THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ARTHUR C. CLARKE

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

Since 1967, Arthur C. Clarke's name has been associated with the year 2001.  It is fitting, therefore, that Tor has elected to published a nearly comprehensive retrospective of Clarke's short fiction in the first year of the new millennium.  Although a few short works are missing, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke contains more than an hundred of Clarke's stories ranging from his years as an amateur ("Travel by Wire," 1937), through his first professional appearance ("Loophole," 1946) and up to the present ("Improving the Neighborhood," 1999).  It is a testament to Clarke that he has published stories even more recently which do not appear in this collection.

Clarke introduces the book with a brief two pages.  Each story, however, is prefaced by its bibliographic information and a short paragraph by the author commenting on the genesis of the tale.  In a few cases, Clarke also provides a little retrospective analysis of the story and how well he feels it has managed to stand the test of time.

While the collection includes such major works by Clarke as "The Star" and "The Nine Billion Names of God," it also includes lesser-known stories which, in some cases feel dated, but in other cases stand up with their more well known brethren.  Other stories, such as "The Longest Science-fiction Story Ever Told," are slight pieces which seem as if Clarke may have dashed them off in a quiet afternoon.  Clarke also includes all of the tales from his "White Hart" series of bar stories.

Because the stories are arranged in chronological order, over the course of the collection, Clarke's growth as an author is apparent as is the growth of technology and science in the second half of the twentieth-century.  As Clarke grows more and more comfortable with the written word, his speculations are grounded in technology which would be fictional in his earliest stories, but is reality by his later ones.

At 966 pages and two pounds, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke is an enormous doorstop of a book.  However, this only means that it contains enough reading material to allow the reader to continuously dip in and find stories, both familiar and new, to read and discover and rediscovery the transcendence of Clarke's ideas.

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