Tales From the White Hart

Tales From the White Hart by Clarke, Arthur C.. mass_market edition. ISBN: 9780345241658.

The 50th Anniversary Edition of one of Arthur C. Clarkes best-loved collections featuring a brand new White Hart story written in collaboration with Stephen Baxter. Although written, as the author informs us in his Introduction to the 1969 edition, in such diverse locations as New York, Miami, Columbo and Sydney there is something inherently English about these stories. Londons famed Fleet Street district has changed dramatically in the five decades since the collections first appearance as a Ballantine paperback original... and, of course, many of the regulars of the White Hart (based on the White Horse pub on Fetter Lane) are no longer with us. But the White Harts most prominent raconteaur, Harry Purvis can still be found propping up the bar and regaling us all once again with tales of quirky and often downright eccentric scientists and inventors. Here, for example, are a man who could control a giant squid; a man who could silence an entire orchestra at the flick of a switch; and a French genius who invents a machine that can record all human pleasures and transmit them to any client rich enough to afford such luxury. And rounding up the whole affair is Time Gentlemen, Please, in which we encounter a gadget able to accelerate the passage of time in a small volume... immensely useful for vaccine research where an entire years worth of study could be completed in seconds. But the hapless inventor finds himself walled off by immobile air molecules... and even worse. Its a tale which points out, with some nostalgic resonance, that we simply cannot slow the passage of time. A fitting last word for one of SFs most enduring watering holes!