April Books 7) Reach for Tomorrow

7) Reach for Tomorrow, by Arthur C. Clarke

A dozen vintage Clarke short stories from the early years of his career (1945-1953). More than half I already knew – I see that “A Walk in the Dark”, “Rescue Party”, “The Curse”, and “The Possessed” were also in The Nine Billion Names of God, and “Trouble with the Natives”, “The Forgotten Enemy” and “The Fires Within” are in Of Time and Stars, of which I still have a battered Puffin copy. Oddly, “A Walk in the Dark”, “Rescue Party”, and “The Possessed” are rather weak stories to have been collected twice; all three of them basically long set-ups for a rather trivial punchline (“It’s in front of you!” “Humans are smarter than you think!” and “Lemmings!”). “The Curse” works rather better, partly because the punchline is tragic rather than funny, but mainly because it is much shorter.

“Trouble with the Natives” is sheer slapstick, but I’ve always liked it. “The Fires Within” is another favourite of mine which manages the twist of perception while maintaining the tone of sinister tragedy well. “The Forgotten Enemy” I’ve always felt is over-rated; scientifically (as Clarke admits in the prologue) it’s a bit implausible, and the enemy turns out to be one that you can literally walk away from; I don’t feel the denouement satisfies the build-up.

The five new stories for me were “Technical Error”, an entertaining engineering story with a Fourth Dimension twist; “The Parasite”, a rather unsuccessful attempt at time-travelling horror; “The Awakening”, a brief but effective Sleeper Outlives Humanity story (though this has been done better since by others, eg Zelazny’s “Go Starless in the Night”); “Jupiter Five”, an early attempt at the themes later more successfully developed in Rendezvous With Rama which unfortunately falls a bit flat in its characterisation; and my personal favourite of the bunch, “Time’s Arrow”, which brings paleontologists and time-travelling physicists together – and although I saw the punchline coming from miles away, I still thought it was carried off well.

Part of my weekend reading is the Turkey City Lexicon. I suspect that Clarke broke a number of these rules and got away with it; but those were more innocent times, over fifty years ago.

I’ve suddenly realised I have a German translation of this collection and The Wind From The Sun bought nineteen years ago, and probably not read since then.

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