Wells wasn't around for, when the genre was at its height, has been Arthur C. Clarke, who has just published a compilation of his stories, nearly 1,000 densely packed pages in length. And yet it is no easy ponder.
Science fiction obsolesces faster than pop music.
One or two stories of the pulp magazine era will sate most contemporary readers. It helped that Clarke hailed from that tonier neighborhood of Outer Space first colonized by Wells and Olaf Stapledon, where even the aliens have cultivated accents. Clarke prided himself on his vivid, documentary-like accounts of space travel, which could seem dry as physics lectures in disguise to those who didn't share his faith in space as the new frontier. But he was respectable, which was more than you could say for sci-fi riffraff like A.E. van Vogt or L. Ron Hubbard. Clarke had no more difficulty accommodating himself to the Pax Americana than most of his countrymen.