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Leinster was a scientist with rather odd political ideas. When he discovers a new super-efficient rocket projectile, he decides to publish his findings to the entire world. The implications are tremendous. Who-ever reaches the moon first and establishes a base can control the earth…
East and West despatch their various expeditions and the space race ends in something like a photo-finish. Almost every Lunar crater in the Sea of Rains becomes a new base for one or other of the great powers, and a new miniature cold-war develops on the moon. Suddenly the leaders of the various expeditions mysteriously disappear. What sinister power is at work? Does life still exist below the dead surface of Lunar?
Has out satellite been the target for non-human space expeditions?
Can the earth men combine against this weird scientific peril?
Or will they remain divided and fall before the terrible alien aggressor?

Trouble aboard the satellite observatory which has been established to circle the Earth every four hours. It is under the despotic control of a brilliant but unbalanced scientist, Commander Hendricks, who refuses to allow his staff any means of communicating with Earth on their own account. But he doesn’t know that Tony Hale, who is one of the engineers in the observatory, has smuggled in his homemade transistor radio.

Scientists everywhere are baffled when three brown streaks appear on the Earth’s surface, destroying all the vegetation in their path. No one can find the explanation until it is realised that the streaks lie in the direction of the satellite’s orbit. Hendricks first refuses to reply to any questions and then announces that he intends to be the world dictator; if the governments of the world refuse to agree he will starve them into surrender by destroying all the vegetation on Earth. The situation seems desperate. But Tony has already used his transistor radio to get in touch with a friend on Earth. His homemade set is now the only means of contact between Earth and the observatory, and through it plans can be made to deal with Hendricks – plans in which Chris Godfrey has a leading role to play.

The most expensive, the most luxurious resort in the history of man. Where no request, no whim or pleasure, was denied. Where anything was possible – for a price.

SATELLITE CITY

The haven and the playground of only the very rich and the most powerful. It was the most amazing pleasure complex ever built – and it looked down on the Earth from an orbit 22,000 miles high.

Yet, for all its glitter, there was something ominous about Satellite City – no nation or international body had any jurisdiction there, it was a law unto itself; no one knew who owned it; or what went on within its secret council rooms.

Until one man penetrated the wall of secrecy and discovered satellite city’s hidden masters.

The mysterious disintegration of the planet Mercury presaged mutational changes in the solar system. Next, the Moon followed Mercury into oblivion, bombarding Earth with giant meteors and causing more earthquakes. Then a giant metal globe that had apparently been buried inside the Moon took up an orbit of the Earth. The new satellite is an alien spaceship carrying the survivors of a super scientific race forced to abandon their own world to emigrate to our solar system. The aliens seeded the then primeval Earth with life cultures in their own image, and then placed themselves in suspended animation whilst evolution took place. They have awakened to assist humanity to avert the mutational danger now facing the remaining planets…

The crew of the interstellar exploration ship Ultima Thule is menaced by a brain-eating alien.

When Jod Wyler and his gang of Whirleebirds decided to invade the new satellite, where now lived Kemlo, Kerowski, Krillie and all our other friends from Satellite K, there were one or two points which he entirely overlooked.

One or two very important points…

Once again Kemlo and his friends find themselves in the thick of a plot – a plot to overthrow the complete organisation of the Satellite. And they are not up against anything they can understand.

These mysterious black-suited men who are not men, but who can do with the utmost efficiency anything they are told, cause considerable, and not unwarranted, alarm on Satellite K.

As Kartin says, ‘You can’t have houses in space.’ What then are those mysterious objects that have suddenly appeared far out on the planet routes? What connection do they have with ‘the Shy Six Hundred’, as Kemlo calls them, those strange, Earth-born visitors to Satellite K who are so chary of having their photographs taken?

Kemlo and his Space Scouts decide that the time has come for a little detective work and the boys are soon hot on the trail – a trail which is to lead them from the comfort and security of the satellite to a battle to the death twenty million miles out into the void.

The logical outcome of the space race, and the preliminary step towards the Moo, was the manned satellite, the Big Wheel moving in a stable orbit about the Earth, integrating the data necessary for a landing on the Moon, and eventually acting as a fuelling station for the Lunar rockets.

After several failures, the station is ready, but even there, danger exists, unseen, unheard, invisible and terrible. Forced to exist in the belt of cosmic radiation surrounding the planet, men die within weeks from aplastic anemia. Seeking a solution to the problem, Doctor Paul Russell is sent up to the satellite and here learns of the two men fro the previous crew who vanished without a trace after spotting an unidentified spaceship in orbit further out from Earth than themselves.

Spatial Body 232: Zone K, because of its valuable strategic position as a satellite of Zennor, was the goal set by the exploratory expeditions from the Earth controlled ports of Zennor itself. A base on 232 offered many advantages for defence of the spaceways, and establishing a settlement there was a must lest rival races in the Galaxy gain a foothold on it first. But though successive ships blasted off with the avowed intent of claiming the cheerless grey satellite none had ever been heard of again, save one whose crew had returned to report fantastic storms of unknown origin. It was not until Tony Wayne and John Reece crash-landed their ship on 232 that they learnt its incredible secrets – and found there a fellow whose story was akin to a nightmare . . .

There’s no mistaking the terminal phase of irreversible catastrophe. The climate has gone berserk. Rising oceans inundate swamps and deserts. Genetic engineers have yet to redesign the human body to cope with the crud in the air, the water, the food, the soil. Now time has run out.

With Earth a lost cause, the satellite worlds twinkling in orbit are prime territory for takeover by the powerful and rich. They are a single battleground on which the richest and most powerful megacorps, Kyocera-Merck and Samurai Industries, fight, no holds barred.

In the artificial purity of satellite air or beneath the bilious skies of Earth, despite newly evolved bacterial plagues and bribe-taking androids, Robert Silverberg’s characters pursue destinies both outrageously self interested and heartwrenchingly familiar in a savagely funny story of our planets last gasp.

Arthur C. Clarke has been one of the most influential commentators on – and prophets of – the communications technology which has created the global village. Now, drawing partly on his own sometimes very personal writings, he provides an absorbing history and survey of modern communications.

The story begins with the titanic struggles to lay transatlantic telegraph cables in the nineteenth century. Fighting against widespread scepticism, lack of funds, technical disasters and setbacks – and against the Atlantic itself, above and below the surface – the pioneers achieved the seemingly impossible and by 1858 Britain and America were linked by Telegraph.

Nearly a century later, as the first transatlantic telephone cable was being laid, the technology that would rival and perhaps even supersede it was undergoing its painful birth as scientists developed the communications satellite precisely as Clarke first described in his famous 1945 article Wireless World, ‘Extra-terrestrial Relays’, reprinted in this book.

The rivalry between cable and satellite continued through the decades. Communication satellites (Comsats) performed even beyond the most optimistic expectations, but cable fought back with the development of the transistor. Then, in one of the most dramatic and unexpected breakthroughs in any technology, the potential of cable systems was transformed. The development of fibre optics technology meant that once more the seabeds of the world began to be draped with the newest and most sophisticated artefacts of human engineering.

It is an enthralling story, filled with extraordinary events and people, and Arthur C. Clarke brings all his storytelling flair and scientific expertise to bear on it. The result is a superb combination of history, comment and challenging speculation.

Arthur C. Clarke was renowned for his science fiction, but his understanding of the subject was more than imagined.

First published in 1951, this painstakingly-researched non-fiction book shows the depth of Clarke’s expertise – he predicts the moon landings nearly two decades before they occurred, explores the potential use of satellites for communications more than ten years before Telstar 1 was put into orbit, and goes on to discuss the potential of space stations and long range orbital telescopes.

Informed by interviews with the foremost scientists and engineers of the time, Clarke presents his thesis for how man will explore space . . . and the reader can measure his predictions against reality.

‘He was a great visionary, a brilliant science fiction writer and a great forecaster. He foresaw communications satellites, a nationwide network of computers, interplanetary travel; he said there would be a man on the moon by 1970, while I said 1980′ – and he was right’ Sir Patrick Moore

Solid land inside a cloud of ‘star dust’ – where no solid land should be. And the weird voices – where are they coming from?

Forced down on a minor star galaxy, Kemlo and his friends of Satellite Belt K discover a secret of Space which gives scientists information for which they have been searching for years.

The Painting was dramatic, passionate, a work of genius. But Earl Dumarest was blind to its power.

For there, in the background, were the features of cratered Luna, satellite of Earth, the fabled planet that Dumarest had sought through countless galaxies.

Dumarest had to find the artist, had to talk to him. His trail led to Ath – and to the ominous forces of the Cyclan.




(First published 1978)

In addition to being one of Science Fiction’s greatest writers, Sir Arthur C. Clarke was also one of our foremost thinkers and visionaries, producing a number of highly readable and important non-fiction works. Report of Planet Three is a collection of 23 essays on the future of Man and his technology, including essays on space, satellite communications, the internet, alien contact, UFO debunking and relativity.

Earth is faced with annihilation by the Purple Dawn – effect of the cosmic fall-out from the swirling planet-in-the-making Polarthanus.

Kemlo and his Space Scouts are out in the void, towing a crippled space ship with their scooters, when suddenly the crisis is upon them. The space-born boys have to make a decision: if they take drastic action will it avert the danger – or will they blow up Earth, the Satellite Belts and themselves?

Kirk Hammond was a man alone.

He had been chosen to ride in the first manned satellite to go out around the Moon and back to Earth. But when the satellite failed to orbit properly, it went on past the Moon into the vastness of outer space, and a whole world watched helplessly as he was borne toward an unthinkably lonely death.

Yet destiny decreed that Kirk Hammond should suffer, not death but a pseudo-death. And he awoke from it to find that a hundred centuries had passed and that the space age which had begun in the 20th Century had now grown into a vast galactic civilization that had carried the sons of Earth to countless stars and worlds. But, unexpectedly, the conquest of space had changed Man himself, and the human race had become not one but several species.

Hammond was plunged into the climactic struggle between the new races. And in his quest with a desperate band for the mysterious Star of Life that was the key to the struggle, in his relations with the strange and beautiful Thayn Marden who was not a human woman, in his odyssey through the mighty suns and earthly worlds of the galaxy, a man of the 20th Century found himself facing the dangers of the great space age which he himself helped pioneer.

After the radiation bombardment from those mysterious structures on the Moon – chronicled in The Domes of Pico – it was inevitable, of course, that a lunar landing would have to be made; and Chris thought, too, that it was inevitable that he should be chosen for the job. But things didn’t work out quite as planned. There was an American candidate for the honour of piloting the first Western rocket to the Moon; and the Russians had their own schemes for turning it into a Soviet satellite…

When young Roy Malcolm won the aviation quiz contest, his prize should have meant an ordinary sight-seeing jaunt on one of the man-made space stations that circled the earth. But instead the trip turned into a terrifying journey as misadventure after misadventure plagued the artificial satellite. The climatic moment came when one of the crew pushed the wrong button and rocketed the runaway ship into outer space…

Bill Hastings was one in a million. He was the winner of a planet-wide contest, and the prize was a chance to spend a year working at the 1992 World’s Fair. For the young xenobiology student, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Fifty thousand miles above the Earth, a gigantic satellite moved in its elegant orbit. It would be Bill’s home for a year, and host to hundreds of thousands of visitors. The 1992 World’s Fair was to be an orbital extravaganza, and Bill Hastings thought that his dreams had come true. He had a lot to learn.

Somewhere in a far galaxy a being inconceivably alien is surging tumultuously from an unimaginable womb.

In a solitary prison cell on the Underworld, the vast prison-satellite in perpetual Earth-orbit, Terra Viridian is tormented by a vision, an imperative which has already driven her to an insane bloodletting.

On an Earth embalmed in peace by a ubiquitous bureaucracy, the Magician weaves his musical spells and tried to close his mind to the thoughts of others.

– just three links in a chain stretching across space and time towards a testing as awesome as it is unpredictable.

Kemlo, captain of Space scouts, and his young friend Krillie receive a visit from two Earth children, Dane and Lesa, Krillie’s cousins. Lesa is quite prepared to be thrilled by all that she sees on Satellite Belt K, but Dane sneers at everything – especially at the mechanical horse in the games-room. he boasts of his own prowess, and is heard by their science engineering master from Earth, who determines to teach him a lesson and at the same time to evolve, with the help of Kemlo and the other troop leaders, a new mechanical wonder, a New World Pegasus, a horse that can gallop in Space…

First published in 1965, this brilliant, prescient book is divided into three sections:

The first concerns space travel and other aspects of the new space age: how our concept of time must be modified when we travel long distances, the space seas of tomorrow, uses of the moon, how lower gravity will affect the sports of space colonists and other fascinating ideas.

The second part is about communications satellites, a field in which the author has already played the role of true prophet.

The third section ranges widely over the side implications of the space age – scientific meddling, the lunatic fringe and the moral obligations of scientists.