In my last post I mentioned that Wendy's parents visited over Thanksgiving. At one point during their visit, Bill started reading an Isaac Asimov book he found on our bookshelves. When I saw that book, I suddenly remembered that tucked away in the corner of another bookshelf was a copy of The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke.
I got it at a company book sale over 4 years ago, but had never read it. Part of the reason why is that it is enormous! It's 1,000 pages long, and contains 104 short stories by Arthur C. Clarke. I remember being excited when I found the book at the book sale, but I also remember thinking: when am I ever going to have time to read 1,000 pages of short stories?
Well, no time like the present, is the answer. I pulled the book off the shelf over Thanksgiving, dusted it off (literally) and started reading it right then. And Bill even read some of it during their visit. Now, it's 2 months later, and I'm almost exactly halfway through the book!
I've read several Arthur C. Clarke books in the past (the 2001 series, Rendezvous with Rama, Childhood's End), so I knew he was a great writer, and that I would enjoy his short stories. But I've been amazed at just how great some of them are! It's been a lot of fun to read. The short stories are published chronologically; the first one is from 1937 (and despite it's age, I though it was really good). I'm currently up to 1954.
One cool thing is that at the start of each story, there's usually a short paragraph from Clarke with background info. I've learned some interesting things so far:
- Two of the short stories provided inspiration for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
- One was The Sentinel, where an ancient artifact is found on the moon; it provided the kernel of the idea that led to the movie. He wrote this story in 1948 for a writing competition at the BBC, and it didn't even place! He said he's often wondered what did.
- The other was Encounter at Dawn, which inspired the opening sequence of the movie, where the apes discover tools. I'm getting chills just thinking about how cool that scene was.
- Shortly after his story Superiority was published in 1951, it was added to the Engineering curriculum at MIT "to warn the graduates that the Better is often the enemy of the Good -- and the Best can be the enemy of both, as it is always too late."
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The Nine Billion Names of God is about a Tibetan monastery attempting to list all possible names of God. Clarke said he got a "charming response" from the Dalai Lama!
- Earthlight is possibly my favorite of all the short stories I've read so far. It was titanic, and left me feeling exhausted when I was done. Clarke said he is very proud of the fact that the Apollo-15 crew gave this name to a crater, which they drove by on a lunar rover. When they returned to earth, they sent him a beautiful 3-D map of their landing site, with the inscription: "To Arthur Clarke, with best personal regards from the crew of Apollo 15 and many thanks for your visions in space."
I am looking forward to the next 500 pages, to see what other "visions in space" Clarke has had.