Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (2 page)

The Other Side of the Sky

Prelude to Mars

The Sentinel

Tales from Planet Earth

Tales from the White Hart

Tales of Ten Worlds

The Wind From the Sun

NON-FICTION

Ascent to Orbit

Astounding Days

By Space Possessed

The Challenge of the Sea

The Challenge of the Spaceship

The Coast of Coral

The Exploration of the Moon

The Exploration of Space

Going into Space

Greeting, Carbon Based Bipeds!

How the World was One

Interplanetary Flight

The Making of a Moon

Profiles of the Future

The Promise of Space

The Reefs of Taprobane

Report on Planet Three

The Snows of Olympus

The View from Serendip

Voice Across the Sea

Voices From the Sky

The Young Traveller in Space

1984: Spring

With the Astronauts:

First on the Moon

With Mike Wilson:

Boy Beneath the Sea

The First Five Fathoms

Indian Ocean Adventure

Indian Ocean Treasure

The Treasure of the Great Reef

With Peter Hyams:

The Odyssey File

With the Editors of Life:

Man and Space

With Robert Silverberg:

Into Space

With Chesley Bonestell:

Beyond Jupiter

With Simon Welfare and John Fairley:

Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World

Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers

Arthur C. Clarke’s Chronicles of the Strange & Mysterious

Arthur C. Clarke’s A–Z

AS EDITOR

(
Fiction
)

Science Fiction Hall of Fame III

Three for Tomorrow

Time Probe

Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime 1–VI

(
Non-Fiction
)

The Coming of the Space Age

Arthur C. Clarke’s July 20, 2019

Project Solar Sail

Edited by Keith Daniels:

Arthur C. Clarke & Lord Dunsany – A Correspondence

Arthur C. Clarke & C. S. Lewis – A Correspondence

FOREWORD

According to my indefatigable bibliographer, David N. Samuelson (
Arthur C Clarke – a primary and secondary bibliography, G.K. Hall
) my first attempts at fiction appeared in the Huish Magazine for Autumn 1932. I was then on the Editorial Board of the school Journal, which was presided over by our English master, Capt. E. B. Mitford – to whom I later dedicated my collection
The Nine Billion Names of God
. My contributions were letters, purporting to be from old boys, working in exotic environments, which clearly had science-fictional inspiration.

But what
is
science fiction anyway?

Attempts to define it will continue as long as people write PhD theses. Meanwhile, I am content to accept Damon Knight’s magisterial: ‘Science Fiction is what I point to and say “
That’s
science fiction.”’

Much blood has also been spilled on the carpet in attempts to distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. I have suggested an operational definition: science fiction is something that
could
happen – but usually you wouldn’t want it to. Fantasy is something that
couldn’t
happen – though often you only wish that it could.

The writer of science fiction is faced with a problem which the writers of so-called main-stream fiction – devoted to a tiny sub-section of the
real
universe – don’t have to worry about. They seldom need to spend pages setting the scene: sometimes one sentence will do the trick. When you read ‘It was a foggy evening in Baker Street’, you’re there in a millisecond. The science fiction writer, constructing a totally alien environment, may need several volumes to do the job: the classic example is Frank Herbert’s masterwork
Dune
and its sequels.

So it’s rather surprising that many of the finest works of science fiction are short stories. I can still recall the impact of Stanley Weinbaum’s
A Martian Odyssey
when the July 1934
Wonder Stories
arrived. When I close my eyes I can see that characteristic Paul cover: never before or since did I read a story – and then go straight back to the beginning and read it right through again …

So perhaps the short story is to the whole science fiction
genre
as the sonnet is to the epic poem. The challenge is to create perfection in as small space as possible.

But how long is a short story? I am sorry you asked me that …

The shortest one you’ll find in this volume contains 31 words; the longest, more than 18,000. Beyond that we enter the realm of the novella (horrid word) which merges imperceptibly into the full-length novel.

Please remember that while these stories were written the world underwent greater changes than in the whole of previous history. Inevitably some of them have been dated by events: however I have resisted all temptations for retrospective editing. To put matters in perspective, roughly a third of these stories were written when most people believed talk of space flight was complete lunacy. By the time the last dozen were written, men had walked on the Moon.

By mapping out possible futures, as well as a good many improbable ones, the science fiction writer does a great service to the community. He encourages in his readers flexibility of mind, readiness to accept and even welcome change – in one word, adaptability. Perhaps no attribute is more important in this age. The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers – and thermonuclear weapons.

Nothing could be more ridiculous, therefore, than the accusation sometimes made against science fiction that it is escapist. That charge can indeed be made against much fantasy – but so what? There are times (this century has provided a more than ample supply) when some form of escape is essential, and any art form that supplies it is not to be despised. And as C.S.Lewis (creator of both superb science fiction and fantasy) once remarked to me: ‘Who are the people most opposed to escapism? Jailors!’

C. P. Snow ended his famous essay ‘Science and Government’ by stressing the vital importance of ‘the gift of foresight’. He pointed out that men often have wisdom without possessing foresight.

Science fiction has done much to redress the balance. Even if its writers do not always possess wisdom, the best ones have certainly possessed foresight. And that is an even greater gift from the gods.

xxxxxxxxx

I am greatly indebted to Malcolm Edwards and Maureen Kincaid Speller for collecting – and indeed locating – virtually all the short pieces of fiction I have written over a period of almost seventy years.

Arthur C. Clarke
Colombo, Sri Lanka

June 2000

Travel by Wire!

First published in
Amateur Science Fiction Stories
, December 1937

Collected in
The Best of Arthur C. Clarke 1937–1955

Science fiction has always encouraged an enormous amount of amateur writing, and there have been literally thousands of duplicated (sometimes printed) magazines put out by enthusiastic ‘fans’. […] The first stories I ever completed appeared in some of these magazines […]. If they do nothing else they may serve as a kind of absolute zero from which my later writing may be calibrated. ‘Travel by Wire!’ was my first published story.

You people can have no idea of the troubles and trials we had to endure before we perfected the radio-transporter, not that it’s quite perfect even yet. The greatest difficulty, as it had been in television thirty years before, was improving definition, and we spent nearly five years over that little problem. As you will have seen in the Science Museum, the first object we transmitted was a wooden cube, which was assembled all right, only instead of being one solid block it consisted of millions of little spheres. In fact, it looked just like a solid edition of one of the early television pictures, for instead of dealing with the object molecule by molecule or better still electron by electron, our scanners took little chunks at a time.

This didn’t matter for some things, but if we wanted to transmit objects of art, let alone human beings, we would have to improve the process considerably. This we managed to do by using the delta-ray scanners all round our subject, above, below, right, left, in front and behind. It was a lovely game synchronising all six, I can tell you, but when it was done we found that the transmitted elements were ultra-microscopic in size, which was quite good enough for most purposes.

Then, when they weren’t looking, we borrowed a guinea pig from the biology people on the 37th floor, and sent it through the apparatus. It came through in excellent condition, except for the fact it was dead. So we had to return it to its owner with a polite request for a post-mortem. They raved a bit at first, saying that the unfortunate creature had been inoculated with the only specimens of some germs they’d spent months rearing from the bottle. They were so annoyed, in fact, that they flatly refused our request.

Such insubordination on the part of mere biologists was of course deplorable, and we promptly generated a high-frequency field in their laboratory and gave them all fever for a few minutes. The post-mortem results came up in half an hour, the verdict being that the creature was in perfect condition but had died of shock, with a rider to the effect that if we wanted to try the experiment again we should blindfold our victims. We were also told that a combination lock had been fitted to the 37th floor to protect it from the depredations of kleptomaniacal mechanics who should be washing cars in a garage. We could not let this pass, so we immediately X-rayed their lock and to their complete consternation told them what the key-word was.

That is the best of being in our line, you can always do what you like with the other people. The chemists on the next floor were our only serious rivals, but we generally came out on top. Yes, I remember that time they slipped some vile organic stuff into our lab through a hole in the ceiling. We had to work in respirators for a month, but we had our revenge later. Every night after the staff had left, we used to send a dose of mild cosmics into the lab and curdled all their beautiful precipitates, until one evening old Professor Hudson stayed behind and we nearly finished him off. But to get back to my story –

We obtained another guinea pig, chloroformed it, and sent it through the transmitter. To our delight, it revived. We immediately had it killed and stuffed for the benefit of posterity. You can see it in the museum with the rest of our apparatus.

But if we wanted to start a passenger service, this would never do – it would be too much like an operation to suit most people. However, by cutting down the transmitting time to a ten-thousandth of a second, and thus reducing the shock, we managed to send another guinea pig in full possession of its faculties. This one was also stuffed.

The time had obviously come for one of us to try out the apparatus but as we realised what a loss it would be to humanity should anything go wrong, we found a suitable victim in the person of Professor Kingston, who teaches Greek or something foolish on the 197th floor. We lured him to the transmitter with a copy of
Homer
, switched on the field, and by the row from the receiver, we knew he’d arrived safely and in full possession of his faculties, such as they were. We would have liked to have had him stuffed as well, but it couldn’t be arranged.