Islands in the Sky

 

The first science fiction novel I ever read was ‘Islands in the Sky’ by Arthur C. Clarke. This was a young adult title that is more-or-less hard SF, published in 1952. I might have been ten or eleven when I picked it up.

It did not greatly impress me as a story at the time, yet I know bits of it have stuck with me. The ‘coffin’ space suits of my Jack Mack science fiction stories (written as Oliver Davis Pike) owe a definite debt to those in the novel. The technology is most of what I remember, to be honest; there didn’t seem to be much plot.

This was very early Clarke but he always liked to explore the engineering and science aspects in his tales. I don’t really have it in me to write hard science fiction, not that it keeps me from sprinkling some tech into my own stories. Only a little!

So when did I really discover SF that grabbed me? That would have to be the science fantasies of E.R. Burroughs a couple years later. I much preferred Barsoom to any space station Mr. Clarke might launch. And though I read a lot of science fiction in my teen years—most of the usual suspects—my tastes ran particularly to Jack Vance and Roger Zelazny and the like. Writers some might accuse even of penning ‘literary’ SF (not that such can be successfully defined).

Then I discovered fantasy and all changed.