"Transience" (in Other Side of the Sky)

Blurb

The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 2001, is a collection of almost all science fiction stories written by Arthur C. Clarke: it includes 114 in all arranged in order of publication, "Travel by Wire!" in 1937 through to "Improving the Neighbourhood" in 1999. The story "Improving The Neighbourhood" has the distinction of being the first fiction published in the journal Nature. The titles "Venture to the Moon" and "The Other Side of the Sky", are not stories but the series titles for groups of six interconnected stories, each story with its own title. This collection is missing several stories, for example "When the Twerms Came" which appears in his other collections More Than One Universe and The View from Serendip. This edition contains a foreword by Clarke written in 2000, where he speculates on the science fiction genre in relation to the concept of short stories. Furthermore, many of the stories have a short introduction about its publication history or its literary nature.
In addition to the printed edition, an audio edition was published by Fantastic Audio in 2001. The audio edition, comprising five volumes, runs nearly fifty hours.