Islands in the Sky
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Author | Arthur C. Clarke |
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Illustrator | Gerard Quinn |
Cover artist | Gerard Quinn |
Language | English |
Genre | Science fiction |
Publisher | Sidgwick & Jackson |
Publication date | 1952 |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
Media type | Print (hardcover) |
Pages | 190 |
Islands in the Sky is a 1952 science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke. It is one of his earliest works. Clarke wrote the story as a travelogue of human settlement of cislunar space in the last half of the twenty-first century.
This is one of the thirty-five juvenile novels that make up the Winston Science Fiction series that was published in the 1950s for a readership of teenagers. The typical protagonist in these books was a boy in his late teens who was proficient in the art of electronics, a hobby that was easily available to the readers. In this case, though, Roy Malcolm is an expert in aviation, its history, and its technology.
Plot summary
At age sixteen, Roy Malcolm has made himself an expert in the history of aviation, so much so that he wins the Aviation Quiz Program, presented on television by World Airways, Inc. Because the prize was described as an all expenses paid trip to “any part of the earth” (rather than on Earth), Roy is able to request a trip to the Inner Station, which is considered part of Earth because its orbit lies under the one-thousand-kilometer limit of earth's legal territory.
Riding the rocketship Sirius out of Port Goddard in the high mountains of New Guinea, Roy goes to the Inner Station, five hundred miles above Earth, for a two-week stay. He is first taken to meet Commander Doyle, who introduces him to a team of apprentices. Their leader, Tim Benton, shows Roy around the station. For the rest of his time on the station Roy stays with the apprentices, studying with them and sharing their activities. After a few days they take him to the Morning Star, the now derelict, though refurbished, rocketship that had taken five men to Venus in 1985. The old rocketship serves as a clubhouse for the young men.
Because of the popularity of a TV series called Dan Drummond, Space Detective and one young man's pastime of trying to figure out how crime, especially piracy, could be profitable in space, Roy and his friends immediately become suspicious when the rocketship Cygnus and her secretive crew come to the Inner Station. Two of the apprentices go to investigate when the ship is left unattended and find that she's carrying what appear to be ray guns. It turns out that the ship belongs to a movie studio that intends to shoot the first movie filmed in space.
As his stay in space is coming to an end Roy gets to ride the Morning Star as she makes an emergency run to the Space Hospital with a seriously ill man. As Roy and his friends return to the Inner Station on a different ship they become so engrossed in Commander Doyle's story of his participation in the first expedition to Mercury that they fail to notice that their ship is off course: it's heading away from Earth rather than toward it. As they swing around the Moon they refuel their ship from a container catapulted to them from the crater Hipparchus, then they return to the Inner Station after making a short stop at one of the Relay Stations in geostationary orbit to get extra oxygen.
Roy has to spend several extra days at the Residential Station before he returns to Earth. There he meets the Moore family, Martian colonists coming to Earth so that the children can attend college. After listening to their talk about their home and seeing the pictures that they show him, Roy changes his future plans: he intends now that he will go beyond the space stations when he graduates from college and head out to the planets.
Reception
Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas praised Islands in the Sky as "a detailedly plausible and accurate fictional tour".[1] Floyd C. Gale called it "superbly detailed".[2] In the Kirkus Reviews of 15 June 1952, the reviewer wrote:
A quiz program prize gives young Roy Malcolm a rocket trip to a space station en route to another planet. There he is introduced to the mysteries of gravity, acclimatizing, a misplaced atomic waste pile ship, monsters on Mars, space pirates. And he comes back, accompanied by a family of Martian colonists, bringing the children back to Earth for college.... Bad as it sounds, it is superior to the others.[3]
References
External links
- Islands in the Sky title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Arthur C. Clarke on Extra Terrestrial Relays
- Go to the Internet Archive to read the book online.
- v
- t
- e
- Prelude to Space
- The Sands of Mars
- Islands in the Sky
- Against the Fall of Night
- Childhood's End
- Earthlight
- The City and the Stars
- The Deep Range
- A Fall of Moondust
- Dolphin Island
- Glide Path
- Imperial Earth
- The Fountains of Paradise
- The Songs of Distant Earth
- Cradle (with Gentry Lee)
- The Ghost from the Grand Banks
- The Hammer of God
- Richter 10 (with Mike McQuay)
- The Trigger (with Michael Kube-McDowell)
- The Light of Other Days (with Stephen Baxter)
- The Last Theorem (with Frederik Pohl)
Space Odyssey |
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Rama series |
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A Time Odyssey |
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collections
- Expedition to Earth
- Reach for Tomorrow
- Tales from the White Hart
- The Other Side of the Sky
- Tales of Ten Worlds
- The Nine Billion Names of God
- Of Time and Stars
- The Wind from the Sun
- The Best of Arthur C. Clarke
- The Sentinel
- Tales from Planet Earth
- More Than One Universe
- The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
- Interplanetary Flight: An Introduction to Astronautics
- The Lost Worlds of 2001
- The View from Serendip
- The Odyssey File: The Making of 2010
- How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village
- An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (comics)
- 2010: The Year We Make Contact (film)
- The Nine Billion Names of God (short film)
- Rendezvous with Rama (video game)
- "The Star" (TV episode)
- The Songs of Distant Earth (album)
- Rama (video game)
- Childhood's End (TV miniseries)
- Arthur C. Clarke in media
- Sir Arthur Clarke Award
- Arthur C. Clarke Award
- Geostationary orbit
- Clarke's three laws
- Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World
- Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers
- Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious Universe
- Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Modern Technologies
- God, the Universe and Everything Else
- Great Basses wreck
- 4923 Clarke
- Serendipaceratops
- GRB 080319B