The definitive collection of Clarke's work including 'The Sentinel' -the basis for 2001: A Space Odyssey, 'The Nine Billion Names of God, and the Hugo-winning 'The Star.'
Clarke’s first short story ‘Travel by Wire’ was published in Amateur Science Fiction in December 1937, and is collected (together with another one-hundred-and-three short stories) in The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke.
Prelude To Space
Clarke’s SF career –with many other Britons—stalled until after World War Two, when appeared in Astounding twice in 1946. Most of his early stories are at best competent, but by 1949 he was writing stories as good as ‘The Forgotten Enemy,’ in which Britain has descended into another Ice Age, and the strange ‘The Wall of Darkness.’
The Other Side of the Sky
Clarke produced almost half his short SF in the 1950s. As early as 1951, with the poignant ‘If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth,’ with its haunting image of a radioactive Earth hanging in the Lunar sky, and ‘The Sentinel,’ which was later used as the basis for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke was producing top-notch stories.
Among the best are ‘All the Time in the World,’ where a mysterious woman hires a thief to steal the world’s treasures; in ‘The Songs of Distant Earth,’ a quiet colony has it’s tranquillity briefly disrupted by the arrival of a starship making repairs; and two groups of vignettes, ‘Conquest of the Moon,’ and ‘The Other Side of the Sky,’ both (then) near-future explorations of space in groups of short-short stories.
Ironically, for such a noted secularist religion features heavily in Clarke’s work, be it ‘The Nine Billion Names of God,’ where Tibetan monks use a computer to fulfil God’s work, with catastrophic results, or ‘The Star,’ his Hugo-winning masterpiece about a Jesuit learning the heart-breaking truth behind the Christmas story..
Tales From The White Hart
The stories set in the White Hart are archetypal Clarke, two to four thousand word-vignettes, where a narrator introduces an idea, a character and a denouement. There is virtually no characterization and no plot, but they are full of wry humour, show a fascinating insight into the Britain of the time, and are an excellent showcase of his work for the novice SF reader.
The Wind From The Sun
By the early 1960s Clarke was at his peak, gracing the major SF magazines with ‘Into the Comet,’ where an expedition are stranded by a computer malfunction until one of the crew revives a lost art; ‘Death and the Senator,’ which accurately predicted the career of NASA-bashing Senator Proxmire a generation later; and ‘Hate,’ a Hungarian refugee’s revenge upon the hated Soviets, among the pearl-divers of New Guinea.
Within three more years Clarke was placing almost all his stories in slick magazines such as Playboy, which Clarke graced five times between 1964 and 1966. The best of these both reference classics; ‘The Shining Ones,’ name-checks Moby Dick’s Kraken, but is hi-tech and set in Sri Lanka, while in ‘Maelstrom II,’ an astronaut faces near-certain death, until inspired by Poe.
Perhaps the archetypal Clarke story is ‘The Wind from the Sun,’ a story of solar-powered racing from the Earth to the Moon, with a quite unforgettable ending. Clarke’s last story for Playboy was ‘A Meeting with Medusa,’ his Nebula-award winning novella that effectively punctuated that phase of his career. Afterwards Clarke’s only fiction was all too often simply gimmicky short-shorts with the rare exception of ‘The Hammer of God’ (filmed as Deep Impact).
Instead, read the book for those optimistic mid-twentieth century views of the future, with Man building Lunar bases by 2000, and for a writer unequalled at portraying the insignificance of man in relation to the cosmos.
