I've been reading Tales from Planet Earth at lunch this week. It's an intriguing collection of short stories, each with an illustrated frontispiece. The foreword is by Isaac Asimov and each story has a short intro written by Clarke for this collection.Clarke is one of the SF authors I always forget that I like - especially his short stories. I especially enjoyed the future-primitive stories: "The Road to the Sea" and "The Wall of Darkness". "Publicity Campaign" is a light, humourous story; while "Hate" sadly lives up to its name. "The Lion of Comarre" and "The Parasite" share chilling explorations of the mind, and "The Deep Range" (apparently expanded into a novel, according to the intro) is an interesting twist on a cowboy story.All in all, this book kept me busy & entertained during my lunch hour this week. It's not a "must have" but it you happen to spot it at the library or in a used book store, you may want to pick it up.
I breezed through the 2001 series in about a week, but I can't say much for this short story collection. It's pretty meh all around. The whaling story was downright awful and ludicrous. Others were fine but not exciting. My biggest complaint, unsurprisingly, is Clarke forgets females exist and in fact, comprise over half the population. They are only in three stories (four if you count the article-type story On Golden Seas) and serve no purpose other than to be a foil for some male character's anger or desire. UGH! LAME! SO LAME. Asimov was hella sexist but at least he tried having female characters every once in a while, and he at least TRIED to make them characters in their own right even if he did a bad job sometimes (ironically, the older and "more experienced" he got, the worse his women became). Clarke, I am very disappointed in you. Being the product of a certain era is no excuse for this laziness.
What do You think about Tales From Planet Earth (2011)?
Entertaining assortment of Clarke stories, mostly from the '40s and '50s. I read Clarke a lot as a teenager in the '60s and '70s, but not much since then. I may have read this anthology when it first appeared, but if not, I had certainly read many of the stories included. Clarke's ideas are interesting, and his writing is solid and undramatic, unlike much of the more recent SF (which I've been avoiding for a long time now) which seems to serve the same fantasizing purpose for men as romance novels serve for women, though often without the sex.
—Cooper Renner
This is a collection of Clarke's short stories mostly from the 1950s and '60s, but with forays into the '80s and even '90s as well. There are a good mix of stories, from very short and playful (such as Publicity Campaign) to almost novella-sized, deep and emotional (such as The Road to the Sea) and many in-between things. As a fan of Clarke I really enjoyed just about all the stories, few of which have aged in any significant way (although, of course, they will have in lesser ways). A great collection to dip into.
—Raj
