The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke

It's taken me almost four months to get through this volume, a few stories at a time, and reading other books concurrently; but I've now read every story. I can report that the stories are readable, amiable, and imaginative in terms of science and technology.

As fiction, however, they're mostly unmemorable; and of course I'd already read the more memorable of them elsewhere. I think my favourite is “Second Dawn” (1951), which is an old friend: I first read it long ago.

Clarke generally seemed more interested and more skilled in the future of science and technology than in fiction. However, these stories are old: as he says himself in the foreword, a third of them were written “when most people believed talk of space flight was complete lunacy”. So they often seem rather quaint now that we're well into the 21st century.

For me, this collection wasn't really worth buying; except that, if I ever want a Clarke story, I now know where to find them all.

It's amazing to think that Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein were once regarded as the Big Three of science fiction. They all produced some memorable work, but on the whole their writings have dated badly by now. Science fiction does tend to age more rapidly than other kinds of fiction; especially science fiction about the future.