The Challenge of the Spaceship [Paperback]

Arthur c clarke (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Pocket (May 1, 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671821393
• ISBN-13: 978-0671821395
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,513,420 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Some of Clarke's better non-fiction writing, September 16, 2003

By 

Bill R. Moore (New York, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Challenge of the Spaceship (Paperback)

As many Arthur C. Clarke fans know, the great writer was not only the Dean of science fiction, but was also, at least pre-2001, one of the world's leading popular science writers. He wrote many volumes of non-fiction, most of them now out-of-print. One thing that anyone who has read through a good amount of them has no doubt noticed is that some essays pop up in more than one volume, and that some of the writing is a good deal more interesting than some others. The Challenge of the Spaceship is, thankfully, one of the best non-fiction collections that Clarke ever wrote. The book's title is somewhat misleading (so titled, probably, to parallel with the more aptly-titled The Challenge of the Sea). The book does not deal directly with spaceships, as far as their own technicalities and aspects of composition. What the book focuses on, instead, are the challenges that the spaceship is faced with overcoming -- exploring the solar system, reaching the stars, etc. -- and, most specifically, the cultural, artistic, philosophical, and even theological ramifications of attempting and meeting such challenges. This is far less prediction-oriented than some of Clarke's other work, and it is a real treat to any fan of the author's. The range of subjects and material that Clarke covers is nothing short of fascinating. As always, Clarke uses his encyclopedic knowledge of science, and astronomy in particular, to positively dazzle and astound the reader. He also, thankfully, possesses the rare ability to take difficult and complex concepts and put them into terms that most readers can understand. One will learn much from this book, things both practically useful and just quite simply interesting. To boot, the philosophical asides that Clarke can just never keep from returning back to are at turns highly imaginative and extremely interesting, thoughtful, and enlightening. As always, he writes with a highly-poetic that is a joy to read, and his ever-present, if subtle, sense of humor is to be found in spades. This book also includes one of my all-time favorite of Clarke's essays The Star of the Magi, in which he explores the question of which astronomical phenomena constituted the Star of Bethlehem. This is an essential book for fans of Clarke's non-fiction.

5.0 out of 5 stars A fine collection of popular science and daring speculations, September 5, 2011

By 

Alexander Arsov - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Challenge of the Spaceship (Paperback)

Arthur C. Clarke

The Challenge of the Spaceship

Pocket Books, Paperback, 1980.

12mo, 222 pp. Introduction by the author [p. 9].

First published, 1959.

First Pocket Books printing, June 1980.

Contents

Introduction

The Challenge of the Spaceship

Vacation in Vacuum*

Journey by Earthlight

So You're Going to Mars?*

The Planets Are Not Enough*

Meteors*

The Star of the Magi*

Where's Everybody?

The Sun

What Can We Do About the Weather?

Oh for the Wings...

Across the Sea of Stars*

Of Mind and Matter

Which Way Is Up?*

Report on Planet Three*

Question Time

Things in the Sky*

The Men on the Moon*

The Radio Universe

Of Space and the Spirit

Envoi

* Reprinted in Report on Planet Three (1972).

================================================='

There are some suspicious moments in the bibliographical history of this book. It is certain enough that it consists of Clarke's essays written for various magazines during the 1950s (except the eponymous piece which was an address delivered to the British Interplanetary Society in 1946, though it was later revised) and collected in book form for the first time in 1959. This makes perfect sense, of course, since the ''the main theme of this book is the impact of the coming Space Age upon our hitherto Earth-bound species''. However, there is some evidence that in 1961, a most momentous year in the history of Space Age, another edition came out which contained a ''Revised Preface''; whether or not there were any other revisions as well, remains elusive. The strangest thing of all is that the Pocket Books edition, published more than 20 years after the first one, contains the bold statement on the front cover ''Reviews of tomorrow's world completely revised and updated by the author''. Now this would have been wonderful - if the copyright page and, more importantly, internal evidence did not suggest that this complete revision and update had occurred back in the late 1950s, apparently while Clarke was collecting these pieces for their first appearance in book form.

Another curious bibliographical paradox is that no fewer than eleven of these essays, more than half of the book that is, were reprinted in another non-fiction book of Clarke 13 years later. The versions of these essays in Report on Planet Three (1972) are virtually unchanged, save for some short prefatory notes. Now if you want to have these pieces in one book only, the later volume is the one to obtain for it contains better bonuses. All the same, The Challenge of the Spaceship still makes a magnificently rich and rewarding read. Just about the most dated thing are few speculations about life on the Moon; at least that sounds rather more unlikely today than it did in the 1950s. Otherwise there is still a great deal to learn and profit from in these essays. To begin with, I would allow myself the monstrous liberty of quoting the Introduction complete. It is the finest review I can imagine:

"The main theme of this book is the impact of the coming Space Age upon our hitherto Earth-bound species. Looking past the immediate present, and ignoring both the occasional triumphs and more frequent failures of today's satellites and rocket probes, it attempts to view the conquest of space as part of a historical process. Except where they are essential to the argument, it is not in the least concerned with technical matters; it assumes that machines are less important than what men do with them - or what they do with men."

"Though the various examinations of the Man-Space relationship that follow look at the subject from different angles, some overlapping is inevitable and some is deliberate. I have tried to edit out all unnecessary repetition, but when a thing is really important it is worth saying more than once."

"Interleaved between these philosophical and cultural speculations are examples of straight science reporting, most of them from the pages of Holiday magazine. Sometimes, as in the trio of pieces giving helpful advice to interplanetary tourists, the reporting is not so straight. However, anyone who reads that book as a whole will be in little danger of confusing fact with fiction."

That's a fine example of saying a great deal with a very few words. (So much for Clarke's notorious repetitions, too.) The three pieces in the manner of tourist brochures are ''Vacation in Vacuum'', ''Journey by Earthlight'' and ''So You're Going to Mars?'; why the second one was not reprinted later in Report on Planet Three as well is difficult to imagine. All three essays are among Clarke's finest hybrids between fiction and non-fiction, daring speculation and popular science with mischievous touches thrown in for a good measure. The last sentence of the Introduction probably refers to a short note in the end of ''The Challenge of the Spaceship'' which prepares the reader for the hilarious stuff that follows. Certainly, however, nobody would have any trouble to distinguish fiction from non-fiction, though the prefatory note is very helpful indeed: without it, it might take few paragraphs to realise that you're reading a kind of interplanetary Baedeker - but published several decades after the first edition of the book you are holding, in times when Mars and the Moon bear the same relation to the English as Egypt and Italy today. Since ''Journey by Earthlight'' was not reprinted later, here is one favourite quote from it. Such poetry in prose, affecting yet shattering, is one of the things most characteristic of Clarke, one of the things, in fact, that put him in a class of his own. Here he describes the view from the ''dark side'' of the Moon; in other words, how the starry sky would change if you move from the sun-drenched lunar plains into the freezing shadow of a ''convenient rock'':

"Then, as your vision adapts itself and your pupils enlarge, you'll see the stars come out. First there will be the bright, familiar constellations, then the legions of their faint companions, until at the last the whole sky seems packed with glowing dust. All those countless points of light will be shining with a steady, unvarying radiance: none will twinkle or scintillate as they do in the clearest nights on Earth. Now you will understand why all great observatories are on the Moon: you will realize that, until he had climbed above the atmosphere of his own planet, no man had ever really seen the stars."

Think about that next time you're doing your regular dose of stargazing - and if you're a great Clarke admirer you sure do a lot of this neck-breaking sport. For a fine use in fiction of lunar astronomy and the twinkling stars from Earth's surface, see the almost unbearably poignant short stories ''Dog Star'' and ''If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth...'', respectively.

Now, what I have to say about the pieces reprinted in Report on Planet Three, I have said it in my attempt for review of this masterpiece; and what I think of the magnificent title essay, I have said in my reflections on the collection Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! (1999) where it is reprinted.

The rest of the pieces are all gems. The weakest is certainly ''Oh for the Wings...'', which attempts a thoroughly scientific discussion of the not-so-ludicrous-as-it-may-seem human flight powered by - muscular power. As it seems, this type of sport will remain in the realms of the highly impracticable ones for quite some time yet. ''What Can We Do About the Weather?'' deals with our rather feeble attempts to influence a largely unpredictable phenomenon. The most fascinating part of this essay is the one in which Clarke recalls his own wartime experience with the biggest installation of FIDO (Fog, Intense, Dispersal Of) ever built, one of the crudest methods to ''do something about the weather''. Yet the necessity was so strong, and the exorbitant cost so affordable, that those strange fellows, the British, actually did it. They burned some 100 000 gallons of gasoline per hour using approximately four to five miles of pipes with numerous burners attached to them. So the fog had no other chance but to retreat, and the RAF bombers could land safely. But let Arthur describe it in his inimitable way. No apology for the frequency and the length of quotations:

"At night, with the fog rolling in from the Atlantic, a FIDO operation was like a scene from Dante's Inferno. The roar of the flames filled the air and made speech difficult; they created such an updraft that small stones on the edge of the runway were picked up and tossed around by the air currents. As far as the eye could see, the yellow walls of fire, taller than a man, stretched away into the foggy night. The miles of burners were pumping heat into the air at the rate of 10 000 000 horsepower, cutting a long, narrow trench through the fog, down which the returning bombers could find their way to the ground."

"I have known nights when the fog was so thick that visibility was less than ten feet - but standing in the middle of the runway, with the flames roaring on either side, one could see the stars shining overhead. FIDO worked by brute force, and the development of radar made it obsolete; but it did show what could be done when incentive was sufficiently great - and expense was no object."

''The Sun'' is a typical piece of popular science, but of the type that only Clarke could write. And this is the most precious type, namely the one that makes you realise how little - if... Read more ›

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Outdated predictions about the world already in the past., August 16, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Challenge of the Spaceship (Paperback)

There was something about this book that was not quite right. Originally written in the late 1950's, this book lacks the creativity of Clarke's full novels.

Perhaps Clarke has discovered this also, because recently he stays with short diatribes on television shows and co-authors most of his recent works.

This book is only for the collector looking to complete their Arthur C. Clarke collection.