The Evolution of a Writer
The stories which are contained in this collection represent a historical production by the writer. This is collection of over one-hundred stories written by Clarke with the only truly unifying theme connecting them being the author. The stories were not chosen to fit a particular theme nor even just a particular era in the writer’s career. In the case of comprehensive collections such as this, the most significant theme to explore is therefore the evolution of the writer. A collection that spans a professional lifetime stretching from 1937 to 1999 offers ample opportunities to study the stories for clues to the literary development of Clarke, the historical background which motivated his fictional explorations, and even the psychological standing of the writer at given points through his career.
Space Exploration
A very good reason exists for why Stanley Kubrick called upon the talents of Arthur C. Clarke to assist him in the germ of a story he had the film to follow his classic nuclear war comedy, Dr. Strangelove. Clarke’s career had already by then been filled with a number of stories about humans exploring the distant reaches of the solar system and beyond long before he published “The Sentinel” in 1951. That story became the source material expanded upon greatly to become the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Such is the commitment to exploring the theme of human space exploration that the second story Clarke ever published bears the self-evident title “How We Went to Mars.”
Technology
Many of the stories pursue themes related to the impact of technology upon civilization and the future of humanity. Clarke’s very first published story in 1937 is about the consequences of teleportation. “Technical Error” was published in 1950 under the much more to-the-point title “The Reversed Man.” In one particularly prescient story published in 1954, the “Patent Pending” is for a machine that can record and play brain waves which is almost immediately exploited for pornographic potential. The technology of Clarke’s stories populate tales that take place in space as well on earth and occasionally include no other referent to science fiction on the space-time continuum; they are simply stories of how technology seems almost destined to fail and doom us all.
