Customer Reviews

Clarke's Universe

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Since I got my kindle a year ago, I have been waiting for a larger amount of Clarke's work to become available. Much of what is available is the more recent collaborations, which I don't care for.

I found this last night, and bought it immediately. "A Fall of Moondust" has been a favorite of mine for over 30 years, I have read it at least 5 times. It is described most often as a "hard" SF story, meaning it revolves around science and technology. That is true, but not accurate. This is a great story with several compelling characters, and a few plot twists to add to the excitement. It's like watching Apollo 13 for the 20th time, you know what is going to happen, but it is still exciting.

One of the things that I have always liked about this book is how it illustrates the differences, and similarities, between what a scientist does, and what an engineer does.

Sir Arthur tells an amazing amount of story in a small space, the print editions come in at under 250 pages. More modern authors would probably use 800 pages to tell the same story.

There are two other stories in this set, both of which are vintage Clarke, and highly enjoyable. However, I think "Fall of Moondust" shines above them.

Now, if only the publisher would make "Collected Stories" available, along with the Rama and 2001 series.

The Kindle edition is FULL of typos. I had to give up after the first two pages because it was virtually unreadable.

Far too many OCR typos to enjoy. Amazon must do more to assure product quality. Do not purchase.

I enjoyed the three short stories that made up this book. Nothing especially stellar or ground breaking but interesting little reads.

My only complaint and warning, the first story is replete with typos. It seems like the story was scanned from a source like a magazine, converted to text by a computer, and then never proof read. I found the typos so common and disruptive that I almost had to stop reading the story. If you're likely to be bothered by this, then definitely don't shell out the money for this collection.

Ok- I've always been a fan of Clarke's work, so when I found this collection I grabbed it-and was confronted by an average of 5-10 typing errors on every page. It's obvious that ibooks simply scanned the books from originals, ran them through a reader, used an automated spell checker, but made no effort to edit or even proofread the resulting text. As a result, the story has been rendered unreadable, and ibooks has lost a future customer.