Sir Arthur C Clarke

Arthur C Clarke

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Arthur C Clarke's
Fiction

The following list covers all published novels and short story collections of Arthur C Clarke. It includes literary collaborations (with co-author names given). All are in the genre of science fiction, except for Glide Path (1963) which is based on Clarke’s wartime service with the Royal Air Force where he worked on a radar-based, ground-controlled approach aircraft landing system.

Most of these titles are still in print, some having run into multiple editions and reprints. Please check online or with book sellers for availability.

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Dolphin Island

Something jolted the raft and he woke. Four dolphins were pushing the raft through the water. Johnny stared in amazement. Was this another of their games? Then he knew the answer was No. He was in the centre of a great pack of animals, all moving in the same direction. There were scores – hundreds - ahead and behind. From time to time one of the dolphins would drop away from the raft, only for another to take its place. And the raft was moving at over five miles an hour. Arthur C. Clarke’s brilliant story of lovable dolphins with a mission in the broad Pacific.

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Earthlight

Two centuries from now there may be men who do not owe allegiance to any nation on Earth - or even to Earth itself. This novel of the lunar colony is set at a time when the pioneering days of space-travel are over, and mankind has firmly established itself on the planets. Inevitably, conflicts of loyalty will arise when the new societies become independent of the mother world. Earthlight describes such a conflict, rising to its climax on the jagged face of the Moon, when a divided solar system faces a situation not unlike that confronting our world today. Arthur C. Clarke - scientist, novelist and explorer - whose vividly realistic Wellsian stories have won him fame throughout the English-speaking world, is at his best in this exciting and thought-provoking novel of the future.

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Expedition to Earth

The title story contains the germ of one aspect of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which Clarke collaborated with Stanley Kubrick. Its central concept is embodied in “The Sentinel” - which was written, the author tells us, almost twenty years before Kubrick’s effort burst upon the world in April 1968. These and the nine other stories in the volume demonstrate that even at the beginning of his career in fiction, Arthur C. Clarke was writing at the top of his bent. He is always an exciting storyteller, ingenious, inventive, consistently entertaining; the ideas he dramatizes are provocative and stimulating; and all of his tales are based on, or take their departure from, a store of sound scientific information. His poetic or visionary vein is manifest in “Second Dawn,” a novella about a race of creatures whose minds have developed far beyond their physical capacity. “Breaking Strain” is a first-rate suspense yarn about a disaster in outer space. Wry humor plays its part in “Hide and Seek” and “Superiority” is a cautionary tale. This is, all told, an exhilarating volume, science fiction at its fascinating best.

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Firstborn (with Stephen Baxter)

The Firstborn – the mysterious race of aliens who first became known to science fiction fans as the builders of the iconic black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey – have inhabited legendary master of science fiction Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s writing for decades. With Time’s Eye and Sunstorm, the first two books in their acclaimed Time Odyssey series, Clarke and his brilliant co-author Stephen Baxter imagined a near-future in which the Firstborn seek to stop the advance of human civilization by employing a technology indistinguishable from magic.

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From the Ocean, From the Stars

In the three books in this volume – two novels and a collection of twenty-four short stories – Arthur C. Clarke demonstrates the excitement, entertainment, and exhilarating imagination that have made him widely regarded as the master of contemporary science fiction. The City and the Stars reveals the distant future, when human existence on earth is confined to only one city, from which an adventurous young man sets out to explore the remote reaches of the universe. The Deep Range explores the hidden caverns of the ocean with Walter Franklin, a permanently grounded astronaut, assigned to herding whales upon whose products man subsists, a century from now. The Other Side of the Sky offers twenty four stories, dramatic, humorous, and exciting, ranging from the earth of our day, to the moon some decades hence, to the planets and galaxies millennia from now.

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Glide Path

There was a time when the uses of radar would have seemed as fantastic as anything conceived by writers of science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke, whose own fiction has consistently anticipated the actual achievements of science, has turned the clock back, for a change, and written a wholly realistic novel about the early, exciting, exploratory days of radar in World War II. Glide Path concerns the joint efforts of a group of brilliant scientists, courageous flyers, and specially trained servicemen, working under pressure, to perfect a talk-down system for planes, called Ground Controlled Descent. It has the authoritative ring of a documentary, the lucidity that makes technical matters comprehensible to the layman, and the special fascination of an inside story about crucial top-secret activities. It is, as well, a book concerned with likable human beings, English, American, Canadian, and Australian, at a wartime base in the west of England. Chief among them is Flying Officer Alan Bishop, an unassuming young man of twenty-three, whose adventures on and off the base - some in line of duty and some emphatically not, some lighthearted and some actually nerve-racking - transform his life and entertain the reader. Glide Path is not only a new departure for Arthur C. Clarke. It is an engaging, engrossing, ultimately tense and dramatic novel in its own right.

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Imperial Earth

The year is 2276. The place is Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, where for more than a century a flourishing colony has been ruled by the Makenzie clan. Duncan Makenzie, heir to wealth and power, now hurtles sunward toward his ancestral home – Earth - to meet a team of medical specialists. Like his father and grandfather before him, Duncan is duty-bound to perpetuate the Makenzie dynasty… and create a child in his own image. But his godlike mission is in jeopardy. In search of his destiny, he is about to steal a glimpse of the future. When a mysterious intergalactic shriek sounds the warning, far more than the Makenzie fortunes are at stake. For humankind travels a razor-thin line between paradise and extinction… and by the choice he makes, Duncan Makenzie will set the course.

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Islands in the Sky

When young Roy Malcolm won the Aviation Quiz Contest, the sponsor, World Airways, never dreamed he could legally claim a trip to the Inner Space Station as his prize. Set in the middle of the twenty-first century, this is an amazing yarn about a teenager’s adventures and conflicts five hundred miles up on a strange, artificial outpost that circles our planet. What promised to be merely a sightseeing jaunt into space soon shaped up into the most thrilling weeks in Roy’s life. For shortly after his arrival at the outpost a mysterious and untalkative spaceship “anchored” ten miles off the station - and its suspicious behavior fitted in perfectly with the space crew’s ideas on interplanetary crime. The surprising outcome of this uninvited visit, a race-for-life mission aboard a long-abandoned ship, a weird mishap that necessitates a trip around the moon spark this story with thrills and suspense. Bristling with excitement, this is a tale that can’t be matched in science fiction, for the author, Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, knows how to translate his vast knowledge of the universe into an ingenious novel. Told by an acclaimed expert in the field, Islands in the Sky is unique not only as entertainment but as the most lucid, most accurate picture of man’s proposed conquest of space.

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