Expedition to Earth, Arthur C. Clarke’s first short-story collection (1953)

Since I finally posted my page dedicated to Short Stories by Arthur C. Clarke, I figure it’s high time I go back and read through the many stories I have never touched! I begin with his first publication of 11 stories, each of which were published originally in magazines between 1946-1953.

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As I usually do, I work through these 11 stories one by one and try to keep “spoilers” to a minimum—even though they’ve been around now for more than 75 years!

1. “Second Dawn” (1951)

Clarkes begins his collection with a mighty long story about telepathic alien-like creatures—and it’s frankly not what I expected. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been reading so much from Isaac Asimov over the past several years that I expected more robots and gizmos! Yet I have to remind myself of Clarke’s infatuation with species of all sorts and their fights for survival in the throes of Evolution. Instead of machines and technology, we meet in this story a race of 4-footed creatures which are gifted in metaphysics and telepathy yet lack hand-like appendages with which to build things—that is, until they finally run across a curious race with hands. It’s seemed an odd way to begin this return-foray into Clarke, but I liked it.

2. “If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth” (1951)

This truly short short story offers a vivid, beautiful, painful picture of a future Earth, post-Armageddon, yet from the viewpoint of a child on the moon. It’s a cautionary tale, as Marvin’s father drives him wordlessly for hours to the far side of the moon, where they see in all its glory both their past and their future. This story is premium Clarke. 

3. “Breaking Strain” (1949, a.k.a. “Thirty Seconds, Thirty Days”)

This one begins innocently enough, two men on a ship to Venus doing their spaceman job. One is even smoking a cigarette, they’re so relaxed. But when they are suddenly hit by a meteoroid and begin losing oxygen, everything changes. I loved this description of their chances of getting hit by this “monster” stone nearly a centimeter in size:

According to the tables, the waiting time for collision with such a monster was of the order of ten to the ninth days – say three million years. The virtual certainty that such an occurrence would not happen again in the course of human history gave Grant and McNeil very little consolation.

The clock won’t let them return to any port alive—so what can be done? This quickly becomes an incredible story of survival, human nature, and guilt.

4. “Expedition to Earth” (1949, a.k.a. “History Lesson”)

This story apparently stemmed from a line Clarke read in Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilisation: “Civilization is an interlude between ice ages.” While this story isn’t totally focused on ice ages, they do play a small part. And I’ll be honest, the clinching line in this one really made me laugh. Clarke really took his sweet time setting up this long-joke of a story, and it definitely lands. The Venutians are probably still quite confused. 

5. “Superiority” (1951)

When I began this story, I was hit once again by how these masters of sci-fi fantasy can imagine the most mesmerizing technology yet still require “vacuum tubes” and punch-hole cards for their computers and fuel for their rockets. That this entire story comes in the form a letter is another musty breath of antiquity.

“Superiority” plays off the drama that comes when a much superior army is defeated by the inferior science of their enemies. This concept reminded me immediately of Luke Skywalker destroying the Death Star in A New Hope, or of the Ewoks defeating the Empire in The Return of the Jedi. I’m sure George Lucas read Arthur C. Clarke (along with Joseph Campbell, of course), so I think he definitely learned some tricks of the trade from this one.

6. “Nemesis” (1950, a.k.a. “Exile of the Eons”)

When a future leader more cruel than Hitler himself leads his people to a final bloody death, he lets them die with one consolation: he’ll be cryogenically frozen, so that he can reawaken to raise up another army and win the final victory—in about a century. But what he thought might be a 100-year nap instead turns into eons, and the twist at the end (I thought) was a good one. Another long set-up for a satisfying payoff.

7. “Hide-and-Seek” (1949)

Clarke always tries to end his stories with a nice twist—like O. Henry, but in Space—which is something I love about the guy. The twist in this story is less about what happens and more about how the story is told. It’s authorial trickery like this that makes me want to keep reading his stories. 

8. “Encounter in the Dawn” (1953)

At least two stories in this book have ties to Clarke’s future masterwork, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and this is one of them. Here, a future race visits Earth to make connections with humans, though the clincher is unexpected, as it often is with Clarke’s stories. This time it’s not the “who” but the “when.”

9. “Loophole” (1946)

This was one of Clarke’s first stories he ever sold, and it’s definitely unique among all the others I’ve read, at it comes in the form of back-and-forth correspondence. Of course, he predicts space travel—and even guesses at how many decades it would take for man to send rockets into space, once the world was no longer at war. Radioactive rockets were a mere guess, but a good one. The fact that Martians could watch and threaten Earth so easily, yet still needed to transmit their communications on paper carried aboard their ships like snail mail does, however, show the limits of human imagination—even humans as gifted with foresight as Arthur C. Clarke!

10. “Inheritance” (1947, a.k.a. “By Charles Willis”)

I had to skim this one a second time in order to track its logic. It involves test pilots and time-travel shenanigans, though it reminded somewhat of that great film I could watch over and over again, Interstellar. It may defy logic, but that’s what makes it Sci-fi and fun to read!

11. “The Sentinel” (1951, a.k.a. “Sentinel of Eternity”)

Clarke later mentions that this story is another “starting point of 2001: A Space Odyssey.” An astronaut discovers something strange in the mountains of the Moon, but he’s baffled to know whether this pyramid (not a monolith) is a message from the past—or the future. While I am certain that the Clarke-Kubrick storyline was unique to the two of them, I’m glad to see that elements also stem back into Clarke’s own history of writing. It’s cool to see how various plot points converge to make one of the smartest yet most downplayed films ever.

Conclusion

I truly enjoyed this first collection of short stories from Arthur C. Clarke and hope to make it through several more volumes before the year is over. Next up would be Reach for Tomorrow (1956) which includes stories from 1942-1955.

©2026 E.T.