Status Updates From The Collected Stories

The Ultimate Melody ★★★☆☆ Another tale told at the White-Hart. A physiologist attempts to find the ultimate musical melody that aligns perfectly with human brainwaves. He creates a machine, "Ludwig," to discover this mental trigger, and succeeds in creating the "Ultimate Melody" with unintended results.

The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch ★★☆☆☆ A sound engineer, fed up with his wife's incessant talking, creates a recording device that counts the number of words spoken by himself and his wife, Ermintrude. At the end of the experiment, the word counter shows that the engineer's word count beats his wife's by 100! The engineer is incredulous, and begins debugging the machine...

Moving Spirit ★★★★☆ A humorous story in which Harry Purvis tries to help a relative charged with illegally distilling liquor. Purvis steps in to defend his relative, arguing that the scientist was not making illegal liquor, but was instead working on a revolutionary, top-secret "osmotic bomb". To prove his point, Purvis demonstrates the "bomb" in the courtroom, with interesting results and a short term victory.

The Reluctant Orchid ★★★★★This is the unfortunate tale of Hercules Keating, a meek man who cultivates exotic orchids and cactii, and has an overbearing aunt he dislikes intensely. Keating comes across an unknown Amazonian orchid who has a fondness for meat... and plans to use the carnivorous orchid to kill his domineering aunt. As usual for Clarke, the twist is in the tail - things don't go at all as planned

The Pacifist ★★★★☆ The story of an incredibly advanced, massive supercomputer built with the aim to solve complex war-strategy problems. The computer is programmed by a meek, brilliant mathematician who is constantly berated and mistreated by the pompous, harsh commanding General in charge of the project. As revenge for the abuse, the mathematician sabotages the machine by programming the computer.

🟢Venture to the Moon ★★★⯪☆ Originally written as a series of six independent but linked stories about the first joint American-Russian-British mission to the Moon in 1975, told from the perspective of the British team commander. Humorous and entertaining.

What Goes Up ★★★⯪☆ A comedy spoof bites the teller in the butt. This story is told to silence a U.F.O. fanatic with unintended consequences.

The Star ★★★★☆ 1955 Hugo Award-winner. A starship crew (including a Jesuit priest/astrophysicist) on a deep-space expedition explores the ruins of a supernova in the Phoenix Nebula, finding a "vault" of artifacts on a remote planet, which serves as a final record of the doomed civilization. The priest/astrophysicist calculates when the light from this supernova reached Earth, questioning his faith.

🟢Refugee ★★★☆☆ A simple, sentimental piece that focuses on themes of British history, traditions and royal loyalty in a futuristic setting. The twist at the end was a bit obvious. "Prince Henry" visits a new type of spaceship and has an interesting discussion with the American captain.

Patent Pending ★★★☆☆ This story is a nod towards virtual reality, 50 years before it came into being. A French scientist creates a device to record and play back brain waves, allowing experiences to be replayed by other people, including pornographic experiences, which results in him (fatally) neglecting his mistress. However, a venture to make the recording process commercial is still underway.

Big Game Hunt ★★★★☆ A fun little story which describes the efforts of an eccentric professor to study the electrical circuitry of the brain. He invents a device which can control animals' movements by reproducing the electrical signals, but there has to be an electrical connection between device and animal. So he teams up with a wildlife photographer and they head for the ocean, to try film a giant squid.

🟢No Morning After ★★★☆☆ A mildly amusing story featuring other dimensional alien beings who try to warn humanity that the sun will explode in 74 hours, but that the aliens can offer them a means of escape. Their only form of communication is telepathy. The only human receptive to their message is a brilliant, but very drunk mathematician, who believes the warning is a hallucination.

The Deep Range ★★★☆☆ A story exploring future ocean farming, where humans manage, herd, and harvest whales for protein to meet global food shortages... with the help of their "sea dogs", the porpoise. This particular story features the herder protecting his whales from a shark attack. No whales are hurt in this story, only the predator shark. This story was expanded into a novel of the same name.

Armaments Race ★★★⯪☆ Told by a Hollywood special effects man, this funny story details an escalating, absurd and increasingly elaborate technological arms race between the weapons required for the protagonist and the adversaries in an SF TV series. About a dozen variants of weapon are produced & used in several episodes. However, the next upgrade to these prop weapons far exceeds the expectations of its makers!

🟢Publicity Campaign ★★★☆☆ A satire of human xenophobia and media-driven fear during a peaceful alien first-contact scenario... with drastic consequences. It's not everyday a story features a purple panda with four eyes.

The Other Tiger ★★★⯪☆ A funny little theoretical physics story. Exploring infinity and probability, two friends discuss the idea that all possibilities must exist in an infinite universe while walking in the English countryside. After one of them argues they could meet a tiger, but meet something else instead.

🟢Encounter In the Dawn ★★★⯪☆ A poignant first contact story that partially inspired the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The story features advanced alien scientists from a dying galactic empire visiting a primitive Earth. One of the explorers bond with early humans, influencing their technological development before departing, revealing that these ancient aliens inspired humanity's early "gods" and progress.

🟢Jupiter Five ★★★★⯪ 💖 This story was a great deal of fun.
It concerns the detection and exploration of an ancient spaceship from outside the Solar System.

The Parasite ★★★☆☆ A creepy psychological SF story featuring a man who believes a telepathic, alien intelligence (dubbed "Omega") has invaded his mind and feeds on his emotions.

The Possessed ★★★⯪☆ An interesting story explaining lemming suicides as the result of a parasitic, non-corporeal alien intelligence that landed on Earth during the Age of Reptiles.

The Nine Billion Names Of God ★★★★☆ Fun story of ironic, cosmic "horror" that fuses the world of modern technology with the realm of ancient mysticism. Tibetan monks hire two Western technicians to use a powerful modern computer to list all possible names of God. This will allow them to finish a 15000-year manual task in 100 days. They believe this task will complete humanity's purpose and end the universe.

🟢All the Time In the World ★★★☆☆ An art thief is hired to steal many of Earth's cultural treasures. He is given a time-stopping bracelet to aid in this endeavor so that he has "all the time in the world" to rob the Metropolitan Museum. Poignant and tragic.

🟢‘If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth …’ ★★★⯪☆ A poignant story in which a ten-year old boy realizes the tragic consequences of nuclear war when he views the radioactive, ruined, uninhabitable Earth from his place of permanent exile on the Moon. The story focuses the dangers of technology, hope, duty, and the legacy of human actions.

Superiority ★★★⯪☆ Told as a confession of a defeated Admiral, explaining how chasing new, unproven technology led to logistical failure and military defeat of a technologically advanced, yet arrogant, society to a more primitive, practical adversary. This story highlights that untested (often theoretically) superior technology does not guarantee success.