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Typical Arthur C. Clarke, meaning these short stories are all marvelously creative ideas, dryly and competently sketched out, giving the reader a bit to think about with only having to invest minimal time.

Apparently, not terribly memorable, though, at least for me.

Oddly, I don't remember reading this book, but yet GoodReads reminded me that I have already rated it (a different edition no less - the edition I read in 2025 was a March 1969 4th printing - white cover with a painting-like depiction of a deathstar-like orb with a large rectangular docking module sticking out of it) four stars in 2018. I apparently did not review it.

The four star rating stands, because I did "really like it." However, even two days out from finishing the last story in this collection, I remember less from it than I remember of other short-story collections I read a while ago, and clearly made more of an impact. Notable among these is Ted Chiang's Exhalation and Stephen Baxter's Vacuum Diagrams.

NOTES

"Second Dawn" (first story)
p. 11

"All my life I've worked to increase our knowledge of the mind, but now I wonder if I've brought something into the world that is too powerful, and too dangerous, for us to handle. Yet it's too late, now, to retrace our footsteps: sooner or later our culture was bound to come to this point, and to discover what we have found.

"It's a terrible dilemma: and there's only one solution. We cannot go back, and if we go forward we may meet disaster. So we must change the very nature of our civilization, and break completely with the million generations behind us."

p. 35
"Certainly nothing we can learn from Nature will ever be as great a threat as the peril we have uncovered in our own minds.

"History Lesson" (fourth story)
I wondered if this story in particular influenced A Canticle for Liebowitz.

"Superiority" (fifth story)
Clever way to critique bureaucracy, and demonstrate the existential penalties of wildly misdirected "advancement." (Also see the ninth story, "Loophole.")

"Exile of the Eons" (sixth story)
A masterclass in economy of storytelling to deliver what might be the ultimate moral quandary of the entire human race. (<--- am I overselling this one?)