The Songs of Distant Earth and Other Stories

by Arthur C. Clarke, Jennifer Bassett (Editor)

High above them, Lora and Clyde heard a sound their world had not heard for centuries - the thin scream of a starship coming in from outer space, leaving a long white tail like smoke across the clear blue sky. They looked at each other in wonder. After three hundred years of silence, Earth had reached out once more to touch Thalassa...

And with the starship comes knowledge, and love, and pain.

In these five science-fiction stories Arthur C. Clarke takes us travelling through the universe into the unknown, but always possible future.

Ideal for intermediate and more confident learners of English looking to improve or practise their English. The book is filled with useful vocabulary that is carefully graded and easy to understand, it also comes with audio, so that you can listen to the story at the same time as reading.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Short Stories

88 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..