The Science Fiction Novel - Arthur Charles Clarke

A quick entry today, my ongoing look at the Science Fiction novel.

The Science Fiction Novel - Arthur Charles Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke was a British Science Fiction author, inventor, undersea explorer and futurist. He was born in Somerset UK in 1917 and died in Sri Lanka in 2008. Clarke was known as one of the 'Big Three' of Science Fiction, along with Asimov and Heinlein. He was a bit proponent of space travel and wrote about it in his stories and in science magazines. He co-wrote the 1968 screenplay for the iconic Stanley Kubrick movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Clarke's first professional sale, Loophole, appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1946. He began to carve out a niche as a 'scientific' science fiction writer with his first novel Against the Fall of Night, published as a novella in 1948. His third Sci-Fi novel, Childhood's End, was published in 1953 and cemented his popularity as a Sci-Fi writer. I took this novel in my Science Fiction novel course but I have a feeling that I was falling behind with my reading at that time. I don't remember reading it It was made into a TV mini-series a couple of years ago, though and I enjoyed it very much.

Over his life, Clarke wrote over 30 novels, a number of collections of short stories and many novellas / short stories. Looking through my Goodreads' book list, I see I've only read one so far and have one more on my book shelf to read.

1. Dolphin Island (1963).











"Late one night (in the world of the future), a giant cargo hover-ship makes an emergency landing somewhere in the middle of the United States and an enterprising teenager named Johnny Clinton stows away on it.

In the space of only a few hours the craft crashes into the Pacific Ocean. The sole survivor is Johnny, whose life is saved by the "People of the Sea"— dolphins.

A school of these fantastic creatures guides him to an island on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. There Johnny becomes involved with the work of a strange and fascinating research laboratory, learns skin-diving and survives a typhoon — only to risk his life again, immediately afterwards, in a cliffhanger of a climax!" (3 stars)

2. The Songs of Distant Earth (1986).











"Just a few islands in a planet-wide ocean, Thalassa was a veritable paradise—home to one of the small colonies founded centuries before by robot Mother Ships when the Sun had gone nova and mankind had fled Earth.

Mesmerized by the beauty of Thalassa and overwhelmed by its vast resources, the colonists lived an idyllic existence, unaware of the monumental evolutionary event slowly taking place beneath their seas...

Then the Magellan arrived in orbit carrying one million refugees from the last, mad days on Earth. And suddenly uncertainty and change had come to the placid paradise that was Thalassa."

The complete list of Arthur C. Clarke stories can be found at this link. 

Enjoy the rest of your week.