James Nicoll Reviews

Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 Childhood’s End¹ is a near-future novel about human destiny.

1985: the world is on the brink of determining whether democracy’s Nazi rocket scientists are better than Communism’s Nazi rocket scientists… when the question suddenly becomes moot. Vast alien starships appear over humanity’s cities. The Earth and all on it are now under the rule of the Overlords.

What horrific purpose have the aliens in mind for their human subjects? And why will they not reveal their true form to humans?

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Arthur C. Clarke’s 1961 A Fall of Moondust is a stand-alone near-future science fiction novel.

Just as the brilliant Thomas Gold predicted, the Lunar surface consists in part of a very fine dust, so fine as to act like a dry liquid. In the Sea of Thirst, a deep crater has accumulated a deep pool of dust. Ever keen on enhancing their income stream, the Lunar tourist board commissioned a specially designed vehicle, the Selene, to traverse the Sea of Thirst like a very odd boat.

Under Captain Pat Harris and stewardess Sue Wilkins, the Selene has toured the Sea of Thirst many times. As Selene sets out from Port Roris, there is no reason to think the current excursion will be different. Nevertheless, this is Selene​’s final voyage.

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Arthur C. Clarke’s 1951 Sands of Mars is a standalone science fiction novel. It was his debut novel. It has also been published as The Sands of Mars.

To commemorate the maiden voyage of Ares, first passenger rocket on the Earth-Mars loop, famed science fiction author Martin Gibson has been dispatched to document the voyage. Although not decrepit as such, Gibson is old enough that he began writing when interplanetary travel was a matter of imagination and not practical engineering. Thus, he can provide an interesting perspective on the realities of crewed space flight. 

While space flight is as unexciting as legions of engineers can arrange¹, the voyage does provide some unexpected surprises.

Warning! Spoilers ahead!

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Arthur C. Clarke’s 1973’s Rendezvous with Rama is a first-contact science fiction novel. 

In the early 22^nd century the Spaceguard warning system detects an asteroid-sized body passing through the Solar System. Although the object will not come near Earth and thus falls outside Spaceguard’s main mission, the body has a number of unusual characteristics that warrant investigation: the object is of extrasolar origin and will exit the Solar System once it passes the Sun; it appears to have smooth surface and a rotation period measured in minutes. It cannot be a comet. A closer look by a space probe reveals that it is an alien space craft. It is dubbed ​“Rama.”

Only one crewed spacecraft is in the right orbit with enough fuel reserves to match course with Rama: Commander Norton’s Endeavour.

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Arthur C. Clarke’s 1956 The City and the Stars is a standalone SF novel. A famous SF novel. 

A billion years in the future, Earth is a lifeless, arid desert world. The galaxy-spanning civilization of the ancients is gone, the victim, or so myth has it, of nigh-unstoppable Invaders. The last remnant of humanity lives in the city of Diaspar. The inhabitants are effectively immortal, being reincarnated over and over again from Central Computer records. 

Once reborn, they take up their old roles. That is, everyone but young Alvin, one of the rare unique persons intermittently created to ensure that Diaspar does not completely stagnate. Alvin is going to succeed in this purpose and then some. 

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1958’s The Other Side of the Sky¹ is a collection by Arthur C. Clarke. The Signet MMPB is only 160 pages long, but there are two dozen stories in this book. Most are rather short. 

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This review was inspired by the news that the Syfy network, perhaps best known for renaming itself after the Polish term for syphilis, hada cquired the rights to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End .The jury is still out whether the Syfy version will be a full scale abomination, like their adaptation of Earthsea, or merely wretched, like most of the rest of their product. Until the full extent of the horror of this adaptation is revealed, I thought it would be fun to look at — sorry, listen to — a previous adaptation by a considerably more reputable organization with a long history of presenting SF works. I speak, of course, of the two-hour audio adaptation BBC 4 aired back in 1997.

As soon as the radio play opens, it is clear that events have developed not necessarily to Earth’s advantage. The frame: a distressed Jan Rodericks reports to an entity named Karellen, narrating the ongoing destruction of the Earth.

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1976’s Imperial Earth was published the year of the United State’s bicentennial. This wasn’t one of the USA’s better periods; oil shocks, stagflation, and political scandal had marred the first half of the decade. Other SF authors might have decided to revel in the doom and gloom of the era — and they did—but Clarke instead chose to take the reader on a tour of what is likely as close to a utopian US as any SF writer has ever imagined.

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