The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke Literary Elements

Science fiction

Varies. For the most part the stories take place either on earth or aboard spaceships launched from earth in the near-to-distant future.

Varies. “The White Hart Stories” feature a framing device introducing a story-within-the-story which are narrated by a character named Harry Purvis in the first person. The perspective of the rest of the stories includes first-person and third-person accounts.

Varies. The tales told by Harry Purvis tend toward the lighthearted. Many of the stories feature a wistfully melancholic view toward humanity as inevitably being responsible for its own collapse while at the same time other stories are defiantly optimistic about what man may accomplish in its future.

As indicated in the discussion of tone and mood, it is humanity that is front and center in the stories of Clarke. Robots and aliens are generally avoided as either heroes or villains. Ultimately, the protagonist and antagonist of Clarke’s science fiction when considered collectively is mankind itself.

It has been made clear that despite being science fiction, these stories are at heart based on the conflict of man versus man. Thus, the major conflict is obviously between humans rather than humans unified against external threats. Clarke conceptualizes this thematic obsession in his very first published story “Travel by Wire!” in which the only real conflict is the competition taking place between the biologists on the 37th floor, the chemists on the next floor and the narrator and scientists working with him who invent teleportation.

Each individual story comes to its own climax, of course, but if there is one identifiable element unifying the stories in this collection, it is Clarke’s methodology of climax. Almost all of these stories end on the climax and eschew the denouement. The overwhelming majority of stories move inexorably toward their final lines which punctuate the theme, plot and tone. Examples: “He was still marvelling at the narrowness of his escape when his time ran out and Death fell softly from the summer sky.” “He could not guess, in this moment beyond all feeling, that the Furies had yet to close in upon his soul—and that soon the whole world would be listening to an accusing voice from beyond the grave, branding him more irrevocably than any man since Cain.”

The opening lines of “The Star” are arguably the most famous foreshadowing in any of Clarke’s short stories. “It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican. Once, I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed that the heavens declared the glory of God’s handiwork.” The reference to the Vatican along with the narrator’s that he “once” believed all serve to foreshadow the story’s shocking—and some have argued blasphemous—revelation.

Alternatively, the final climactic line of “The Nine Billion Names of God” is probably Clarke’s most famous example of understatement. The story is about the prediction of the end of the world which is not taken seriously by the main characters. The final line poetically understates the fact that they were woefully misguided in their assumption: “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

“The Food of the Gods” is an ironically satirical story about bioengineered meat made from human flesh. The title can be seen as a double allusion both ambrosia—the mythical food of the gods—and the duplicate title of a novel by science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells which is also about bioengineering food.

Magic imagery is pervasive throughout the collection. While this may seem paradoxical in a collection mostly taking place in a future dominated by technologically advanced societies, it is actually a reference to Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The genuine paradox lying at the heart of the science fiction of Clarke is that the very same evolutionary urge to advance technological potential with each succeeding generation makes man just as capable of destroying his own planet as reaching beyond earth to explore other planets.

“The Longest Science Fiction Ever Told” is a cheeky little exercise in extreme parallelism. The entire story consists of a repetitious rejection from an editor explaining to an author why his idea about a work being plagiarized even before it is completed is not original. The editor’s complimentary closing is repeated three times: “Better luck next time! Sincerely,! Morris K. Mobius! Editor, Stupefying Stories”

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