Islands in the Sky

When sixteen year-old Roy Malcolm wins a trip to anywhere in the world, he chooses to go to the Inner Station. Roy's first trip into space is full of excitement and adventure.

Islands in the Sky feels at times like an excuse for Clarke to teach his reader everything there is to know about space: gravity, orbits, space station design, how to adapt to weightlessness, rockets and other launching devices, and meteors. And that is really what this is: a book aimed at teenagers that gives them an adventure as well as teaching them a lot of sound science. Clarke has always been a stickler for hard science, and Islands in the Sky is no exception.

If that makes a story a bit simplistic, that is forgivable. If I were 12 in 1952 I would have loved this story to pieces. At 23 in 2004 it seems an idealistic relic of the past.