The Songs Of Distant Earth And Other Stories

by Arthur C. Clarke, Jennifer Bassett (Editor )

Arthur C. Clarke is one of the greatest science fiction writers of the century, and surely the most celebrated science fiction writer alive. He is -- with H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein -- one of the writers who define the genre. Now, at the dawn of the year 2001, Sir Arthur C. Clarke has cooperated in the preparation of a massive definitive edition of his collected shorter works, which will be made available on audio in five chronological volumes, followed by a 10 CD volume of favorite selection and a 30 cassette gift set...the most ambitious science fiction audio project in history.

In addition to the well-known and ever popular stories "The Other Side of the Sky," "I Remember Babylon," and The Songs of Distant Earth," this volume features comic cosmic narratives originally collected in Tales From the White Hart, including "The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch," "The Next Tenants," and "The Man Who Ploughed the Sea."

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Short Stories

69 pages, Paperback

First published April 29, 2009

About the author

Stories, works of noted British writer, scientist, and underwater explorer Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, include 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

This most important and influential figure in 20th century fiction spent the first half of his life in England and served in World War II as a radar operator before migrating to Ceylon in 1956. He co-created his best known novel and movie with the assistance of Stanley Kubrick.

Clarke, a graduate of King's College, London, obtained first class honours in physics and mathematics. He served as past chairman of the interplanetary society and as a member of the academy of astronautics, the royal astronomical society, and many other organizations.

He authored more than fifty books and won his numerous awards: the Kalinga prize of 1961, the American association for the advancement Westinghouse prize, the Bradford Washburn award, and the John W. Campbell award for his novel Rendezvous with Rama. Clarke also won the nebula award of the fiction of America in 1972, 1974 and 1979, the Hugo award of the world fiction convention in 1974 and 1980. In 1986, he stood as grand master of the fiction of America. The queen knighted him as the commander of the British Empire in 1989.

Reviews

[Tazar Oo · Rating 4 out of 5]

ကလာခ့္၏ အေရးအသားမွာ ဖတ္လို႔ေကာင္းပါသည္။ Science Fiction ဆိုေသာ္လည္း ခက္ခဲေသာ၊ သဘာ၀မက်ေသာ အျဖစ္မ်ား မဟုတ္ပါ။ Soft S.F အမ်ဳိးအစား၊ လူ႔သေဘာ လူ႔သဘာ၀၊ လူသားမ်ား၏အနာဂတ္အေၾကာင္းကို စိတ္ကူးထားေသာ ပံုျပင္မ်ားသာျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ဒီစာအုပ္ကိုဖတ္မိသျဖင့္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ C. Clarke ၏ ပရိသတ္တစ္ေယာက္ ျဖစ္သြားပါသည္။

[F. · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were a few good stories, but nothing like Asimov's work.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure this is the version I read, but it's the only one I can find here under the Oxford Bookworms label. An okay compilation of Clarke's work, though the stories picked (many which will be familiar if you read Clarke's short stories) aren't really his hard-science stuff. Fun but uneventful and never particularly deep. That being said, the book was compiled for students as a study aid, so that might explain the relatively simple selection of stories.

[Alejandra Riquelme · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atrapante, futurista, apocalíptico.
Leí este libro mientras estudiaba pedagogía en inglés como lectura extensiva. La sensación que me dejó cada uno de sus relatos fue relativamente depresiva. Los finales abiertos de cada relato dejan en claro la irremediable extinción de la humanidad.

[Stan Barker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was a random grab from the library... wasn't until I got it home realised it was a school book with edited (?) versions of the short stories contained within. Quick read so not much of an inconvenience.

[Yasser · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read it for an ESL class, enjoyed some of its stories..