Arthur C. Clarke - Essays and Short Stories

Essays and Short Stories

During his life Clarke published several books with essays, speeches, addresses, etc. Most notable are The Challenge of the Spaceship (1959), Voices from the Sky (1965) and Report on Planet Three (1972) and 1984: Spring – A Choice of Futures (1984). Several of his non-fiction books are composed of chapters which can stand on their own as separate essays. Most important of these are The Promise of Space (1968, rev. ed. 1970) and Profiles of the Future (1962, rev. eds. 1973, 1983, and 1999, Millennium edition with a new preface).

An extensive selection of Clarke's essays and book chapters (from 1934 to 1998; 110 pieces, 63 of them previously uncollected in his books) can be found in the book Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! (2000), together with a new introduction and many prefatory notes. Another fine collection of essays, all previously collected, is By Space Possessed (1993). Clarke's technical papers, together with several essays and extensive autobiographical material, are collected in Ascent to Orbit: A Scientific Autobiography (1984).

Almost all of his short stories can be found in the book The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001). Another collection of early essays was published in The View from Serendip (1977), which also included one short piece of fiction, "When the Twerms Came". Clarke also wrote short stories under the pseudonyms of E. G. O'Brien and Charles Willis.