One of Arthur C. Clarke's first published pieces, an essay called "Reverie," begins with the words, "All the ideas in science fiction have been used up!" In Clarke's "The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever Told," written nearly 30 years later, the author descends into an infinite loop when he realizes that complaining that there are no more original stories is itself patently unoriginal. Throughout The Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke—which includes every scrap of marginally fictive writing that Clarke's editors could track down, spanning more than 60 years through 1999—he returns time and again to the idea that his genre is played out, and that even taking note of clichés has become a cliché. All of which is the science-fiction legend's way of excusing the most persistent flaws in his writing, namely his over-reliance on insect overlords, conquerors from Venus, time travel, and artificial intelligence, in stories that often serve up heaping platters of corn. Clarke is far from the most dazzling prose stylist in his field, nor does he necessarily traffic in multi-dimensional characters with a knack for witty speech. The legacy of the man who plotted the course to 2001 is in the ideas behind his ideas, particularly in the fertile period between the end of WWII and the assassination of JFK. During that 20-year stretch, Clarke usually had seven or eight lengthy stories published per year. His work used the easy-to-comprehend conventions of science fiction to present deep philosophical conundrums, exploring the nature of humanity, what facets of that nature might survive into the future, and where our race might have originated. The Collected Stories, almost by design, stacks up far too much chaff with the wheat, but classics such as "The Lion Of Comarre" (about the attempts to wake up a hidden city of dreamers) and "The Sentinel" (about tripping a silent alarm on the moon) provide haunting impressions of the forces, large and small, that govern the universe. Clarke's ability to process the rapid social and technological changes of his lifetime, extrapolating where they might lead, is what kept him from becoming the sort of writer that he scolded throughout his career.