Clarke, Arthur C.

Islands in the Sky

Philadelphia, PA: The John C. Winston Company, 1952. First Edition. Hardcover. "When young Roy Malcolm won the Aviation Quiz Contest, the sponsor, World Airways, never dreamed he could legally claim a trip to the Inner Space Station as his prize. Set in the middle of the twenty-first century, this is an amazing yarn about a teen-ager's adventures and conflicts five hundred miles up on a strange, artificial outpost that circles our planet." (from front flap) An early, classic science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), the great British-born writer, inventor & television personality perhaps most famous for co-writing the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey with the iconic film's director, Stanley Kubrick. Brilliantly prolific & prophetic, Clarke wrote fiction & non-fiction about the furthest science advances & speculations. As he predicted in his introduction, "Cities in Space," such human-made & staffed stations launched from Earth would exist in reality not all that long from his fictional depiction of them in this prescient novel. Offered here is the first USA edition (stated "First Edition" on copyright page), hardcover in dust jacket. A key collectible in the Clarke canon. Book in fine condition with only very mild rubbing & occasional scratching, spotting to front, back covers & spine (blue cloth with orange lettering on spine); very light wear at edges & corners of same esp. spine; light rubbing to edges of text block. Interior very fine with exemplary retro-futuristic Black-&-white endpaper illustrations by Alex Schomburg; slightest browning at thin blank edges of page leaves; tiny bumps at corners of a few of same. Dust jacket, slightly clipped at all four flap corners as issued but not remainder-clipped, in good-to-near-fine condition with very light rubbing to front cover & spine (also illustrated, in color, by Shomburg); moderate-to-significant rubbing, staining & creasing to back cover with list of ten contemporary science fiction books including this; medium-small horizontal area of tape residue extending from mid-left edge of same; mild-to-moderate wear & small bumps, creases with miniscule loss of paper at all edges & corners. Fine / Good-Near Fine. [Item #3312]

Price: $500.00