Fiction sz – Sir Arthur C Clarke

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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Sunstorm (with Stephen Baxter)

Returned to the Earth of 2037 by the Firstborn, mysterious beings of almost limitless technological prowess, Bisesa Dutt is haunted by the memories of her five years spent on the strange alternate Earth called Mir, a jigsaw-puzzle world made up of lands and people cut out of different eras of Earth’s history. Why did the Firstborn create Mir? Why was Bisesa taken there and then brought back on the day after her original disappearance? Bisesa’s questions receive a chilling answer when scientists discover an anomaly in the sun’s core - an anomaly that has no natural cause and is evidence of alien intervention over two thousand years before. Now plans set in motion millennia ago by inscrutable watchers light-years away are coming to fruition in a sunstorm designed to scour the Earth of all life in a bombardment of deadly radiation. Thus commences a furious race against a ticking solar tome bomb. But even now, as apocalypse looms, co-operation is not easy for the peoples and nations of the Earth. Religious and political differences threaten to undermine every effort. And all the while, the Firstborn are watching…

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Tales from Planet Earth

From the furthest arid stars to the secret ways under the oceans, from intelligent termites to super-intelligent aliens, and from ruined empires to the rings of Saturn, these fictions range through time and space - and map our future. Containing many examples of rarely published stories by Arthur C. Clarke, this volume is a superb compendium of entertainment, thought-provoking thrills and astral surprises, and also includes introductions by the author.

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Tales from the White Hart

The White Hart in Fleet Street is the favorite haunt of top Science Fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. At any time there you’d find a garrulous crowd of journalists, scientists, editors and authors. And… Harry Purvis. In a pub of great raconteurs, Harry Purvis was the best. His amazing repertoire consisted almost entirely of tales of the quirks and eccentricities of scientists and inventors. A man who could control a giant squid. Another who could silence a concert orchestra at the flick of a switch. Or, the French genius who invented a machine that could record all human pleasures and transmit them to any client rich enough to afford the sybaritic luxury. These entertaining stories show Arthur C. Clarke at his most inventive and light-hearted.

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Tales of Ten Worlds

“Before we start, I’d like to point out something that a good many people seem to have overlooked. The twenty-first century does not begin tomorrow; it begins a year later, on January 1, 2001. Even though the calendar reads 2000 from midnight, the old century still has twelve months to run. Every hundred years we astronomers have to explain this all over again, but it makes no difference. The celebrations start just as soon as the two zeros go up…” This superb collection of short stories includes some of Clarke’s finest work - vivid glimpses of the future, a decade, a century, a millennium from now.

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The City and the Stars

Men had built cities before, but never such a city as Diaspar - for millennia its protective dome shut out the creeping decay and danger of the world outside. But then, as legend had it, the Invaders came, driving humanity into this last refuge. It takes one man, a Unique, to break through Diaspar’s stifling inertia, to smash the legend and discover the true nature of the Invaders.

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The Collected Stories

Author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Childhood’s End, The City And The Stars, and the Hugo and Nebula-winning Rendezvous With Rama, Arthur C. Clarke is one the greatest science fiction writers of the century, and surely the most celebrated science fiction author alive. He is – with H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein - one of the writers who define science fiction in our time. Now Clarke has cooperated in the preparation of a massive definitive edition of his collected shorter works. From the early work like “Rescue Party” and “The Lion and Comarre”, through to classics like “The Star,” “Earthlight,” “The Nine Billion Names of God,” and “The Sentinel” (a kernel of the later novel and movie, 2001: A Space Odysssey), all the way to later work like “A Meeting with Medusa” and “The Hammer of God,” this immense volume encapsulates one of the greatest science fiction careers ever.

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The Deep Range

JOURNEY TO INNER SPACE: Walter Franklin is a former spaceman who underwent a trauma in orbit around Mars, producing a career-threatening case of astrophobia. His rehabilitation will be unprecedented: He is assigned to join the men and women exploring and exploiting the equally alien realm under the sea. They are ocean farmers providing much of Earth’s food, fearless rangers in lightning-fast subs patrolling the deep. If Franklin can defeat his personal demons, and survive in an eerie world of sudden violence and subtle danger, then he could help shape the future of the planet and its threatened ecology - and redeem mankind from its inglorious past.

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The Fountains of Paradise

It is the year 2142 A.D., and the brilliant, visionary engineer Vannevar Morgan has evolved a method of building a gigantic ‘Space Elevator’ for transporting men and materials to a point outside the earth’s atmosphere, thus marking the true beginning of Man’s interplanetary civilization. But before this awe-inspiring conception can become reality a major obstacle has to be faced. For there is only one point on earth suitable for the launching site - the peak of a sacred mountain which is jealously guarded by the monks who have inhabited it since time immemorial. How their resistance is overcome, and what happens when Morgan’s Elevator begins to tower into the sky, forms the basis of a dramatic tale in which scientific knowledge and soaring imagination both play their part. Taprobane, the setting of the novel is a thin disguise for Arthur Clarke’s beloved Sri Lanka, and the background is sketched in with vivid life and colour.

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The Garden of Rama (with Gentry Lee)

In the year 2130 a mysterious spaceship, Rama, arrived in the solar system. It was huge - big enough to contain a city and a sea - and empty, apparently abandoned. By the time Rama departed for its next unknown destination, many wonders had been uncovered, but few mysteries solved. Only one thing was clear: everything the enigmatic builders of Rama did, they did in threes. Eighty years later the second alien craft arrived in the solar system. This time, Earth had been waiting. But all the years of preparation were not enough to unlock the Raman enigma. Now Rama II is on its way out of the solar system. Aboard it are three humans, two men and a woman, left behind when the expedition departed. Ahead of them lies the unknown, a voyage no human has ever experienced. The Garden Of Rama is the stunning third volume in one of the greatest science fiction epics of all time.

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The Ghost from the Grand Banks

It is 2010. In just two years there will be an anniversary, the centennial of an event that has haunted the world: the sinking of the Titanic. The remains of what was once the world’s greatest and most prestigious ocean liner lie four kilometers down on the Grand Banks of the Atlantic Ocean, an endless reminder of the fragility of technology in the face of the natural perils the planet can throw at man. But, a hundred years on, the urge to raise the wreck is irresistible. From the West comes one solution; from the East another. Both are marvels of technological imagination; both can succeed. But the wreck on the Grand Banks may still have a surprise or two for those who would bring her back to the eyes of the world. The Ghost From The Grand Banks is one of the finest works from science fiction’s Grand Master: a novel that brings together his two great concerns, future technology and the exploration of the deep sea. It is both a realistic novel of the very near future and a provocative piece of speculation.

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The Hammer of God

It is the twenty-second century. The Moon is colonized and on Mars the pioneers live in domes while the first steps in the long process of terraforming the red planet are under way. It is on Mars that an amateur astronomer is the first to spot a previously uncharted asteroid out beyond Jupiter, heading into the solar system - and when the scientists of project SPACEGUARD compute the newcomer’s orbit, they give it a name filled with foreboding. Kali: the Hindu goddess of destruction. Because in a terrifying few months Kali is going to collide with the Earth causing a catastrophe at least as great as the one which wiped out the dinosaurs. For Captain Robert Singh, Kali is the climax of his long space-going career, the job he was born to do. As captain of the research vessel Goliath he is in charge of an operation that has been long planned but never before put into action - the immense task of pushing an asteroid off its course. The operation has been plotted down to the finest detail. But what neither Singh nor SPACEGUARD have taken into account is the human factor…

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The Last Theorem (with Frederik Pohl)

The final work from the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the most brilliant mind in science fiction. Collaboratively written with fellow grandmaster Frederik Pohl, The Last Theorem sets a new benchmark in contemporary prescient science fiction. In Sri Lanka a young astronomy student, Ranjit Subramanian, becomes obsessed with a three-hundred-year-old theorem that promises to unlock the secrets of the universe. Thirty light years away, invisible to human eyes, the Grand Galactics scan the universe for intelligent life. Their mission: to eradicate any advanced species whose technology could threaten their dominance of the universe. Having detected the first nuclear weapons strike on a distant small blue planet, a vast fleet of races subservient to the Galactics is dispatched with orders to destroy the warlike aliens. Recruited against his better judgement, Ranjit begins working for the secret international organization called Pax Per Fidem. Led by the warmongering Colonel Bledsoe, it has developed a deadly electromagnetic weapon codenamed ‘Silent Thunder’, capable of destroying every electronic object in any country of its choosing. Soon the three superpowers of America, China and Europe are locked in a battle for world supremacy, despite their best efforts for peace. Meanwhile the completion of a giant space elevator is celebrated with the first Olympic games on the Moon, But when the first alien craft is accidently encountered Ranjit is forced to question his own actions, in a bid to save the lives of not just his own family but of all humankind.

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The Light of Other Days (with Stephen Baxter)

Author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Childhood’s End, The City and the Stars and the Hugo and Nebula-winning Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke is quite simply, one of the greatest science-fiction writers of the century. He is - with H.G, Wells, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein - one of the writers who have defined science fiction in our time. Now he joins forces with Stephen Baxter - the John W. Campbell Award-winning author of such acclaimed novels as The Time Ships, Voyage and Moonseed, a writer called by Time Out “the most credible heir to the hard SF tradition previously monopolized by Clarke and Asimov” - for a spectacular novel about nothing less than the transformation of humanity itself. The Light of Other Days tells the tale of what happens when a brilliant, driven industrialist harnesses quantum physics to enable people everywhere to see one another at all times: around every corner, through every wall, into everyone’s most private, hidden, and even intimate moments. This new technology amounts to the sudden and complete abolition of human privacy - forever. Then, as men and women scramble to absorb this shock, the same technology proves able to look backwards in time as well. Nothing can prepare us for what follows - the wholesale discovery of the truth about thousands of years of human history. Governments topple, religions fall, the entire edifice of human society is shaken to its roots. It is a fundamental change in the terms of the human condition… cause for despair, provocation for chaos, and – just maybe - opportunity for transcendence. The Light of other Days is a tour de force, an SF event for the millennium, and a story you will not soon forget.

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The Lion of Comarre / Against the Fall of Night

The Lion of Comarre Set towards the close of the 26^th century, the story of a mysterious city, a youth of great courage and a lion of peculiar ability… Against the Fall of Night A novel set in the almost unimaginably remote future - the embryo work for Clarke’s later masterpiece The City and the Stars.

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The Lost Worlds of 2001

And here is the complete record of that first incredible journey, a trip that began with a story called The Sentinel, by Arthur C. Clarke. The odyssey took flight when Stanley Kubrick asked Clarke to write a novel of space exploration upon which the acclaimed director would base a movie. The result was one of the most extraordinary films of all time. Now the reader is taken through every stage of this great adventure. Here is the original story. Here are the different versions of 2001 as they evolved in the interplay between two brilliantly charged imaginations. And here is Clarke’s own intimate account of the unique chemistry between author and director which created 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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The Nine Billion Names of God

From among the hundred or so stories he has written in the course of thirty years, Arthur C. Clarke selected for this volume those he himself likes best. The skill of their telling is beyond praise, and prefatory notes to a number of the stories add to the interest of a thoroughly satisfying collection. One of the stories, “The Sentinel,” inspired the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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The Other Side of the Sky

What happens when some Tibetan monks buy an electronic computer to speed-up the labor of the ages… A space-ship’s pilot’s embarrassing love affair with a girl from an alien planet… The secrets behind the first American, British and Russian flights to the moon… Platforms in space, expeditions into the unexplored universe, and the habits and problems of men and women who live in unbounded worlds - these are some of the fascinating themes of the stories in this new collection by one of the masters of science fiction.

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The Sands of Mars

When a celebrated science fiction writer takes to space on his first trip to Mars, he’s sure to be in for some heckling from the spaceship’s crew. But Martin Gibson, man about space, takes it all in his stride. That is, until he lands on the red planet. Once there, the intrepid author causes one problem after another as he stumbles upon Mars’s most carefully hidden secrets and threatens the future of an entire planet!

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The Sentinel

The Sentinel is a magnificent collection of Arthur C. Clarke’s finest shorter fiction spanning four decades. Included here, along with revealing new introductions, are The Sentinel (the story that inspired 2001), Guardian Angel (the rarely-glimpsed work that gave birth to Childhood’s End), The Songs of Distant Earth, a brilliant, haunting story of first contact with an alien world, and other outstanding stories of vaulting imagination. Stunningly illustrated with ten plates by internationally acclaimed artist Lebbeus Woods, The Sentinel will grace the collection of every Arthur C. Clarke reader and every lover of fine science fiction.

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The Songs of Distant Earth

Arthur Clarke is at his lyrical best in this evocative tale of life on a paradisical world, of the clash of two different cultures, and of mankind’s first contact with truly alien intelligence. Just a few islands nestled on a warm, planetwide ocean, Thalassa was a veritable paradise-home to one of the small colonies founded centuries before by robot Mother Ships. Mankind had barely managed to flee before the Sun went nova and destroyed the Solar System. The people of Thalassa were happy, devoted to living well on their beautiful world. Mesmerized by the beauty of Thalassa and overwhelmed by its vast resources, the colonists were unaware of a monumental evolutionary event slowly taking place beneath their seas… But Thalassa’s idyll was broken one day by the appearance in orbit of the Magellan, a huge spacecraft carrying one million hibernating refugees from the very last, mad days of Earth. Clearly, whether the Magellan was just stopping by on her way to a more distant star, as her crew alleged, or intending to stay - as many Thalassans feared -uncertainty and change had come to the placid paradise that was Thalassa.

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The Space Trilogy

An omnibus edition of three novels. Islands in the Sky, first published in 1954, sees Roy Malcolm winning a trip to the Inner Station, a space station rotating 500 miles from Earth. The Sands of Mars, set in the 21st century, has a group of pioneers struggling to change the face of this inhospitable planet. In Earthlight, two centuries hence, man has colonised the planets and the inhabitants of the Moon owe no allegiance to any nation on Earth – or to Earth itself... This omnibus edition of three of Arthur C. Clarke's early novels shows the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey exploring space and time in adventurous and thoughtful ways.

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The Trigger (with Mike Kube-McDowell)

From the legendary Arthur C. Clarke, in collaboration with Michael Kube-McDowell of Star Wars fame, comes a chilling day-after-tomorrow thriller. Jeffrey Horton of Terabyte Laboratories is the brilliant, driven and idealistic scientist responsible for the discovery of the Trigger. It was an accidental discovery. When Horton fired up his prototype analogue of a laser it triggered all nearby explosive material. In that moment, an end to the power of the gun became feasible. In future, a firearm - or a bomb - could be made powerless to harm the innocent. The Trigger might even mean an end to war. Patriotism dictates that Terabyte hands over the science to the Pentagon. Idealism demands the invention be given to the whole world, regardless of politics. But in a world where violence has reached epidemic proportions, too many people have a stake in the business of violence to give peace a chance. Clarke and McDowell offer a startling vision of the future in which the fate of humankind depends on who controls The Trigger.

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The Wind from the Sun

From the solar yacht of the title story to the ultra-complex telephone network that develops its own consciousness and the spaceship that no longer obeys human command… here are eighteen stories of a future where man’s technologies are beginning to dictate his life style, even to demand life for themselves. The recurring theme of this Arthur C. Clarke collection suggests that man’s scientific discoveries may be unleashing forces that he only partly understands and may never be able to control…

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Time’s Eye (with Stephen Baxter)

For eons, Earth has been under observation by the Firstborn, beings almost as old as the universe itself. The Firstborn are unknown to humankind - until they act. In an instant, Earth is carved up and reassembled like a huge jigsaw puzzle. Suddenly the planet and every living thing on it no longer exist in a single timeline. Instead, the world becomes a patchwork of eras, from pre-history to 2037, each with its own indigenous inhabitants. Scattered across the planet are floating silver orbs impervious to all weapons and impossible to communicate with. Are these technologically-advanced devices responsible for creating and sustaining rifts in time? Are they cameras through which inscrutable alien eyes are watching? Or are they something stranger and more terrifying still? The answer may lie in the ancient city of Babylon, where two groups of refugees from 2037 - three cosmonauts returning to Earth from the International Space Station, and three United Nations peacekeepers on a mission in Afghanistan - have detected radio signals: the only such signals on the planet, apart from their own. The peace-keepers find allies in nineteenth-century British troops and in the armies of Alexander the Great. The cosmonauts, crash-landed in the steppes of Asia, join forces with the Mongol horde led by Genghis Khan. The two sides set out for Babylon, each determined to win the race for knowledge… and the power that lies within.

Arthur C Clarke

Arthur C Clarke's Fiction

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