Which are the best must-read novels of Arthur C Clarke?

Do collaborations count? That one he wrote with Stephen Baxter, Time Storm I think was the title, was really good.
 
Clarke is my favourite science fiction author ... with Asimov... in my college days ... i found Rendezvous with Rama and Asimov's Stars like dust. these were the ones which hooked me to science fiction. i distinctly remember Clark's science being very believable. i remember making pentominoes out of cardboard and solving the only (one of two mirrored) solution with 3 rows
i also remember being disappointed by not being able to generate a mandelbrot set on my zx spectrum as described in one of his novels - i dont remember which - im still fascinated by the mandelbrot set .... i have a few sets of pentominoes cut out in acrylic which i give to kids i know with a prize on solving the puzzle
 
This is a bit late - gee, d'ya think? - but on a search for unread Clarke titles I ended up here and...

I haven't read nearly enough of Clarke, so evaluate this in that context but... I liked Rendezvous with Rama immensely, not the least of which for something Clarke dared to do and did extraordinarily well, something a great many other Sci-Fi authors rarely attempt and often positively blow at: Creating convincing, detailed alien creatures and cultures. In Rama he left it a little sketchy because the plot demanded it be so, but what he gave us were aliens that were at once so wonderfully weird and simultaneously concealed that as a reader it was like being hooked on some kind of powerful narcotic. I had to know more.

Few have mentioned the sequel, which was a collaboration with Gentry Lee - with which latter I've had the alternately unnerving and surreal experience of standing next to in line at the cafeteria at work - which was of course Rama II. I thought it was one of those rare sequels which eclipses the original. OTOH, the subsequent two novels - Garden of Rama and Rama Revealed - hovered between "wretched" and "putrid." (I not only do not recommend reading them, I recommend running from them at top speed, maybe screaming. "Garden" was a horrid analogy to early-'90s headlines; "Revealed" was... a revelation that by that point they'd long since run out of ideas for the series and were looking to wrap it up and just be done with it.)

The Clarke-Lee collaboration Cradle was excellent too, for most of the same reasons. Once again there was an utterly alien world and beings which were nonetheless as convincingly real as the street outside your front door. I'm disappointed they didn't do a sequel to that one.
 
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I read a lot of Clarke between the ages of 16 and 18 or so. Rendezvous with Rama is the only one of his books I can picture myself reading again.
 
Although 2001: A Space Odyssey (read for a High School English class) is more memorable than the mostly forgotten Rendezvous with Rama, Childhoods End, and The Fountains of Paradise; all of those novels fall short of the simple pleasures offered by The Wall of Darkness.
 
Against the Fall of Night, which was rewritten as The City and the Stars. Both were great, and there was a good account of them in The Fifty Minute Hour.
 
JimC said:
Against the Fall of Night, which was rewritten as The City and the Stars. Both were great, and there was a good account of them in The Fifty Minute Hour.
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I loved The City and the Stars. I think it was the first thing I read which was set in a deeply distant (but known) future. Definitely sparked my imagination.
 
Ori Vandewalle said:
I loved The City and the Stars. I think it was the first thing I read which was set in a deeply distant (but known) future. Definitely sparked my imagination.
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I too read this book a long time ago as a fresh faced young teenager and had very fond memories of it.

Now very close to my half century I re-read it.

Not as good as the impression it left :(

I think I shall leave my favourite ACC read of all time The Fountains of Paradise and only re-read it if there is no other choice!
 
Venusian Broon said:
I think I shall leave my favourite ACC read of all time The Fountains of Paradise and only re-read it if there is no other choice!
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I re-read it about a year ago. It was okay, but like you said earlier, not nearly like I remembered it from my youth.
 
I only read 1 ACC book called Islands in the Sky it was ok. The blurb made it sound like a thriller but the only danger in the book was bouncing off walls incorrectly in zero-G
 
Clarke for me is all about the wonder of matter - what matter can do (The City and the Stars) and the elevated state (2001) and terrifying state (Childhood's End) in which living matter can exist. That being the case his fiction is not really about storyline and his plot endings all tend to fall rather flat, I think because the best stories are concerned with things that transcend matter.

The technological side of his SF is a bit dated largely because we now have a much better idea of the limits of technology, whereas back in the 1940's science was still as marvellous as magic. We rely more on alternate universes these days (or just a massive suspension of disbelief) if we want a real SF rollercoaster ride.
 
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