Expedition to Earth

Contents

This collection, originally published in 1953, includes:

• "Second Dawn"
• "If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth"
• "Breaking Strain"
• "History Lesson" (as "Expedition to Earth" in the British Edition, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1954)
• "Superiority"
• "Exile of the Eons" (as "Nemesis" in the British Edition, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1954)
• "Hide-and-Seek": first published in 1949 in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. The story tells of an incident during an interplanetary war in which a lone human evades a hostile spaceship by landing on the moon Phobos. The similarity to CS Forester's Brown on Resolution has been pointed out, but Clarke said that he had not read Forester's story. Clarke himself pointed to a similarity with the film Murphy's War.
• "Expedition to Earth" (as "Encounter in the Dawn" in the British Edition, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1954)
• "Loophole"
• "Inheritance"
• "The Sentinel"

Reception

Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas selected the collection as one of the best sf books of 1953, praising the stories' "humor, technical ideas, science-fictional thinking and all-around excellence." Groff Conklin said that "The stories are continuously fascinating" and "exhibiting their author's versatility".{{Cite magazine

References

Sources

References

1. "Publication: Expedition to Earth".
2. (2023). "Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s". Abrams Books.
3. (2010). "Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime 3". J. Boylston Publishers.
4. "Recommended Reading," ''[[The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. F&SF]]'', March 1954, p.93.
5. "The Reference Library", ''[[Astounding Science Fiction]]'', November 1954, p.150
6. "Time and Space", ''Hartford Courant'', February 7, 1954, p.SM19