I bought this omnibus quite cheap, for about 10 EUR. Of course, it was during a sales period. As I was looking for something by Arthur C. Clarke, I picked this one and [b:The City and the Stars|250024|The City and the Stars|Arthur C. Clarke|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1340242824s/250024.jpg|925052]. And as the stories in this 'The Space Trilogy' omnibus are each quite short, I decided to read them before tackling his other classic, also while trying to take into account that these stories were written at least 60 years ago.

'Islands in the Sky' was mediocre. A young guy wins a tv-quiz, gets to travel into space, although that wasn't part of the deal. And then you learn that the lad, Roy Malcolm (16 years old), did his homework with regards to Earth's "legal" boundaries and the Tycho Convention. Thanks to his uncle, who works in the legal sector, the small print was decoded. So Roy travels to the Inner Station and learns all about the life out there. As his stay is short, he also tries to have some adventures, next to learning about research that is conducted in the station.

It felt like a YA-story, mainly because of the main character, but the scientific elements about space and what not, do make the story a bit more digestable.

'The Sands of Mars' starts in roughly the same way as 'Islands in the Sky', but the story is, in general, better. Matt Gibson, a writer, leaves Earth to begin a new life - that's his goal - on Mars. But he has to earn the trust of the human Martians. Meanwhile, his task is also to keep Earth up to date with regards to happenings and what he experiences, as a reporter would do. Mars is set to become a second Earth, but as Gibson isn't told everything, he has to find out for himself what's going on.

This one, too, is more for entertainment, for in-between. It's definitely not that exciting, whether or not the time of writing is taken into account.

And last, but somehow not least, 'Earthlight'. It started well, I noticed a change in writing style, a bit more serious, and chapter sizes (smaller, better arranged, in a way), but at about 80 pages before the end, I didn't feel like finishing this story of intrigues, espionage, etc. I find it very difficult to connect to the characters (they're so flat, so devoid of emotion), to the events, the politics. Sure, the science in the story is again fairly alright, but it's only one part of the story and not enough to make the reading more exciting.


In short: I was a little deceived, thinking that the great Sir Arthur C. Clarke had written nothing but very good and recommended Sci-Fi. I still have, as mentioned in the first paragraph, 'The City and the Stars', which I hope is a much better book. The reading will, for obvious reasons, be for much later. Fans of mr Clarke will probably be more interested in this omnibus, 'The Space Trilogy', or will perhaps appreciate his earliest works more.

For those, like me, new to Clarke's works: start elsewhere. Avoid this trilogy until you really want to read it. It's almost like when "discovering" a band: unless they're really new, it's best not to start with the earliest albums or demos. ( )

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Islands in the Sky

good wholesome stuff, with boys becoming men in space: our protagonist gets to stay in the big low-orbit space station, where the entire crew appear to be English and male, and experience a few other adventures but also learn some important lessons about life and about engineering (though nothing much about other matters, the only women in space being an actor making a movie in orbit and the members of a friendly family of Mars colonists). The most striking difference for me between Clarke's 1952 future and what has actually happened is that the cost of space flight has proven to be so high that economies of scale have pushed us much more to unmanned spacecraft and also to international collaboration than he anticipated, though I am sure he approved of both developments.

The Sands of Mars

a Clarke novel that I definitely had not read before - and I thought I had raided the Belfast library system of its entire stock of his works when I was a teenager. Though bound second in my omnibus volume, it was Clarke's first published novel, dating from 1951. It's set a few years after the establishment of a Mars colony; the journalist protagonist (who is also an sf novelist) is being sent as what we'd now call an embedded member of the team, to write up what is going on in humanity's new outpost; the details of how journalism is technically done have dated far more than the rest of the book - there is a loving detailed description of a fax machine, an unimaginable technological advance in 1951, archaic for us in 2016. It's also a rare case of Clarke attempting to inject some emotional energy into his story, with one of the crew members turning out to be the protagonist's long-lost biological son, who then falls in love with the only girl on Mars; characteristically, having laid out the situation, the author doesn't dwell on it (and didn't really try this kind of narrative trick again in his career). He's on much more comfortable political ground when the discovery of a new form of Martian life upsets the balance of relations between the Martian base and its Earth master's, though here again his viewpoint is firmly rooted in what's good for the human colonists rather than the indigenous Martians. Still, I enjoyed it, and I'm surprised that this took me decades to track down.

Earthlight

This 1955 novel did disappoint me a bit. It's the story of a counterespionage accountant on a lunar observatory at a moment of interplanetary conflict between Earth and The Rest Of The Solar System; obviously the Moon becomes a critical location in that conflict (and equally obviously there are Cold War parallels in the author's mind). There are some vivid observations of base life in the observatory (where again all the staff are white men) and the high-tech battle at the climax of the plot is well described. But otherwise the whole thing is a bit subdued, and the framing narrative of the protagonist's mission gets a particularly unconvincing resolution. ( )

Although the most recent of the books making up this omnibus was written almost 60 years ago and the technology is, in some senses, very dated (valves anyone?) the sense of adventure that these tales engender is still enthralling as we look back to a world where the solar system was there for the taking. There are problems of course - women are almost non-existent and the typing pool is as extinct as the dodo as well as the deplorable state of computers as presented in these tales. ( )