Sunday, May 24, 2009

Free fiction: Arthur Clarke's "Superiority"

Among the very best of science fiction - how not to go about deploying new technology.

According to Best Science Fiction Stories, it can be read online at Google Book Search as part of the preview of Clarke's Collected Stories. I cannot even see the Preview tab of the book at the Google link from India, so may be its access is country-locked. Depending on your geographical location, you may be able to see it - watch for Preview tab near the top of the Google page. Good luck.

A request: In case you are able to see the preview, can you please note in comments below which individual stories have their full text (full, not partial) available in Preview (besides Superiority), so I can add this online presence information to individual stories. Thank you.

Related: Arthur Clarke's short fiction, novels, collections.

4 comments:

Blue Tyson said...

Yeah, google book search stuff is US only these days.

Rusty said...

Hey,

Thanks for the heads up about Google Book Preview - I didn't realize that people outside of the USA had a difficult (or impossible) time viewing it. I'll be more careful to note that when I link to stories there.

I have had strange luck when viewing stories and books on Google's Book Preview - some days it will show the entire story, and other days it will only show certain pages. Sometimes if I clear my browser's cache and cookies I get better results, and sometimes I don't. I haven't quite figured it out yet.

Anyway, as for which stories can be read in full here are some others that I could see:

Travel by Wire!
How we went to Mars
Retreat from Earth
Reverie
The Awakening
Whacky
Loophole
Rescue Party

... it really doesn't look like there are many missing pages (for now anyway.)

Ok, I hope this is helpful.

Tinkoo said...

Thanks, Rusty. I'll add comments to appropriate posts.

"Travel by Wire!", "How we went to Mars", & "Rescue Party" are online elsewhere too; and I think I've seen MP3 of "The Awakening" somewhere.

Between "Reverie" & "Whacky", one is hopeless; other I don't recollect.

That leaves one good story here - "Loophole", & another OK one - "Retreat from Earth".

Nigel G Mitchell said...

The full story is here, at least for now:
http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html