 about 5 times and the other 3 only once each, but I am going re-read and then probably go on to his other works becasue I am really diggin him right now, old Stevie boy will need to take a back seat for this Autumn...
June 21, 2020
This was a long collection and it took me a while to get through it. I really enjoyed the stories about the moon. I liked most of the stories, but a few were not good for me. I am a fan of the author and have enjoyed other works that came after this collection.
May 21, 2019
Me he tomado con mucha calma la lectura de este tochaco, que ya tenía en papel y que ahora he disfrutado en kindle, pero es una lectura de nueve estrellas por lo menos, ya que la recopilación de todos los relatos cortos de Arthur C. Clarke no se merece otra cosa. Desde los primeros hasta los últimos, todos los relatos son imaginativos y están muy bien escritos, pero lo que marca la diferencia son joyas como "Los nueve mil millones de nombres de Dios", "El centinela", "Cánticos de la lejana Tierra" o esa obra superlativa que es "Cita con Medusa", posiblemente mi relato favorito de CF de todos los tiempos. Recomendado 100% para todos los fanáticos de la ciencia ficción.
January 28, 2023
Por favor la cantidad de joyitas que hay aquí. ✨🌟
February 25, 2020
Questa raccolta è stata una vera rivelazione per me, ho adorato quasi tutte le storie e soprattutto ho amato come la fantascienza si ponesse semplicemente come comune denominatore di questi racconti, nulla di più, perchè è la pura fantasia a farla da padrone, in alcuni casi accompagnata da un filo di terrore perchè alcuni aspetti del genere sono spesso talmente plausibili da diventare inquietanti. Ma al di là di alcuni elementi inquietanti, questi 104 racconti sono delle vere e proprie perle, avventure in pillole scritte e raccontate in ogni modo possibile.
A volte Clarke ci sorprende con una storia raccontata tramite rapporti di missioni, altre con una riflessione sulla fantascienza e su cliché e pregiudizi del genere, altre ancora ci trasporta in un futuro lontanissimo lasciandoci con un finale scioccante che mette in discussione tutto ciò che si era letto in precedenza. Insomma, con questa raccolta scopriamo un autore di fantascienza pura e incredibile, un’amante del genere, un "nerd", ma anche una penna in grado di adattarsi a qualsiasi idea, assurda o plausibile che essa sia, creando suspense, azione e rivelazioni scioccanti che altri autori potrebbero fare solo nel corso di un’epopea scientifica.
Altro elemento a stupirmi è stata l’ironia, la freschezza, l’aspetto comico e divertente da cui ogni racconto è caratterizzato. Nonostante la trama delle singole vicende, ognuna è raccontata con un tono auto-ironico difficile da non notare, nemmeno quando l’autore ha cercato di nasconderla tra le righe. Un carattere che dà un meraviglioso tocco di leggerezza a queste storie.
Un libro un po’ complesso da recensire in realtà, perchè ogni racconto avrebbe bisogno di un commento a sé, ma tutti sono talmente incredibili e avvincenti che trovo difficile una critica negativa. Nonostante le oltre mille pagine è un libro che si legge in un soffio, e se amate il genere vi consiglio assolutamente di recuperare questa lettura perchè vi regalerà alcune perle uniche e indimenticabili!
Ad arricchire la lettura dei racconti ho trovato una splendida prefazione, arguta e interessante, dell’autore di cui vorrei lasciarvi due brevi citazioni che mi sono segnata e che trovo meravigliosamente azzeccate:
"I tentativi di distinguere la fantascienza dal fantasy hanno fatto scorrere molto sangue. Io ho suggerito una definizione operativa: la fantascienza è qualcosa che potrebbe accadere, ma che di solito preferireste di no. Il fantasy è invece qualcosa che non potrebbe accadere, anche se spesso lo desiderereste."
E poi la mia preferita….
"Nel tracciare tutti i possibili futuri, anche molti di quelli più improbabili, lo scrittore di fantascienza rende un grande servigio alla comunità. Incoraggia la flessibilità mentale dei lettori, la loro capacità di accettare rapidamente e persino accogliere di buon grado i mutamenti, in breve, l’adattabilità. Forse non c’è attributo più importante oggi. I
dinosauri scomparvero per la loro incapacità di adattarsi ai cambiamenti ambientali. Noi scompariremo se non sapremo adattarci a un ambiente di cui ora fanno parte navi spaziali, computer… e armi termonucleari. Perciò nulla potrebbe risultare più ridicolo dell’accusa mossa talvolta alla fantascienza, e cioè di essere un genere d’evasione."
A volte Clarke ci sorprende con una storia raccontata tramite rapporti di missioni, altre con una riflessione sulla fantascienza e su cliché e pregiudizi del genere, altre ancora ci trasporta in un futuro lontanissimo lasciandoci con un finale scioccante che mette in discussione tutto ciò che si era letto in precedenza. Insomma, con questa raccolta scopriamo un autore di fantascienza pura e incredibile, un’amante del genere, un "nerd", ma anche una penna in grado di adattarsi a qualsiasi idea, assurda o plausibile che essa sia, creando suspense, azione e rivelazioni scioccanti che altri autori potrebbero fare solo nel corso di un’epopea scientifica.
Altro elemento a stupirmi è stata l’ironia, la freschezza, l’aspetto comico e divertente da cui ogni racconto è caratterizzato. Nonostante la trama delle singole vicende, ognuna è raccontata con un tono auto-ironico difficile da non notare, nemmeno quando l’autore ha cercato di nasconderla tra le righe. Un carattere che dà un meraviglioso tocco di leggerezza a queste storie.
Un libro un po’ complesso da recensire in realtà, perchè ogni racconto avrebbe bisogno di un commento a sé, ma tutti sono talmente incredibili e avvincenti che trovo difficile una critica negativa. Nonostante le oltre mille pagine è un libro che si legge in un soffio, e se amate il genere vi consiglio assolutamente di recuperare questa lettura perchè vi regalerà alcune perle uniche e indimenticabili!
Ad arricchire la lettura dei racconti ho trovato una splendida prefazione, arguta e interessante, dell’autore di cui vorrei lasciarvi due brevi citazioni che mi sono segnata e che trovo meravigliosamente azzeccate:
"I tentativi di distinguere la fantascienza dal fantasy hanno fatto scorrere molto sangue. Io ho suggerito una definizione operativa: la fantascienza è qualcosa che potrebbe accadere, ma che di solito preferireste di no. Il fantasy è invece qualcosa che non potrebbe accadere, anche se spesso lo desiderereste."
E poi la mia preferita….
"Nel tracciare tutti i possibili futuri, anche molti di quelli più improbabili, lo scrittore di fantascienza rende un grande servigio alla comunità. Incoraggia la flessibilità mentale dei lettori, la loro capacità di accettare rapidamente e persino accogliere di buon grado i mutamenti, in breve, l’adattabilità. Forse non c’è attributo più importante oggi. I
dinosauri scomparvero per la loro incapacità di adattarsi ai cambiamenti ambientali. Noi scompariremo se non sapremo adattarci a un ambiente di cui ora fanno parte navi spaziali, computer… e armi termonucleari. Perciò nulla potrebbe risultare più ridicolo dell’accusa mossa talvolta alla fantascienza, e cioè di essere un genere d’evasione."
April 21, 2019
It grew on me.
As the kind of hard science-fiction Clarke is known for it's.... not great. But that's very clearly not what he's going for here. It reads more like HHGTTG: light-hearted and vaguely absurdist.
and
And most impressively, Clarke managed to predict the ending to "The Martian":
Worth the ten minutes it took to find and the next ten it took to read.
As the kind of hard science-fiction Clarke is known for it's.... not great. But that's very clearly not what he's going for here. It reads more like HHGTTG: light-hearted and vaguely absurdist.
When all were conscious (or as nearly so as could be expected in the circumstances), I rapidly outlined the situation and explained the need for complete calm. After the resulting hysteria had subsided[...]
and
The leader spoke to me in what would have been flawless BBC English had it not been for the bits he had obviously picked up from Schoncctady.
And most impressively, Clarke managed to predict the ending to "The Martian":
I carefully punctured my space-suit with the pin, and in a moment the escaping jet of air drove me back to the ship.
Worth the ten minutes it took to find and the next ten it took to read.
April 12, 2021
This collection includes 104 stories, which represents all but four of the stories Arthur C. Clarke published in his lifetime. This volume fully collects and supersedes 13 earlier collections.
Here are my reviews of the most notable stories:
"How We Went to Mars" (1938) -- A comedy about a trio of astronauts who accidentally launch their rocket into space and end up on Mars, where they are startled to be greeted by English-speaking Martians who possess technology just slightly below the level of a second-rate science fiction novel. Think Monty Python in space. Awarded a 1939 Retro Hugo Award for Best Short Story.
"Rescue Party" (1946)--A few hours before Sol goes supernova, a rescue party of aliens arrives on Earth but finds it empty. This story is remarkable in how it builds tension simply by having the aliens interact with our machines and piece clues together to figure out what happened to us. The ending was absolutely amazing. Clarke shared Asimov's view that Earth is unique in the cosmos because it engenders fast evolutionary development.
"The Wall of Darkness" (1949) -- Shervane lives in a universe with only one sun and one planet. The planet does not rotate on its axis, so one side always faces the sun while the other is always (presumably) in darkness. The line of demarcation is marked by an ancient, impenetrable wall with mysterious other-worldly properties. Shervane makes it his life's mission to cross over the wall. He discovers his cosmos is shaped like a Möbius strip. The wall only has one side; it sits atop the twist in space-time.
"Breaking Strain" (1949) -- After colliding with a meteor, a freight ship is left with only enough oxygen to support one of its two crew members. This taut psychological drama is an effective rebuttal to those who criticize Clarke's ability to write memorable characters. The author said in his introduction it was one of the stories that influenced the plot of 2001 (the design of the ship, astronauts trying to kill each other).
"Guardian Angel" (1950)--The Overlords arrive on our planet in a fleet of near-light speed ships bringing advanced technology and medicine. They usher in a utopia free of disease, poverty, war, and hard labor…. But what is their purpose? Why will they not reveal what they look like? The famous twist about the Overlords' physical appearance was added to the final paragraph of this story by author James Blish, after a magazine editor asked him to do a last-minute polish of Clarke's manuscript. This story was later expanded into chapters 2-4 of the classic novel Childhood's End.
"The Sentinel" (1951) -- An astronaut discovers an alien artifact atop the mountains on the moon, standing guard over Earth, waiting for the day we achieve both spaceflight and power over the atom. This is an excellent story which provided the genesis of the idea of the monoliths in 2001.
"Earthlight" (1951) -- In the year 2015, Earth is in a bitter dispute with her space colonies over uranium trade. Two lunar astronomers get pulled into the escalating conflict after vast deposits are discovered near the surface of the moon. I appreciate this story for its geopolitical complexity, its operatic space battle, and its detailed examination of the challenges of living on the moon during its two consecutive weeks of "night". The author expanded this novella into a novel of the same name in 1955.
"Second Dawn" (1951) -- On a faraway planet, a sentient species has evolved from grazing herbivores without arms, tentacles, or opposing thumbs. They have no means of manipulating their physical environment, so they have developed advanced forms of mental abilities -- telepathy, philosophy, and abstract mathematics. They discover another creature on their world with opposable thumbs that is less advanced culturally but which has mastered fire, pottery, and metal-working. Together, these two species can combine their talents into a symbiotic society that far outpaces earth. This is a fascinating and well-developed exploration of how parallel evolution might work.
"The Nine Billion Names of God" (1953) - A Tibetan monk requests a computer to assist his order in finding all the names of God. This story won a 1954 Retro Hugo and is often cited as one of the Top 10 science fiction stories of all time.
"Jupiter Five" (1953) -- A group of scientists travel to the fifth and smallest moon of Jupiter. They discover it is really a spaceship left behind by a now-extinct alien race five million years ago. Shades of Rendezvous with Rama.
"Encounter in the Dawn" (1953) -- Explorers from an ancient dying race meet Neanderthal ape-men on Earth and leave them with rudimentary tools to aid their technological progress. Clarke repeatedly cited this story as the inspiration for the opening sequence of the film 2001.
"The Deep Range" (1954) -- A whale farmer protects his herd from sharks and other predators in the North Sea, aided by a pair of highly trained porpoises. This is a taut survival tale and also an interesting extrapolation of how man may one day tame the ocean. Clarke later expanded it into a full-length novel of the same name.
"Patent Pending" (1954) -- A scientist invents a machine that can record the pleasure centers of the brain and then replay the experience for others. It falls into the hands of an unscrupulous Frenchman and… well, you can guess the rest. Clarke at his most ribald manages to predict the rise of virtual reality in the porn industry. The 4th White Hart story.
"The Star" (1955) -- A Jesuit astrophysicist investigates a supernova and the alien civilization it destroyed thousands of years ago. The ending is surprising and memorable. This story won a 1956 Hugo for Best Short Story.
"The Songs of Distant Earth" (1958) -- A giant interstellar colony ship on a 300-year voyage stops to make emergency repairs on a small underdeveloped planet. A brief forbidden romance flourishes between one of the ship's married engineers and a young native woman who is engaged to another man. This is a beautiful, almost poetic story that explores the sacrifices that must be made to spread mankind throughout the galaxy.
"Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting..." (1959) -- Clarke examines the precise moment when humanity will know it has crossed the threshold to become a spacefaring race. The title comes from a famous quote: "Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever."
"The Wind from the Sun" (1964) -- Space yachts harness the minute pressures of solar energy as their captains race from the Earth to the moon. An excellent hard sci-fi story about how this technology could work.
"A Meeting with Medusa" (1973) -- Howard Falcon is a heavily mech-augmented human who performs the first manned mission to survey the upper atmosphere of Jupiter in a dirigible craft. While this Nebula-winning novella never manages to make Falcon a really engaging character, it succeeds in detailed world-building. Jupiter is populated with strange bioluminescent aerial plankton, animals that feed on hydrocarbon bubbles, and giant gas-filled jellyfish a hundred thousand times larger than whales.
Here are my reviews of the most notable stories:
"How We Went to Mars" (1938) -- A comedy about a trio of astronauts who accidentally launch their rocket into space and end up on Mars, where they are startled to be greeted by English-speaking Martians who possess technology just slightly below the level of a second-rate science fiction novel. Think Monty Python in space. Awarded a 1939 Retro Hugo Award for Best Short Story.
"Rescue Party" (1946)--A few hours before Sol goes supernova, a rescue party of aliens arrives on Earth but finds it empty. This story is remarkable in how it builds tension simply by having the aliens interact with our machines and piece clues together to figure out what happened to us. The ending was absolutely amazing. Clarke shared Asimov's view that Earth is unique in the cosmos because it engenders fast evolutionary development.
"The Wall of Darkness" (1949) -- Shervane lives in a universe with only one sun and one planet. The planet does not rotate on its axis, so one side always faces the sun while the other is always (presumably) in darkness. The line of demarcation is marked by an ancient, impenetrable wall with mysterious other-worldly properties. Shervane makes it his life's mission to cross over the wall. He discovers his cosmos is shaped like a Möbius strip. The wall only has one side; it sits atop the twist in space-time.
"Breaking Strain" (1949) -- After colliding with a meteor, a freight ship is left with only enough oxygen to support one of its two crew members. This taut psychological drama is an effective rebuttal to those who criticize Clarke's ability to write memorable characters. The author said in his introduction it was one of the stories that influenced the plot of 2001 (the design of the ship, astronauts trying to kill each other).
"Guardian Angel" (1950)--The Overlords arrive on our planet in a fleet of near-light speed ships bringing advanced technology and medicine. They usher in a utopia free of disease, poverty, war, and hard labor…. But what is their purpose? Why will they not reveal what they look like? The famous twist about the Overlords' physical appearance was added to the final paragraph of this story by author James Blish, after a magazine editor asked him to do a last-minute polish of Clarke's manuscript. This story was later expanded into chapters 2-4 of the classic novel Childhood's End.
"The Sentinel" (1951) -- An astronaut discovers an alien artifact atop the mountains on the moon, standing guard over Earth, waiting for the day we achieve both spaceflight and power over the atom. This is an excellent story which provided the genesis of the idea of the monoliths in 2001.
"Earthlight" (1951) -- In the year 2015, Earth is in a bitter dispute with her space colonies over uranium trade. Two lunar astronomers get pulled into the escalating conflict after vast deposits are discovered near the surface of the moon. I appreciate this story for its geopolitical complexity, its operatic space battle, and its detailed examination of the challenges of living on the moon during its two consecutive weeks of "night". The author expanded this novella into a novel of the same name in 1955.
"Second Dawn" (1951) -- On a faraway planet, a sentient species has evolved from grazing herbivores without arms, tentacles, or opposing thumbs. They have no means of manipulating their physical environment, so they have developed advanced forms of mental abilities -- telepathy, philosophy, and abstract mathematics. They discover another creature on their world with opposable thumbs that is less advanced culturally but which has mastered fire, pottery, and metal-working. Together, these two species can combine their talents into a symbiotic society that far outpaces earth. This is a fascinating and well-developed exploration of how parallel evolution might work.
"The Nine Billion Names of God" (1953) - A Tibetan monk requests a computer to assist his order in finding all the names of God. This story won a 1954 Retro Hugo and is often cited as one of the Top 10 science fiction stories of all time.
"Jupiter Five" (1953) -- A group of scientists travel to the fifth and smallest moon of Jupiter. They discover it is really a spaceship left behind by a now-extinct alien race five million years ago. Shades of Rendezvous with Rama.
"Encounter in the Dawn" (1953) -- Explorers from an ancient dying race meet Neanderthal ape-men on Earth and leave them with rudimentary tools to aid their technological progress. Clarke repeatedly cited this story as the inspiration for the opening sequence of the film 2001.
"The Deep Range" (1954) -- A whale farmer protects his herd from sharks and other predators in the North Sea, aided by a pair of highly trained porpoises. This is a taut survival tale and also an interesting extrapolation of how man may one day tame the ocean. Clarke later expanded it into a full-length novel of the same name.
"Patent Pending" (1954) -- A scientist invents a machine that can record the pleasure centers of the brain and then replay the experience for others. It falls into the hands of an unscrupulous Frenchman and… well, you can guess the rest. Clarke at his most ribald manages to predict the rise of virtual reality in the porn industry. The 4th White Hart story.
"The Star" (1955) -- A Jesuit astrophysicist investigates a supernova and the alien civilization it destroyed thousands of years ago. The ending is surprising and memorable. This story won a 1956 Hugo for Best Short Story.
"The Songs of Distant Earth" (1958) -- A giant interstellar colony ship on a 300-year voyage stops to make emergency repairs on a small underdeveloped planet. A brief forbidden romance flourishes between one of the ship's married engineers and a young native woman who is engaged to another man. This is a beautiful, almost poetic story that explores the sacrifices that must be made to spread mankind throughout the galaxy.
"Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting..." (1959) -- Clarke examines the precise moment when humanity will know it has crossed the threshold to become a spacefaring race. The title comes from a famous quote: "Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever."
"The Wind from the Sun" (1964) -- Space yachts harness the minute pressures of solar energy as their captains race from the Earth to the moon. An excellent hard sci-fi story about how this technology could work.
"A Meeting with Medusa" (1973) -- Howard Falcon is a heavily mech-augmented human who performs the first manned mission to survey the upper atmosphere of Jupiter in a dirigible craft. While this Nebula-winning novella never manages to make Falcon a really engaging character, it succeeds in detailed world-building. Jupiter is populated with strange bioluminescent aerial plankton, animals that feed on hydrocarbon bubbles, and giant gas-filled jellyfish a hundred thousand times larger than whales.
October 10, 2019
The brilliance of Clarke shines through in this collection of sometimes eerily prescient stories. I used this as a palette cleanser between novels, and I'm sad it's finished.
November 5, 2020
Monster of a book. Stories are quite uneven, but the whole is brilliant overall.
November 9, 2022
“The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers — and thermonuclear weapons.” - Forward of The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke is a wonderful collection of short stories. Especially in ebook or audiobook format, you receive tremendous value for little money. The 114 stories are collected in the order that they were published, beginning in 1937 with "Travel by Wire!" to 1999 with "Improving the Neighbourhood.” Clarke notes in the introduction that the Earth saw more technology changes in his lifetime than it had ever experienced in the previous 10,000 years or so of human civilization. Jet airplanes, rockets, nuclear weapons, man walking on the moon, computers that can fit in the palm of your hand, etc. What an exciting time to be a science fiction writer. The tales in this collection reflect the era that Clarke lived through, along with his incredible imagination.
Some of my favorite quotes from this collection:
“There may be a moral here. For the life of me I can't find it.” - What Goes Up, p. 529
“Christine would surely be talking, even if she had only an ape as audience. To her, any silence was as great a challenge as a blank canvas; it had to be filled with the sound of her own voice.” - An Ape About the House, p. 802
“He knew something of the emotion the artist must feel when his dreams become reality.” - The Wall of Darkness, p. 114
“Captain Saunders, who came from Dallas and had no intention of being impressed by any prince, found himself unexpectedly moved by the wide, sad eyes. There were eyes that had seen too many receptions and parades, that had had to watch countless totally uninteresting things, that had never been allowed to stray far from the carefully planned official routes. Looking at that proud but weary face, Captain Saunders glimpsed for the first time the ultimate loneliness of royalty.” - Patent Pending, p. 508
“There are some things that no amount of pure intelligence can anticipate, but which can only be learned by bitter experience.” -The Road to the Sea, p. 284
“The future is built on the rubble of the past; wisdom lies in facing that fact, not in fighting against it.” - The Road to the Sea, p. 265
“Great art and domestic bliss are mutually incompatible. Sooner or later, you'll have to make your choice.” - The Road to the Sea, p. 298
“He was suddenly struck by an idea so brilliant that he was quite sure it could not possibly work.” - Hide-and-Seek, p. 166
“Now there are some forms of apparel that may be worn or discarded as the fancy pleases with no other ill effects than a possible loss of social prestige. But spacesuits are not among them.” - Breaking Strain, p. 184
“For what is life but organized energy?” - Out of the Sun, p. 656
“Like the atom bomb, it arose out of equally academic research. Never, gentlemen, underestimate science. I doubt if there is a single field of study so theoretical, so remote from what is laughingly called everyday life, that it may not one day produce something that will shake the world.” - Patent Pending, p. 500
“The idea of death was utterly incongruous—as it is to all men until the final second.” - Maelstrom II, p. 789
“Purvis looked at him as though seeing something that had no right to be around in a world that had invented penicillin.” - Silence Please, p. 247
“Why should men travel, he asked himself bitterly, across the gulf of stars at such expense and risk—merely to land on a spinning slag heap? For the same reason, he knew, that they had once struggled to reach Everest and the Poles and the far places of the Earth—for the excitement of the body that was adventure, and the more enduring excitement of the mind that was discovery.” - Summertime on Icarus, p. 730
“He had wished to convince himself that Comarre was evil. Now he knew that it was not. There would always be, even in Utopia, some for whom the world had nothing to offer but sorrow and disillusion.” - The Lion of Comarre, p. 151
“There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed but nothing could be done about good men who were deluded.” - Guardian Angel, p. 220
“It is hardly necessary for me to say that I do not believe in the supernatural; everything that happened has a perfectly rational explanation, obvious to any man with the slightest knowledge of psychology.” - Dog Star, p. 786
“News that is sufficiently bad somehow carries its own guarantee of truth. Only good reports need confirmation.” - Breaking Strain, p. 170
“There was nothing like a museum for calming the mind, for putting the problems of everyday life in their true perspective. Here, surrounded by the infinite variety and wonder of Nature, he was reminded of truths he had forgotten. He was only one of a million million creatures that shared this planet Earth. The entire human race, with its hopes and fears, its triumphs and its follies, might be no more than an incident in the history of the world.” - Death and the Senator, p. 744
“The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.” - The Road to the Sea, p. 269
“History, it has been said, never repeats itself but historical situations recur.” - Earthlight, p. 347
“I doubt if such a word exists, and if it does, it shouldn’t.” - Silence Please, p. 247
“This sounded promising, and my coefficient of cupidity jumped several points.” - I Remember Babylon, p. 705
“It is surprising how long it takes to do a simple addition when your life depends on the answer.” - Breaking Strain, p. 172
“A single neutron begins the chain-reaction that in an instant can destroy a million lives and the toil of generations. Equally insignificant and unimportant are the trigger-events which can sometimes change a man’s course of action and so alter the whole pattern of his future.” - Breaking Strain, p. 181
“Why should one be afraid of something merely because it is strange?: - The Wall of Darkness, p. 114
Note: The page numbers from the 2002 paperback edition, published by the Orb
Title: The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
Author: Arthur C. Clarke
Dates: first published in 2000, the 114 stories in this book were written from 1937 to 1999
Genre: Fiction - Short story collection, science fiction
Page count: 980 pages
Date(s) read: October 10, 2022 - November 9, 2022
Reading journal entry #300 in 2022
Links to the images:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Co...
https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?118431
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2008/...\
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/bo...
The contents of the book:
[First edition cover of The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke]
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke is a wonderful collection of short stories. Especially in ebook or audiobook format, you receive tremendous value for little money. The 114 stories are collected in the order that they were published, beginning in 1937 with "Travel by Wire!" to 1999 with "Improving the Neighbourhood.” Clarke notes in the introduction that the Earth saw more technology changes in his lifetime than it had ever experienced in the previous 10,000 years or so of human civilization. Jet airplanes, rockets, nuclear weapons, man walking on the moon, computers that can fit in the palm of your hand, etc. What an exciting time to be a science fiction writer. The tales in this collection reflect the era that Clarke lived through, along with his incredible imagination.
[Arthur C. Clarke on the set of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, circa 1967. Clarke and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick used Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel” (1948, first published in 1951) as a starting point for the 2001 project. Clarke states that his short story "Encounter in the Dawn" (1953) inspired the film, too. Clarke wrote the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey concurrently with the writing and production of the film]
Some of my favorite quotes from this collection:
“There may be a moral here. For the life of me I can't find it.” - What Goes Up, p. 529
“Christine would surely be talking, even if she had only an ape as audience. To her, any silence was as great a challenge as a blank canvas; it had to be filled with the sound of her own voice.” - An Ape About the House, p. 802
“He knew something of the emotion the artist must feel when his dreams become reality.” - The Wall of Darkness, p. 114
“Captain Saunders, who came from Dallas and had no intention of being impressed by any prince, found himself unexpectedly moved by the wide, sad eyes. There were eyes that had seen too many receptions and parades, that had had to watch countless totally uninteresting things, that had never been allowed to stray far from the carefully planned official routes. Looking at that proud but weary face, Captain Saunders glimpsed for the first time the ultimate loneliness of royalty.” - Patent Pending, p. 508
The false logic involved is: “We exist; therefore something—call it X—created us.” Once this assumption is made, the properties of the hypothetical X can be fantasied in an unlimited number of ways.
But the entire process is obviously fallacious; for by the same logic something must have created X—and so on. We are immediately involved in an infinite regress, which can have no meaning in the real universe.
- Crusade, p. 878
“There are some things that no amount of pure intelligence can anticipate, but which can only be learned by bitter experience.” -The Road to the Sea, p. 284
“The future is built on the rubble of the past; wisdom lies in facing that fact, not in fighting against it.” - The Road to the Sea, p. 265
“Great art and domestic bliss are mutually incompatible. Sooner or later, you'll have to make your choice.” - The Road to the Sea, p. 298
“He was suddenly struck by an idea so brilliant that he was quite sure it could not possibly work.” - Hide-and-Seek, p. 166
“Censorship does raise some very difficult problems, doesn’t it? I’ve always argued that there’s an inverse correlation between a country’s degree of civilisation and the restraints it puts on its press.”
A New English voice from the back of the room cut in: “On that argument, Paris is a more civilised place than Boston.”
“Precisely,” answered Purvis. For once, he waited for a reply.
“OK,” said the New England voice mildly. “I’m not arguing. I just wanted to check.”
-Patent Pending, p. 500
“Now there are some forms of apparel that may be worn or discarded as the fancy pleases with no other ill effects than a possible loss of social prestige. But spacesuits are not among them.” - Breaking Strain, p. 184
“For what is life but organized energy?” - Out of the Sun, p. 656
“Like the atom bomb, it arose out of equally academic research. Never, gentlemen, underestimate science. I doubt if there is a single field of study so theoretical, so remote from what is laughingly called everyday life, that it may not one day produce something that will shake the world.” - Patent Pending, p. 500
“The idea of death was utterly incongruous—as it is to all men until the final second.” - Maelstrom II, p. 789
“Purvis looked at him as though seeing something that had no right to be around in a world that had invented penicillin.” - Silence Please, p. 247
“Why should men travel, he asked himself bitterly, across the gulf of stars at such expense and risk—merely to land on a spinning slag heap? For the same reason, he knew, that they had once struggled to reach Everest and the Poles and the far places of the Earth—for the excitement of the body that was adventure, and the more enduring excitement of the mind that was discovery.” - Summertime on Icarus, p. 730
“He had wished to convince himself that Comarre was evil. Now he knew that it was not. There would always be, even in Utopia, some for whom the world had nothing to offer but sorrow and disillusion.” - The Lion of Comarre, p. 151
“You’re a gang of robbers,” he said once. “You’re seeing how quickly you can loot this planet of its resources, and you don’t give a damn about the next generation.”
“And what,” answered McKenzie, not very originally, “has the next generation ever done for us?”
-The Man Who Ploughed the Sea, p. 620
“There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed but nothing could be done about good men who were deluded.” - Guardian Angel, p. 220
“It is hardly necessary for me to say that I do not believe in the supernatural; everything that happened has a perfectly rational explanation, obvious to any man with the slightest knowledge of psychology.” - Dog Star, p. 786
“News that is sufficiently bad somehow carries its own guarantee of truth. Only good reports need confirmation.” - Breaking Strain, p. 170
“There was nothing like a museum for calming the mind, for putting the problems of everyday life in their true perspective. Here, surrounded by the infinite variety and wonder of Nature, he was reminded of truths he had forgotten. He was only one of a million million creatures that shared this planet Earth. The entire human race, with its hopes and fears, its triumphs and its follies, might be no more than an incident in the history of the world.” - Death and the Senator, p. 744
“The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.” - The Road to the Sea, p. 269
“History, it has been said, never repeats itself but historical situations recur.” - Earthlight, p. 347
“I doubt if such a word exists, and if it does, it shouldn’t.” - Silence Please, p. 247
“This sounded promising, and my coefficient of cupidity jumped several points.” - I Remember Babylon, p. 705
“It is surprising how long it takes to do a simple addition when your life depends on the answer.” - Breaking Strain, p. 172
“A single neutron begins the chain-reaction that in an instant can destroy a million lives and the toil of generations. Equally insignificant and unimportant are the trigger-events which can sometimes change a man’s course of action and so alter the whole pattern of his future.” - Breaking Strain, p. 181
“Why should one be afraid of something merely because it is strange?: - The Wall of Darkness, p. 114
Note: The page numbers from the 2002 paperback edition, published by the Orb
Title: The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
Author: Arthur C. Clarke
Dates: first published in 2000, the 114 stories in this book were written from 1937 to 1999
Genre: Fiction - Short story collection, science fiction
Page count: 980 pages
Date(s) read: October 10, 2022 - November 9, 2022
Reading journal entry #300 in 2022
[Arthur C. Clarke near the end of his life, circa 2008]
Links to the images:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Co...
https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?118431
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2008/...\
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/bo...
The contents of the book:
"Travel by Wire!"
"How We Went to Mars"
"Retreat from Earth"
"Reverie"
"The Awakening"
"Whacky"
"Loophole"
"Rescue Party"
"Technical Error"
"Castaway"
"The Fires Within"
"Inheritance"
"Nightfall"
"History Lesson"
"Transience"
"The Wall of Darkness"
"The Lion of Comarre"
"The Forgotten Enemy"
"Hide-and-Seek"
"Breaking Strain"
"Nemesis"
"Guardian Angel"
"Time's Arrow"
"A Walk in the Dark"
"Silence Please"
"Trouble with the Natives"
"The Road to the Sea"
"The Sentinel"
"Holiday on the Moon"
"Earthlight"
"Second Dawn"
"Superiority"
"If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth"
"All the Time in the World"
"The Nine Billion Names of God"
"The Possessed"
"The Parasite"
"Jupiter Five"
"Encounter in the Dawn"
"The Other Tiger"
"Publicity Campaign"
"Armaments Race"
"The Deep Range"
"No Morning After"
"Big Game Hunt"
"Patent Pending"
"Refugee"
"The Star"
"What Goes Up"
"Venture to the Moon" (six individual connected stories)
"The Starting Line"
"Robin Hood, F.R.S."
"Green Fingers"
"All That Glitters"
"Watch This Space"
"A Question of Residence"
"The Pacifist"
"The Reluctant Orchid"
"Moving Spirit"
"The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch"
"The Ultimate Melody"
"The Next Tenants"
"Cold War"
"Sleeping Beauty"
"Security Check"
"The Man Who Ploughed the Sea"
"Critical Mass"
"The Other Side of the Sky" (six individual connected stories)
"Special Delivery"
"Feathered Friends"
"Take a Deep Breath"
"Freedom of Space"
"Passer-by"
"The Call of the Stars"
"Let There Be Light"
"Out of the Sun"
"Cosmic Casanova"
"The Songs of Distant Earth"
"A Slight Case of Sunstroke"
"Who's There?"
"Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting..."
"I Remember Babylon"
"Trouble with Time"
"Into the Comet"
"Summertime on Icarus"
"Saturn Rising"
"Death and the Senator"
"Before Eden"
"Hate"
"Love That Universe"
"Dog Star"
"Maelstrom II"
"An Ape About the House"
"The Shining Ones"
"The Secret"
"Dial F for Frankenstein"
"The Wind from the Sun"
"The Food of the Gods"
"The Last Command"
"Light of Darkness"
"The Longest Science-fiction Story Ever Told"
"Playback"
"The Cruel Sky"
"Herbert George Morley Roberts Wells, Esq."
"Crusade"
"Neutron Tide"
"Reunion"
"Transit of Earth"
"A Meeting with Medusa"
"Quarantine"
"'siseneG': 'Genesis' Spelled Backwards"
"The Steam-powered Word Processor"
"On Golden Seas"
"The Hammer of God"
"The Wire Continuum" (with Stephen Baxter)
"Improving the Neighbourhood"
Want to read
October 24, 2023Contains the stories:
Travel by Wire! -
How We Went to Mars -
Retreat From Earth -
Reverie -
The Awakening -
Whacky -
Loophole -
Rescue Party -
Technical Error -
Castaway -
The Fires Within -
Inheritance -
Nightfall -
History Lesson -
Transience -
The Wall of Darkness -
The Lion of Comarre -
The Forgotten Enemy -
Hide-and-Seek -
Breaking Strain -
Nemesis -
Guardian Angel -
Time's Arrow -
A Walk in the Dark -
Silence Please -
Trouble With the Natives -
The Road to the Sea -
The Sentinel -
Holiday on the Moon -
Earthlight -
Second Dawn -
Superiority -
'If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth...' -
All the Time in the World -
The Nine Billion Names of God - 5/5 - monks get computerized
The Possessed -
The Parasite -
Jupiter Five -
Encounter In the Dawn -
The Other Tiger -
Publicity Campaign -
Armaments Race -
The Deep Range -
No Morning After -
Big Game Hunt -
Patent Pending -
Refugee -
The Star - 4/5 - the significance of a supernova
What Goes Up -
Venture to the Moon -
The Pacifist -
The Reluctant Orchid -
Moving Spirit -
The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch -
The Ultimate Melody -
The Next Tenants -
Cold War -
Sleeping Beauty -
Security Check -
The Man Who Ploughed the Sea -
Critical Mass -
The Other Side of the Sky -
Let There Be Light -
Out of the Sun -
Cosmic Casanova -
The Songs of Distant Earth -
A Slight Case of Sunstroke -
Who's There? -
Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting... -
I Remember Babylon -
Trouble With Time -
Into the Comet -
Summertime on Icarus -
Saturn Rising -
Death and the Senator -
Before Eden -
Hate -
Love that Universe -
Dog Star -
Maelstrom II -
An Ape About the House -
The Shining Ones -
The Secret -
Dial F For Frankenstein -
The Wind from the Sun -
The Food of the Gods -
The Last Command -
Light of Darkness -
The Longest Science-fiction Story Ever Told -
Playback -
The Cruel Sky -
Herbert George Morley Roberts Wells, Esq. -
Crusade -
Neutron Tide -
Reunions -
Transit of Earth -
A Meeting With Medusa -
Quarantine -
'siseneG' -
The Steam-powered Word Processor -
On Golden Seas -
The Hammer of God -
The Wire Continuum -
Improving the Neighbourhood -
Travel by Wire! -
How We Went to Mars -
Retreat From Earth -
Reverie -
The Awakening -
Whacky -
Loophole -
Rescue Party -
Technical Error -
Castaway -
The Fires Within -
Inheritance -
Nightfall -
History Lesson -
Transience -
The Wall of Darkness -
The Lion of Comarre -
The Forgotten Enemy -
Hide-and-Seek -
Breaking Strain -
Nemesis -
Guardian Angel -
Time's Arrow -
A Walk in the Dark -
Silence Please -
Trouble With the Natives -
The Road to the Sea -
The Sentinel -
Holiday on the Moon -
Earthlight -
Second Dawn -
Superiority -
'If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth...' -
All the Time in the World -
The Nine Billion Names of God - 5/5 - monks get computerized
The Possessed -
The Parasite -
Jupiter Five -
Encounter In the Dawn -
The Other Tiger -
Publicity Campaign -
Armaments Race -
The Deep Range -
No Morning After -
Big Game Hunt -
Patent Pending -
Refugee -
The Star - 4/5 - the significance of a supernova
What Goes Up -
Venture to the Moon -
The Pacifist -
The Reluctant Orchid -
Moving Spirit -
The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch -
The Ultimate Melody -
The Next Tenants -
Cold War -
Sleeping Beauty -
Security Check -
The Man Who Ploughed the Sea -
Critical Mass -
The Other Side of the Sky -
Let There Be Light -
Out of the Sun -
Cosmic Casanova -
The Songs of Distant Earth -
A Slight Case of Sunstroke -
Who's There? -
Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting... -
I Remember Babylon -
Trouble With Time -
Into the Comet -
Summertime on Icarus -
Saturn Rising -
Death and the Senator -
Before Eden -
Hate -
Love that Universe -
Dog Star -
Maelstrom II -
An Ape About the House -
The Shining Ones -
The Secret -
Dial F For Frankenstein -
The Wind from the Sun -
The Food of the Gods -
The Last Command -
Light of Darkness -
The Longest Science-fiction Story Ever Told -
Playback -
The Cruel Sky -
Herbert George Morley Roberts Wells, Esq. -
Crusade -
Neutron Tide -
Reunions -
Transit of Earth -
A Meeting With Medusa -
Quarantine -
'siseneG' -
The Steam-powered Word Processor -
On Golden Seas -
The Hammer of God -
The Wire Continuum -
Improving the Neighbourhood -
March 28, 2024
The sheer scale and range of Arthur C. Clarke's short fiction cannot be overstated. This collection of all 100+ short stories of his extensive career is a showcase of imagination married to hard scientific ideas that deserves to be read and savoured. It's rare I spend more than a week or two on a book. To have slowly made my way through this huge volume over a 3-month period is a testament to the ideas of Clarke, and the enjoyment I've gained from this work. Personal favourites include The Nine Billion Names of God, The Sentinel, and Earthlight. The tales from the White Hart also struck a chord.
Never too heavy, Clarke had a wonderful lightness of touch in his fiction that means you never feel overwhelmed or patronised. Although I doubt I'll ever re-read the collection in full, I will be returning to dip in to individual works when seeking inspiration or escape.
Never too heavy, Clarke had a wonderful lightness of touch in his fiction that means you never feel overwhelmed or patronised. Although I doubt I'll ever re-read the collection in full, I will be returning to dip in to individual works when seeking inspiration or escape.
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