The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke

The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 2001, is a collection of almost all science fiction short stories written by Arthur C. Clarke. It includes 114 stories, arranged in order of publication, from "Travel by Wire!" in 1937 through to "Improving the Neighbourhood" in 1999. The story "Improving The Neighbourhood" has the distinction of being the first fiction published in the journal Nature. The titles "Venture to the Moon" and "The Other Side of the Sky" are not stories, but the titles of groups of six interconnected stories, each story with its own title. This collection is only missing a very few stories, for example "When the Twerms Came", which appears in his other collections More Than One Universe and The View from Serendip. This edition contains a foreword by Clarke written in 2000, where he speculates on the science fiction genre in relation to the concept of short stories. Furthermore, many of the stories have a short introduction about their publication history or literary nature.

In addition to the printed edition, an audio edition was published by Fantastic Audio in 2001. The audio edition, comprising five volumes, runs nearly fifty hours. An electronic edition of the book was published in four volumes by RosettaBooks in 2012.

Contents

Previous appearances in book form

Of the above 114 pieces, 95 were published in six major short story collections during Clarke's lifetime. They are distributed as follows (all cross-references with the above list are noted):

• "Expedition to Earth" (1953, 11 stories: nos. 7, 12, 14, 19–21, 28, 31, 32–33, 39)
• "Reach for Tomorrow" (1956, 12: nos. 5, 8–9, 11, 13, 18, 23–24, 26, 36–38)
• "Tales from the White Hart" (1957, 15: nos. 25, 42, 45–46, 49, 57–64, 66–67)
• "The Other Side of the Sky" (1958, 24: nos. 15–16, 34–35, 41, 44, 47–48, 51–56, 65, 69–74, 76–78)
• "Tales of Ten Worlds" (1962, 15: nos. 27, 75, 79–89, 91, 93)
• "The Wind from the Sun" (1972, 18: nos. 90, 92, 94–109)

Note that nos. 50 and 68 above are not short stories but two cycles of six pieces each.

Later collections consist mostly of previously collected material, with the following exceptions (all cross-references with the above list are noted):

• The Best of Arthur C. Clarke: 1937–1971 (1973, four "new" stories: nos. 1, 3, 6, 10)
• The Sentinel (1983, 2: no. 22)
• The Wind from the Sun (1987 edition, 3: nos. 110, 111)
• Tales from Planet Earth (1989, 3: nos. 40, 43, 113)

As can be seen, of these 12 "new stories", 10 are reprinted in The Collected Stories. The missing ones are a movie outline of The Songs of Distant Earth (from "The Sentinel"; this is not the short story of the same name) and a short sketch titled "When the Twerms Came", which originally appeared in Clarke's non-fiction book The View from Serendip (1978) and was later reprinted in the 1987 edition of The Wind from the Sun.

For the remaining nine pieces (2, 4, 17, 29, 30, 112, 114–116) this is either their first appearance in book form at all or first appearance in a book by Arthur C. Clarke. There are, however, two exceptions. "The Lion of Comarre" (no. 17), although published in magazine form as early as 1949, first appeared in book form in 1968, in an omnibus edition together with Clarke's early novel Against the Fall of the Night (1953). "The Steam-powered Word-Processor" (no. 112) had previously appeared in Clarke's "science-fictional autobiography" Astounding Days (1989).

See also

• Arthur C. Clarke bibliography

References

• Brown, Charles N.; William G. Contento. "The Locus Index to Science Fiction". Retrieved 2007-12-06.
• "ISFDB". Retrieved 2007-12-05.

External links

• The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database