Author | Arthur C. Clarke |
---|---|
Cover artist | Paul Swendsen |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Genre | Science fiction |
Publisher | Bantam Books |
Publication date | 1991 |
Media type | Print (paperback) |
Pages | 554 pp |
ISBN | 0-553-29189-0 |
OCLC | 24239885 |
More Than One Universe: The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke is a collection of science fiction short stories by Arthur C. Clarke originally published in 1991.
The stories originally appeared in the periodicals Playboy, Vogue, Dude, New Worlds, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Dundee Sunday Telegraph, Analog, Amazing Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction, Infinity Science Fiction, London Evening News, Startling Stories, Venture Science Fiction Magazine, If, Boys' Life, This Week, Bizarre! Mystery Magazine, Escapade, Asimov's Science Fiction, Astounding, King's College Review, Dynamic Science Fiction, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Satellite, Argosy and Ten Story Fantasy as well as the anthologies Star Science Fiction Stories No.1 edited by Frederik Pohl, Time to Come edited by August Derleth, Infinity #2 edited by Robert Hoskins, The Farthest Reaches, edited by Joseph Elder, and The Wind From the Sun.
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Transcription
(Music) Sometimes when I'm on a long plane flight, I gaze out at all those mountains and deserts and try to get my head around how vast our Earth is. And then I remember that there's an object we see every day that would literally fit one million Earths inside it. The sun seems impossibly big, but in the great scheme of things, it's a pinprick, one of about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which you can see on a clear night as a pale, white mist stretched across the sky. And it gets worse. There are maybe 100 billion galaxies detectable by our telescopes, so if each star was the size of a single grain of sand, just the Milky Way has enough stars to fill a 30 foot by 30 foot stretch of beach three feet deep with sand. And the entire Earth doesn't have enough beaches to represent the stars in the overall universe. Such a beach would continue for literally hundreds of millions of miles. Holy Stephen Hawking, that is a lot of stars. But he and other physicists now believe in a reality that is unimaginably bigger still. I mean, first of all, the 100 billion galaxies within range of our telescopes are probably a minuscule fraction of the total. Space itself is expanding at an accelerating pace. The vast majority of the galaxies are separating from us so fast that light from them may never reach us. Still, our physical reality here on Earth is intimately connected to those distant, invisible galaxies. We can think of them as part of our universe. They make up a single, giant edifice, obeying the same physical laws and all made from the same types of atoms, electrons, protons, quarks, neutrinos that make up you and me. However, recent theories in physics, including one called string theory, are now telling us there could be countless other universes, built on different types of particles, with different properties, obeying different laws. Most of these universes could never support life, and might flash in and out of existence in a nanosecond, but nonetheless, combined they make up a vast multiverse of possible universes. in up to 11 dimensions, featuring wonders beyond our wildest imagination. And the leading version of string theory predicts a multiverse made of up to 10 to the 500 universes. That's a one followed by 500 zeroes, a number so vast that if every atom in our observable universe had its own universe and all of the atoms in all of those universes each had their own universe, and you repeated that for two more cycles, you'd still be at a tiny fraction of the total -- namely, one trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillionth. But even that number is minuscule compared to another number: infinity. Some physicists think the space-time continuum is literally infinite, and that it contains an infinite number of so-called pocket universes with varying properties. How's your brain doing? But quantum theory adds a whole new wrinkle. I mean, the theory's been proven true beyond all doubt, but interpreting it is baffling. And some physicists think you can only un-baffle it if you imagine that huge numbers of parallel universes are being spawned every moment, and many of these universes would actually be very like the world we're in, would include multiple copies of you. In one such universe, you'd graduate with honors and marry the person of your dreams. In another, not so much. There are still some scientists who would say, hogwash. The only meaningful answer to the question of how many universes there are is one, only one universe. And a few philosophers and mystics might argue that even our own universe is an illusion. So, as you can see, right now there is no agreement on this question, not even close. All we know is, the answer is somewhere between zero and infinity. Well, I guess we know one other thing: This is a pretty cool time to be studying physics. We just might be undergoing the biggest paradigm shift in knowledge that humanity has ever seen.
Contents
Contents of More Than One Universe include:
- "I Remember Babylon"
- "Summertime on Icarus"
- "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting..."
- "Who's There?"
- "Hate"
- "Into the Comet"
- "An Ape about the House"
- "Let There be Light"
- "Death and the Senator"
- "Trouble with Time"
- "Before Eden"
- "A Slight Case of Sunstroke"
- "Dog Star"
- "The Nine Billion Names of God"
- "Refugee"
- The Other Side of the Sky
- "Special Delivery"
- "Feathered Friends"
- "Take a Deep Breath"
- "Freedom of Space"
- "Passer-by"
- "The Call of the Stars"
- "Security Check"
- "No Morning After"
- Venture to the Moon
- "The Starting Line"
- "Robin Hood, F.R.S."
- "Green Fingers"
- "All That Glitters"
- "Watch This Space"
- "A Question of Residence"
- "All the Time in the World"
- "Cosmic Casanova"
- "The Star"
- "Out of the Sun"
- "Transience"
- "The Songs of Distant Earth"
- "The Food of the Gods"
- "Maelstrom II"
- "The Shining Ones"
- "The Wind from the Sun"
- "The Secret"
- "The Last Command"
- "Dial F for Frankenstein"
- "Reunion"
- "Playback"
- "The Light of Darkness"
- "The Longest Science-Fiction Story Ever Told"
- "Herbert George Morley Roberts Wells, Esq."
- "Love That Universe"
- "Crusade"
- "The Neutron Tide"
- "Transit of Earth"
- "A Meeting with Medusa"
- "When the Twerms Came"
- "Quarantine"
- "siseneG"
- "Rescue Party"
- "The Curse"
- "Hide and Seek"
- "The Possessed"
- "Superiority"
- "A Walk in the Dark"
- "The Reluctant Orchid"
- "Encounter at Dawn"
- "Patent Pending"
- "The Sentinel"
References
- "The Locus Index to Science Fiction". Retrieved 2007-12-06.
External links
- More Than One Universe title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database