Tales of Ten Worlds

Arthur C. Clarke
Tales of Ten Worlds (1962)

Uma boa parte da obra publicada por Arthur C. Clarke são contos. Tales of Ten Worlds reúne quinze contos originalmente aparecidos entre 1957 e 1962 e, se não errei a contagem, foi a sexta antologia de contos publicada pelo autor britânico. São histórias escorreitas, por vezes atravessadas por um fino humor, da antecipação de um futuro que, frequentemente, não seguiu os caminhos imaginados pelo autor — o que não será de admirar, pois foram escritas numa época em que os maiores feitos da conquista espacial eram o lançamento dos Sputniks e a jornada de Yuri Gagarin. Mas, para quem gosta de FC isso é irrelevante e não afecta minimamente o prazer da leitura, como o provam "Summertime On Icarus", "Hate", "Into The Comet", "Before Eden" ou "Trouble With Time", de onde foi retirado o excerto que se segue.

The Spaceport P.A. system apologized for a further slight delay owing to final fuel checks, and asked a number of passengers to report to Information. While we were waiting for the announcement to finish, I recalled what little I knew about the Siren Goddess. Though I'd never seen the original, like most other departing tourists I had a replica in my baggage. It bore the certificate of the Mars Bureau of Antiquities, guaranteeing that "this full-scale reproduction is an exact copy of the so-called Siren Goddess, discovered in the Mare Sirenium by the Third Expedition, A.D. 2012 (A.M. 23)."
It's quite a tiny thing to have caused so much controversy. Only eight or nine inches high—you wouldn't look at it twice if you saw it in a museum on Earth. The head of a young woman, with slightly oriental features, elongated earlobes, hair curled in tight ringlets close to the scalp, lips half parted in an expression of pleasure or surprise—that's all. But it's an enigma so baffling that it's inspired a hundred religious sects, and driven quite a few archaeologists round the bend. For a perfectly human head has no right whatsoever to be found on Mars, whose only intelligent inhabitants were crustaceans— "educated lobsters," as the newspapers are fond of calling them. The aboriginal Martians never came near to achieving space flight, and in any event their civilization died before men existed on Earth. No wonder the Goddess is the solar system's number-one mystery; I don't suppose we'll find the answer in my lifetime—if we ever do.

Li anteriormente:
Rendezvous with Rama (1973)
Os Náufragos do Selene (1961)
Luz da Terra (1955)