Notes
Prelude to Mars, an omnibus containing a selection of short fiction and two novels by Arthur C. Clarke.

• Prelude to Space [Complete novel]
• Big Game Hunt
• Critical Mass
• The Ultimate Melody
• Moving Spirit
• The Man Who Ploughed the Sea
• Cold War
• What Goes Up
• Trouble with the Natives
• A Walk in the Dark
• The Forgotten Enemy
• The Parasite
• The Curse
• The Possessed
• The Awakening
• Exile of the Eons
• Second Dawn
• The Sands of Mars [Complete novel]

Publisher’s Blurb – Jacket Flaps
The variety and fascination of science fiction in the hands of a master are strikingly apparent in a volume that brings together two full-length novels and sixteen stories by Arthur C. Clarke, whom Holiday has called "the colossus of science fiction."

Prelude to Space, the first of the novels, is a vivid account of the events that culminate in man's first voyage to the moon. Written when the adventure seemed a remote possibility, and now regarded as a classic in its field, it gains fresh interest from an introduction discussing ways in which the actualities of space travel are overtaking the author's speculations about it. Actuality has yet to overtake Sands of Mars, a novel in which courageous and visionary men bring off a vast experiment to make permanent colonization of that forbidding planet possible.

Among the stories, several include the character Harry Purvis, teller of tall tales and a mouthpiece for the playful and the humorously macabre aspects of Mr. Clarke's talent. Eight stories in a more serious vein concern matters as diverse as the terrors that may lurk in a remote corner of our galaxy and the drastic climatic changes that result when the earth passes through a great belt of cosmic dust. Here, once again, is a volume to delight Arthur C. Clarke’s admirers.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE was born in 1917 and graduated from King's College, London. During World War II he was an R.A.F. flight lieutenant in charge of the first experimental ground-controlled-approach radar in England. At war's end he took a degree, with First Class Honors, in physics and pure and applied mathematics. From 1949 to 1951 he was on the staff of the Institution of Electrical Engineers as assistant editor of Science Abstracts; since then he has been a full-time writer.

Mr. Clarke’s books of fiction and nonfiction have sold over 2,000,000 copies in fifteen languages. In 1962 he was awarded the Kalinga Prize for the popularization of science by an international jury appointed by UNESCO. Mr. Clarke, former chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, now makes his home in Ceylon, where he is President of the Ceylon Astronomical Association.