Across the Sea of Stars by Arthur C. Clarke

With the exception of scifi, short stories are a genre I haven't ventured very far into, and this book reminded me why I've always preferred that variety. (Well, not including Twain's short stories, they're a whole new class of awesome) There's something so tantalizing about scifi short stories; they present myriads of possibilities and scenarios, without getting bogged down by too much plot and character development. Not that there's anything wrong with plot and character development, I'm a big fan, but sometimes the concept is the best part of scifi--just enough to tickle the imagination.

Overview
Across the Sea of Stars is an omnibus of three collections of short stories and two short novels: Childhood's End, and Earthlight. This review will only cover the short stories, partially because the recording I found didn't include the novels for some reason, and partially because Childhood's End is one of Clarke's masterpieces--it deserves a review all its own if I re-read it.

(Disclaimer: it's been a few weeks since I read Sea, so I used a cheat sheet :-p It's a good overview of all the stories, with a brief summary of each. I don't plan to go over each and every story here, mostly because it's already been done.)

The three collections of short stories are only distinguishable because the middle one, Tales from the White Hart, take the form of pub stories--still scifi, but slightly more grounded. (Not necessarily that they are less far fetched, but that there are no spaceships or aliens involved) The other two collections, Expedition to Earth and Reach for Tomorrow aren't really distinguishable except that Reach for Tomorrow has somewhat longer stories.

Recommended for: Scifi and short story fans

Parental Worries: None that I can remember.

Audiobook Comments: Read by Dan Lazar (I think). It's an old recording, from back when audiobooks were a relatively new format, and his reading isn't particularly impressive. It's not bad enough to detract from the book, however, but even if the reader had been wonderful, I wouldn't recommend this book on audio. Audiobooks don't work very well for these stories; it's better to read them one at a time and digest each before moving on to the next. That's possible on audio, but not the rhythm I prefer.

Ramblings
As I mentioned before, I wasn't particularly impressed by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, although I loved the book. I'm similarly unimpressed by the short story "The Sentinel", which was the original 'teaser' for the movie and book, and the first story in this collection. Maybe I was prejudiced going in, maybe the idea was less fantastic since it's become culturally ingrained, or maybe it's just that nothing happens in the story. Riding around on the moon, find an obviously unnatural structure, oh no we're not the only ones out there. Luckily, this story is probably the weakest of the collection, so you only go up from there.

One of the things I particularly love about Clarke is that unlike Asimov, who scorned anything spiritual and created future worlds where religion had been completely abandoned, Clarke's stories do not neglect the human spirit, or rather, human spirituality. He himself was an atheist and expressly ordered that no religious representation or rituals would appear at his funeral, but he obviously recognized that there was more in the universe than could necessarily be explained by science. (Well, that might not be the way he'd put it, but close enough) For example, his story "Inheritance" involves a nicely ironic incidence of prophetic dreams, and "The Nine Billion Names of God" (not in this collection, but one of his best stories) portrays a pair of scornful religious skeptics as blind fools. It's not just the supernatural either. The story "If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth" brought me to tears, and two others in the collection involved advanced technology leading to defeat instead of victory. It's this emphasis on hope, on human ingenuity and tenacity that speaks more deeply to me than Asimov's calculating psychohistory and galactic empires. (Not that I didn't thoroughly enjoy the Foundation series, but his scorn of religion and spirituality really gets under my skin sometimes)

As I saw with Fall of Moondust, Clarke's stories set in the near-future are less effective and enduring than those set in the far future (or occasionally, far past :-p ). That's no fault of Clarke's, no man can perfectly predict the courses that technology and science can take in the next hundred years. Happily, only about four of the stories in this collection are of that variety, and even they have a charm of their own, a kind of naivete. The risk is highest in the Tales from the White Hart, because they stand as stories told in a pub that could have existed anywhere within the last hundred years and (hopefully) the next hundred. Surprisingly, therefore, only one of them is anachronistic; it involves a special effects artist on the run from Hollywood because in the race to make more and more impressive fake weapons, he accidentally made one that was less fake than it should have been. These days, luckily, everything is added in with computers and we don't have to worry about accidentally creating a cold fusion reactor in an attempt to make pretty lights. ^_~