Status Updates From The Collected Stories of Ar...

Holiday On the Moon ★★★⯪☆ Entertaining & inspiring. A teenage girl's visit to her father's work/residence on the Moon, focusing on her experiences as she travels in a space-ship, and interacts with low-gravity living conditions and the technology that make a futuristic lunar colony possible. An optimistic view of future space tourism & colonization. Encourages women to become scientists.

The Sentinel ★★★☆☆ This story is the inspiration and beginning of 2001: The Space Odyssey (film & novel). Lunar explorers discover a mysterious, ancient, and indestructible alien artifact on the Moon.

The Road to the Sea ★★★⯪☆ A longish story that explores themes of technological stagnation, the vastness of time, and the inevitable return of a spacefaring humanity to its home planet. The story focuses on the contrast between the stagnant, simple life of those who stayed and the advanced, cosmic destiny of those who left.

Trouble With the Natives ★★★⯪☆ A fun little story about alien first contact gone awry. Two aliens land in a British village and try to make contact with someone in authority. Instead they are treated as a joke because of their strange appearance, awkward disguises and incomprehensible speech.

Silence Please ★★★⯪☆ This is a funny "tall tale" told by Harry Purvis at the White Hart pub, about the unintended consequences of technology. An inventor creates a "silencer" device that cancels sound using inverted pressure waves. When the device is used by a jilted lover to sabotage a symphony orchestra performance, the device is amplified too high, causing a disastrous, silent collapse of the auditorium.

A Walk In the Dark ★★★☆☆ Suspenseful, but slow, horror story. A space technician stranded on a dark, remote planet must hike to the spaceport before his ship leaves, battling intense psychological fear of being stranded and of local legends of an alien creature. The story explores the triumph of irrational fear over logic, as well as the fragility of man and his works.