THE
COLLECTED
STORIES
Arthur C. Clarke
CONTENTS
Cover
Title
Praise
Also by Arthur C. Clarke
Foreword
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
The 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
The Steam-Powered Word Processor
On Golden Seas
The Hammer of God
The Wire Continuum (with Stephen Baxter)
Improving the Neighbourhood
Copyright
‘There’s an incredible range of subject matter … much remains fresh … It almost goes without saying that this is an essential addition to any enthusiast’s library.’ Time Out
‘Nearly one thousand pages of some of the best short fiction the field has ever seen. This is probably the most significant reprint collection of the year, and it certainly deserves to be in the library of anyone who considers himself or herself a fan’ Science Fiction Chronicle
‘“The Sentinel” … is just one of the endless delights in this astonishing volume. The Collected Stories also contains such classics as “The Songs of Distant Earth” and the tale that many people regard as the greatest single SF short story ever written, “The Nine Billion Names of God”. Even if you have all these tales in individual volumes, this is a pretty tempting collection.’ Starburst.
‘We get a good idea of Clarke’s development as a writer, his full range of tones from facetious or sardonic to poetic or visionary, and his success and failures as a commentator on man’s evolution. Many of the stories have dated surprisingly little, and some are still very effective.’ Times Literary Supplement
Also by Arthur C. Clarke
FICTION
Against the Fall of Night
Childhood’s End
The City and The Stars
The Deep Range
Dolphin Island
Earthlight
A Fall of Moondust
The Fountains of Paradise
The Ghost from the Grand Banks
Glide Path
The Hammer of God
Imperial Earth
Islands in the Sky
The Lion of Comarre
The Lost Worlds of 2001
Prelude to Space
Reach for Tomorrow
Rendezvous with Rama
The Sands of Mars
The Songs of Distant Earth
The Space Trilogy
Islands in the Sky
Earthlight
The Sands of Mars
2001: A Space Odyssey
2010: Odyssey Two
2061: Odyssey Three
3001: The Final Odyssey
With Gentry Lee:
Cradle
Rama II
The Garden of Rama
Rama Revealed
With Mike McQuay
Richter 10
With Michael Kube-McDowell:
The Trigger
With Stephen Baxter
The Light of Other Days
SHORT FICTION
Across the Sea of Stars
An Arthur C. Clarke Omnibus
An Arthur C. Clarke 2nd Omnibus
The Best of Arthur C. Clarke
The Collected Stories
Expedition to Earth
From the Oceans, From the Stars
More Than One Universe
The Nine Billion Names of God
The Other Side of the Sky
Prelude to Mars
The Sentinel
Tales from Planet Earth
Tales from the White Hart
Tales of Ten Worlds
The Wind From the Sun
NON-FICTION
Ascent to Orbit
Astounding Days
By Space Possessed
The Challenge of the Sea
The Challenge of the Spaceship
The Coast of Coral
The Exploration of the Moon
The Exploration of Space
Going into Space
Greeting, Carbon Based Bipeds!
How the World was One
Interplanetary Flight
The Making of a Moon
Profiles of the Future
The Promise of Space
The Reefs of Taprobane
Report on Planet Three
The Snows of Olympus
The View from Serendip
Voice Across the Sea
Voices From the Sky
The Young Traveller in Space
1984: Spring
With the Astronauts:
First on the Moon
Boy Beneath the Sea
The First Five Fathoms
Indian Ocean Adventure
Indian Ocean Treasure
The Treasure of the Great Reef
With Peter Hyams:
The Odyssey File
With the Editors of Life:
Man and Space
With Robert Silverberg:
Into Space
With Chesley Bonestell:
Beyond Jupiter
With Simon Welfare and John Fairley:
Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World
Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers
Arthur C. Clarke’s Chronicles of the Strange & Mysterious
Arthur C. Clarke’s A–Z
AS EDITOR
(Fiction)
Science Fiction Hall of Fame III
Three for Tomorrow
Time Probe
Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime 1–VI
(Non-Fiction)
The Coming of the Space Age
Arthur C. Clarke’s July 20, 2019
Project Solar Sail
Edited by Keith Daniels:
Arthur C. Clarke & Lord Dunsany – A Correspondence
Arthur C. Clarke & C. S. Lewis – A Correspondence
FOREWORD
According to my indefatigable bibliographer, David N. Samuelson (Arthur C Clarke – a primary and secondary bibliography, G.K. Hall) my first attempts at fiction appeared in the Huish Magazine for Autumn 1932. I was then on the Editorial Board of the school Journal, which was presided over by our English master, Capt. E. B. Mitford – to whom I later dedicated my collection The Nine Billion Names of God. My contributions were letters, purporting to be from old boys, working in exotic environments, which clearly had science-fictional inspiration.
But what is science fiction anyway?
Attempts to define it will continue as long as people write PhD theses. Meanwhile, I am content to accept Damon Knight’s magisterial: ‘Science Fiction is what I point to and say “That’s science fiction.”’
Much blood has also been spilled on the carpet in attempts to distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. I have suggested an operational definition: 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.
The writer of science fiction is faced with a problem which the writers of so-called main-stream fiction – devoted to a tiny sub-section of the real universe – don’t have to worry about. They seldom need to spend pages setting the scene: sometimes one sentence will do the trick. When you read ‘It was a foggy evening in Baker Street’, you’re there in a millisecond. The science fiction writer, constructing a totally alien environment, may need several volumes to do the job: the classic example is Frank Herbert’s masterwork Dune and its sequels.
So it’s rather surprising that many of the finest works of science fiction are short stories. I can still recall the impact of Stanley Weinbaum’s A Martian Odyssey when the July 1934 Wonder Stories arrived. When I close my eyes I can see that characteristic Paul cover: never before or since did I read a story – and then go straight back to the beginning and read it right through again …
So perhaps the short story is to the whole science fiction genre as the sonnet is to the epic poem. The challenge is to create perfection in as small space as possible.
But how long is a short story? I am sorry you asked me that …
The shortest one you’ll find in this volume contains 31 words; the longest, more than 18,000. Beyond that we enter the realm of the novella (horrid word) which merges imperceptibly into the full-length novel.
Please remember that while these stories were written the world underwent greater changes than in the whole of previous history. Inevitably some of them have been dated by events: however I have resisted all temptations for retrospective editing. To put matters in perspective, roughly a third of these stories were written when most people believed talk of space flight was complete lunacy. By the time the last dozen were written, men had walked on the Moon.
By mapping out possible futures, as well as a good many improbable ones, the science fiction writer does a great service to the community. He encourages in his readers flexibility of mind, readiness to accept and even welcome change – in one word, adaptability. Perhaps no attribute is more important in this age. 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.
Nothing could be more ridiculous, therefore, than the accusation sometimes made against science fiction that it is escapist. That charge can indeed be made against much fantasy – but so what? There are times (this century has provided a more than ample supply) when some form of escape is essential, and any art form that supplies it is not to be despised. And as C.S.Lewis (creator of both superb science fiction and fantasy) once remarked to me: ‘Who are the people most opposed to escapism? Jailors!’
C. P. Snow ended his famous essay ‘Science and Government’ by stressing the vital importance of ‘the gift of foresight’. He pointed out that men often have wisdom without possessing foresight.
Science fiction has done much to redress the balance. Even if its writers do not always possess wisdom, the best ones have certainly possessed foresight. And that is an even greater gift from the gods.
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I am greatly indebted to Malcolm Edwards and Maureen Kincaid Speller for collecting – and indeed locating – virtually all the short pieces of fiction I have written over a period of almost seventy years.
Arthur C. Clarke
Colombo, Sri Lanka
June 2000
Travel by Wire!
First published in Amateur Science Fiction Stories, December 1937
Collected in The Best of Arthur C. Clarke 1937–1955
Science fiction has always encouraged an enormous amount of amateur writing, and there have been literally thousands of duplicated (sometimes printed) magazines put out by enthusiastic ‘fans’. […] The first stories I ever completed appeared in some of these magazines […]. If they do nothing else they may serve as a kind of absolute zero from which my later writing may be calibrated. ‘Travel by Wire!’ was my first published story.
You people can have no idea of the troubles and trials we had to endure before we perfected the radio-transporter, not that it’s quite perfect even yet. The greatest difficulty, as it had been in television thirty years before, was improving definition, and we spent nearly five years over that little problem. As you will have seen in the Science Museum, the first object we transmitted was a wooden cube, which was assembled all right, only instead of being one solid block it consisted of millions of little spheres. In fact, it looked just like a solid edition of one of the early television pictures, for instead of dealing with the object molecule by molecule or better still electron by electron, our scanners took little chunks at a time.
This didn’t matter for some things, but if we wanted to transmit objects of art, let alone human beings, we would have to improve the process considerably. This we managed to do by using the delta-ray scanners all round our subject, above, below, right, left, in front and behind. It was a lovely game synchronising all six, I can tell you, but when it was done we found that the transmitted elements were ultra-microscopic in size, which was quite good enough for most purposes.
Then, when they weren’t looking, we borrowed a guinea pig from the biology people on the 37th floor, and sent it through the apparatus. It came through in excellent condition, except for the fact it was dead. So we had to return it to its owner with a polite request for a post-mortem. They raved a bit at first, saying that the unfortunate creature had been inoculated with the only specimens of some germs they’d spent mo
nths rearing from the bottle. They were so annoyed, in fact, that they flatly refused our request.
Such insubordination on the part of mere biologists was of course deplorable, and we promptly generated a high-frequency field in their laboratory and gave them all fever for a few minutes. The post-mortem results came up in half an hour, the verdict being that the creature was in perfect condition but had died of shock, with a rider to the effect that if we wanted to try the experiment again we should blindfold our victims. We were also told that a combination lock had been fitted to the 37th floor to protect it from the depredations of kleptomaniacal mechanics who should be washing cars in a garage. We could not let this pass, so we immediately X-rayed their lock and to their complete consternation told them what the key-word was.
That is the best of being in our line, you can always do what you like with the other people. The chemists on the next floor were our only serious rivals, but we generally came out on top. Yes, I remember that time they slipped some vile organic stuff into our lab through a hole in the ceiling. We had to work in respirators for a month, but we had our revenge later. Every night after the staff had left, we used to send a dose of mild cosmics into the lab and curdled all their beautiful precipitates, until one evening old Professor Hudson stayed behind and we nearly finished him off. But to get back to my story –
We obtained another guinea pig, chloroformed it, and sent it through the transmitter. To our delight, it revived. We immediately had it killed and stuffed for the benefit of posterity. You can see it in the museum with the rest of our apparatus.
But if we wanted to start a passenger service, this would never do – it would be too much like an operation to suit most people. However, by cutting down the transmitting time to a ten-thousandth of a second, and thus reducing the shock, we managed to send another guinea pig in full possession of its faculties. This one was also stuffed.
The time had obviously come for one of us to try out the apparatus but as we realised what a loss it would be to humanity should anything go wrong, we found a suitable victim in the person of Professor Kingston, who teaches Greek or something foolish on the 197th floor. We lured him to the transmitter with a copy of Homer, switched on the field, and by the row from the receiver, we knew he’d arrived safely and in full possession of his faculties, such as they were. We would have liked to have had him stuffed as well, but it couldn’t be arranged.
After that we went through in turns, found the experience quite painless, and decided to put the device on the market. I expect you can remember the excitement there was when we first demonstrated our little toy to the Press. Of course we had the dickens of a job convincing them that it wasn’t a fake, and they didn’t really believe it until they had been through the transporter themselves. We drew the line, though, at Lord Rosscastle, who would have blown the fuses even if we could have got him into the transmitter.