
It’s been a while since I’ve read any Clarke and I’d forgotten just how good a writer he is. This collection of eighteen stories contains all his short fiction output of the 1960s, stretching both sides of Apollo, and, apart from a couple of things, could almost feel modern. The two things I mention are firstly, of lesser importance, that all the (scientific) measurements are in imperial units. As a child of the late 20th century, I might still think in miles for travel distance and pints for milk, but scientific measurement will always be metric. Reading distances in inches, or weights in pounds just feels weird, when coming from the mouth of a scientist (and so many of Clarke’s protagonists are, or are closely associated with, scientists).
The second problem is a bigger deal: there is a complete absence of women in Clarke’s fiction, and that sticks out like a sore thumb. There’s a wife mentioned in Maelstrom II, and a “woman operator” who gets a couple of lines in A Meeting with Medusa, but that’s about it. Clarke was never very good with writing women but while I might not have noticed when I was first reading Clarke, back in the days of my youth, it’s really obvious.
But having herded the elephant in the room back out on to the savannah where it’s happiest, what about the stories? As I said, Clarke is a stonkingly good writer. And he’s got a decent range too. This collection includes the longest SF story ever written (one page), a very short shaggy dog tale, that is the setup for a pun that had me laughing out loud; but also poignant stories about men trapped in the vastness of space, without any hope of rescue; an adventure on Mount Everest; a consciousness recorded by aliens after a freak accident; and other great ideas. While I might like some stories here better than others, there were none that I actively disliked or thought just didn’t work. The man knew his craft.
I enjoyed this collection, although I do have a bit of a bias towards Clarke, having grown up reading him when my tastes as a reader were being formed. If you can put aside the lack of women then there’s a lot to enjoy here.