rthur C. Clarke's stories originally appeared in everything from fanzines in the late '30s to the prestigious scientific journal Nature and just about every kind of magazine in between.
Matter transmission causes lawsuits, wins an interplanetary war, and changes the course of civilization. Astronauts deal with the harsh realities of survival in space. Undersea exploration proves to be just as challenging. Experiments on the cutting edge of various sciences result in explosions and other disasters. The time and distances involved in slower-than-light interstellar travel make love difficult. Alien life is discovered in the Earth's core, on the sun, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and just about anywhere Clarke can focus his imagination.
The human race is observed through non-human eyes. Telescopes and mirrors are used as deadly weapons. Information Age technology and its effect on people is predicted as well as documented, even his chilling idea that intelligent machines may replace organic life, conceived long before the coining of the word "cyberpunk."
Many of these stories provided the germs of what later became the novels Childhood's End and The City and the Stars. Ideas that ended up in 2001 can be traced as far back as Clarke's earliest published works.
A hopeful vision for the future
2001 is what made Arthur C. Clarke a global icon in this turn-of-the-millennium world. Yet reading his stories individually gives a deceptive impression. His wit and imagination are apparent, but it isn't until the stories are read together in one collection that the architecture and awesome scale of his vision become clear. And it is a truly cosmic scale.
This book traces Clarke from a young fan full of wild imagination and a whacky sense of humor ("Whacky" is even the title of one of his early stories), into the archetypical post-war technical writer in the John W. Campbell tradition, to one of the great visionaries of the 20th century. Throughout all of it, he is an optimist: his predictions about technology usually have things developing too soon, like moon colonies in the '90s. But he has a realistic side as well. He destroys the world regularly in his fiction. In his foreword, he defines science fiction as "something that could happen--but usually you wouldn't want it to." He knows things can change radically, and the universe holds secrets most people may not want to know, but he doesn't let it intimidate him.
A sense of humor helps, allowing him to snap from the cosmic to the human scale and back again. Puns, satire and stories like the White Hart tales are illustrations of people's tendency to use technology to serve very human--even silly--needs. These stories provide both contrast and comfort when compared to the more serious works where everything of the world as we know it--even the human race--is shown to be a temporary phenomenon.
Individually, these stories are amusing, disturbing, thought-provoking and inspiring. Together, the stories are greater than the sum of their parts. Together they stand as a monumental achievement.
