Carbon Redux

Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! Collected Essays, 1934-1998; Sir Arthur C. Clarke (St. Martin's Press, 1999; ISBN 0-312-19893-0).

I had previously read this collection in 2004, but, given Sir Arthur's passing, I picked it up again to re-read his shorter works (I'll take up the short stories later in the year).

Made up of: Introduction: Part 1: The 1930s and 1940s: Rockets and Radar; Dunsany, Lord of Fantasy; Rockets; The Coming Age of Rocket Power; Extraterrestrial Relays; The Moon and Mr. Farnsworth; The Challenge of the Spaceship; First Men in the Moon; The Problem of Dr. Campbell; The Lackeys of Wall Street; Voyages to the Moon; You're on the Glide Path, I Think; Morphological Astronomy; The Conquest of Space; Introduction: Part 2: The 1950s: Beneath the Seas of Ceylon; The Effect of Interplanetary Flight; Space Travel in Fact and Fiction; Review: Destination Moon; Interplanetary Flight; The Exploration of Space; Review: When Worlds Collide; Review: Man on the Moon; Flying Saucers; Review: Flying Saucers Have Landed; Undersea Holiday; The Exploration of the Moon; Eclipse; Astronautical Fallacies; The Star of Bethlehem; Capricorn to Cancer; Keeping House in Colombo; The Reefcombers' Derby; Rest Houses, Catamarans, and Sharks; The First Wreck; A Clear Run to the South Pole; The Isle of Taprobane; The Great Reef; Winding Up; Introduction: Part 3: The 1960s: Kubrick and Cape Kennedy; Failures of Nerve and Imagination; We'll Never Conquer Space; Rocket to the Renaissance; The Obsolescence of Man; Space and the Spirit of Man; The Uses of the Moon; The Playing Fields of Space; Kalinga Prize Speech; More Than Five Senses; Son of Dr. Strangelove; Possible, That's All!; The Mind of the Machine; God and Einstein; Introduction: Part 4: The 1970s: Tomorrow's Worlds; Satellites and Saris; Mars and the Mind of Man; The Sea of Sinbad; Willy and Chesley; The Snows of Olympus; Writing to Sell; Introduction: Part 5: The 1980s: Stay of Execution; The Steam-Powered Word Processor; Afterword: "Maelstrom II"; Mother Nature Got There First; Message to Comsat, February 18, 1988; Graduation Address: International Space University; Back to 2001; Coauthors and Other Nuisances; The Power of Compression; Life in the Fax Lane; Credo; The Colors of Infinity: Exploring the Fractal Universe; Close Encounter with Cosmonauts; The Century Syndrome; Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf?; My Four Feet on the Ground; Introduction: Part 6: The 1990s: Countdown to 2000; Macroni Symposium; Introduction to Charlie Pellegrino's Unearthing Atlantis; Tribute to Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988); Satyajit and Stanley; Aspects of Science Fiction; Save the Giant Squid!; A Choice of Futures; Gene Roddenberry; Introduction to Jack Williamson's Beachhead; Scenario for a Civilized Planet; NASA Sutra: Eros in Orbit; Minehead Made Me; Good-bye, Isaac; Encyclical; Letter from Sri Lanka; Message to Mars>; Preface: The War of the Worlds; Preface: The First Men in the Moon; The Joy of Maths; Tribute to Robert Bloch; Spaceguard; Foreword: Encyclopedia of Frauds by James Randi; Bucky; Homage to Frank Paul; Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!; The Birth of HAL; The Coming Cyberclysm; Tribute to David Lasser; Toilets of the Gods; When Will the Real Space Age Begin?; Review: Imagined Worlds by Freeman Dyson; Eyes on the Universe; Walter Alvarez and Gerrit L. Verschuur; The Gay Warlords; More Last Words on UFOs; Carl Sagan; For Cherene, Tamara, and Melinda; Introduction: Part 7: Postscript: 2000 and Beyond; Science and Society; Is There Life After Television?; The Twenty-First Century: A (Very) Brief History.

Counts as 45 entries in the 2008 Year in Shorts.

Re-read in 2010! Seemed the appropriate thing to do given the year.