Arthur C. Clarke - Islands in the Sky

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Puffin Books

Editor: Kaye Webb

Islands in the Sky

Roy Malcolm had wanted to get into space for as long

as he could remember. He had read everything he could

get hold of about aviation and astronauts, seen all the

movies and telecasts from space, and made up his mind

that some day he was going to look back and watch the

earth shrinking behind him.

When he was sixteen his chance came. He won a

television Aviation Quiz Programme, and as his prize

he went to the Inner Station, five hundred miles from

Earth, where spaceships were refuelled and overhauled

on their way out.

Roy's adventures on the Inner Station are very exciting,

more so because all the information given is

scientifically correct, and they give us a good idea of

what life on a space station really will be like.

For readers of eleven and over. Cover

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

With an Introduction by Patrick Moore

Puffin Books,

Penguin Books Ltd,

Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

Penguin Books, 625 Madison Avenue,

New York, New York 10022, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

Victoria, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street,

Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 184

Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

Auckland, New Zealand

First published in the U.S.A. 1954

Published in Great Britain by Sidgwick & Jackson 1971

Published in Puffin Books 1972

Reprinted 1973, 1975, 1976, 1978

rights reserved

Made and printed in Great Britain by

Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd,

Aylesbury, Bucks Set in Linotype

Juliana

Except in the United States of America, this book is

sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way

of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or

otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior

consent in any form of binding or cover other than

that in which it is published and without a similar

condition including this condition being imposed on

the subsequent purchaser

CONTENTS

Foreword by Patrick Moore 7

1 Jackpot to Space 13

2 Goodbye to Gravity 25

3 'The Morning Star' 53

4 A Plague of Pirates 71

5 Star Turn 86

6 Hospital in Space 102

7 World of Monsters 122

8 Into the Abyss 135

9 The Shot from the Moon 155

10 Radio Satellite 171

11 Starlight Hotel 182

12 The Long Fall Home 197

FOREWORD

'The Eagle has landed...'

I wonder how many people heard those words,

spoken by Neil Armstrong across a distance of a quar-

ter of a million miles? Certainly it was a moment

never to be forgotten; Man had reached the Moon at

last. The impossible had been achieved.

Hindsight is always easy, and there are many

people today who claim that they 'always knew it

would happen'. Well, I am sorry - but the fact is that

as recently as the end of Hitler's war, very few people

thought it would happen before the end of the cen-

tury, if at all. I claim to be one of the minority; but my

time-scale was considerably in error, and I was working

in terms of a lunar landing some time around 1990. I

should have listened more carefully to Arthur

Clarke...

When I first met Arthur Clarke we were not

actually in short trousers, but we were not very far

away from them in time. During the war we were

both in the RAF, but in different sections of it, and

our orbits intersected only occasionally, at meetings of

the British Astronomical Association on the rare

coincidences of our leaves. Yet even then Arthur had

made a considerable reputation for himself. He was

an early member of the British Interplanetary Society,

which admittedly had to suspend all activities during

the war; he was becoming known as an expert science-

fiction writer, and he was a prophet who in those days

was regarded widely as somewhat super-optimistic.

What was not so well known (and is not sufficiently

well known even now) was that he is also a serious and

skilled scientist in his own right, even though he will

always vehemently disclaim the fact.

In 1945, when fighting ended and we entered upon

an all-too-brief and, alas, spurious era when we

thought that wars belonged to the past, space-

research was still not taken very seriously. Anyone

suspected of belonging to an Interplanetary Society

was regarded as more than slightly odd (there is one

record of such an enthusiast being arrested when seen

entering a museum carrying a large parcel; actually it

contained books, but was naturally mistaken for a

bomb). And so when Arthur Clarke published a paper

in Wireless World, in that year, it caused as much

general excitement as the impact of a feather upon a

rubber mattress. Actually, that paper paved the way

for the communications satellites of today; and it is

now read with considerable reverence. Times have

changed.

I am never quite sure when space-research became

'respectable'. It was derided in 1945; it was accepted

by 1956, and the last cries of disbelief were silenced in

1957, when Russia sent Sputnik I soaring beyond the

atmosphere. No one man was responsible, and it

would be absurd to claim otherwise, but Arthur

Clarke had a definite share in it. Those who read his

scientific texts could see, very clearly, that here was a

writer with vision; there was nothing of the extremist

about him, even though his forecasts were extreme by

the time-scale of the fifties.

A little while ago (sometime during 1969) he and I

made a long broadcast together, and we looked back

over those 'early' times. Few of his predictions were

found to have been wrong; the vast majority had been

borne out by subsequent events.

There is, I suppose, a school of thought which will

always oppose any fresh idea. Many pessimists claimed

that the aeroplane could never work; indeed, the

eminent American astronomer Simon Newcomb was

still writing in such a vein some time after the Wright

brothers had begun to make flights lasting for half an

hour or so. (It did not apparently occur to Newcomb

to go and look.) What would a Victorian have said if

told that within a century it would be possible to

twist a knob, look at a screen, and see events taking

place on the other side of the world? As for space-

travel - ridiculous. Dr Dionysius Lardner, in 1840,

told his enthralled audience that 'men might as well

try to reach the Moon as to attempt to cross the stormy

North Atlantic by means of steam power'. There is

surely a moral here. But with voyages to the Moon,

and the setting-up of artificial satellites, the general

scepticism lasted until Arthur Clarke had been writ-

ing books and papers for over a decade.

Now we are in much the same state with regard to

interstellar travel. Can it be done? Certainly not by

rockets of 1970 type; perhaps not by any material

vehicle at all - but in view of past experience it would

be foolish to claim that to reach the stars is impossible.

This is Arthur Clarke's view. He has been right be-

fore, and I expect him to be right again, though ad-

mittedly I doubt whether he (or anyone reading these

words) has much hope of seeing it.

Quite apart from all this, there is the matter of

science fiction. Here, too, Arthur has been a pioneer.

During the thirties, the pulp magazines reduced 's.f.'

to its lowest common denominator, and gave it an evil

reputation from which Arthur has done a good deal

to rescue it.

Some of his stories have a purely factual back-

ground, with very little in the way of author's licence.

The Sands of Mars was one such novel. (For some rea-

son he dislikes it now; I certainly don't. Read it.)

Islands in the Shy comes into the same category. It is

a story, and a good one; but anyone who reads it will

also emerge with a very good idea of what life on

board a space-station will be like. The interesting point

here is that now, in A.D. 1970, nobody will regard it

as particularly futuristic. After all, space-stations are

on the drawing-boards in America, and presumably in

Russia too; they will be in orbit before 1980. But this

novel was written in the dark days of 1952, and the

situation then was different indeed. It is rather like

turning back to a story written in, say, 1890 and

reading about television. (Let me stress that to the best

of my knowledge there was no such story; at least,

none giving a really accurate description of modern-

type TV. 1890 was rather before Arthur Clarke came

upon the scene!)

Another thought - by 1990, Islands in the Sky will

be out of date. Strange, isn't it?

I don't want to give the impression that Arthur's

novels are all of the same kind. They are not; he,

above all, is capable of flights of controlled fancy, as is

shown clearly by novels such as Childhood's End. The

only point I want to stress is that he has never, and

could never, write anything which is eccentric or im-

possible. That sort of thing is left to authors with

lesser skill - of which there are, alas, many.

Over the past years, his interests have become even

wider. He has revolutionized film-making with his

role in 2001 - A Space Odyssey, which burst upon

the world of entertainment with an impact roughly

comparable with that of a nuclear bomb. Also, he

spends amazing periods under the ocean surface, a

technique about which I admit to being completely

out of my depth in every sense of the term. Plunging

about on the sea-bed, looking for (and finding) long-

lost galleons, and taking care to avoid having one's

toes nibbled by sharks, needs a special kind of skill

and mentality which I do not possess; but Arthur

does.

What he will do in the future nobody knows;

probably not even Arthur himself. But by now people

have learned to listen to him, and to take his opinions

and his forecasts very seriously. As a writer, one of

his main merits is that he is so easy to read. After

you have been through Islands in the Sky (which will

probably be at one sitting), you will have gained a

great deal of knowledge without having had the

slightest idea that you have been so doing.

People have often compared him with Jules Verne

and with H. G. Wells. There are points of resemblance,

so far as writing is concerned; but the comparison is

not really valid. Arthur is not a Verne or a Wells. He

is, quite simply, Arthur Clarke; and when history

comes to be written, it will, I feel, be said that he is

the third in line of the great novelist-cum-scientists

who influenced the world at the time when Man first

broke free from the shackles of Earth.

Patrick Moore 18

October 1970.

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PuffinBooksEditor:KayeWebbIslandsintheSkyRoyMalcolmhadwantedtogetintospaceforaslongashecouldremember.Hehadreadeverythinghecouldgetholdofaboutaviationandastronauts,seenallthemoviesandtelecastsfromspace,andmadeuphismindthatsomedayhewasgoingtolookbackandwatchtheearthshrinkingbehindhim.Whenhewassixteenh...

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Arthur C. Clarke - Islands in the Sky

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