Tales from Planet Earth - Softcover

Arthur C. Clarke

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553348833 ISBN 13: 9780553348835

Publisher: Spectra, 1990

Synopsis

A collection of fourteen stories by a master of the genre addresses the fate of the planet and includes "The Lion of Comarre," "The Deep Range," and "The Wall of Darkness"

About this title

Review:

If you want an omnibus of short fiction by Arthur C. Clarke, a Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master, then you want The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke. If you're looking for a representative sample of Clarke's short stories, or for some examples of the creative and extrapolative abilities that established Clarke as one of science fiction's greatest and most important writers, then check out Tales from Planet Earth.

Tales from Planet Earth ranges widely across time, but the stories are centered on our home world. Many SF writers confine their visions of earth to its flatlands, but Clarke is three-dimensional; his stories "Hate," "The Deep Range," and "The Man Who Ploughed the Sea" plunge into the ocean, while "The Cruel Sky" ascends the Himalayas. Some stories, like "The Other Tiger" and "'If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth...'," end on chilling twists. "The Road to the Sea" spans centuries and millennia to explore how humanity's exodus to the stars may affect the world left behind. "Hate" considers how transcendence of the Earth's atmosphere may affect ancient enmities. "The Parasite" demonstrates a scary nastiness not usually associated with Clarke. "The Wall of Darkness" is set on an alternate-universe earth so different from ours, and "The Lion of Comarre" is set in a future so far away, that both stories feel like fantasy; but both are rigorously extrapolated from scientific theory. Two lighthearted entertainments, "The Next Tenants" and "The Man Who Ploughed the Sea," are from Tales of the White Hart. All of the stories in Tales from Planet Earth are recommended.

The iBooks 2001 Anniversary Edition of Tales from Planet Earth collects 14 SF stories first published between 1950 and 1987, including the satire "On Golden Seas," which has "never before [been] collected in any Clarke book." --Cynthia Ward

About the Author:

Arthur C. Clarke is the author of many seminal works of science fiction, most noteably; 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (Little Brown).

About this edition

• Publisher: Spectra
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0553348833
• ISBN 13: 9780553348835
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 307
• Illustrator: Michael Whelan