Islands in the Sky

Islands in the Sky is one of Arthur C. Clarke's earliest novels, published in 1952, and it was written for the Winston Science Fiction series of books aimed at teenage readers. Roy Malcolm is sixteen and an expert on the history of flight, and he wins a television contest whose wording can be read to include travel beyond the planet.

Because the Inner Station orbits inside the boundary that international law once claimed as earthly territory, Roy gets his journey: a rocket from a launch site in the mountains of New Guinea, two weeks aboard a wheel-shaped station, and a place among the apprentices who train there. Clarke intended the book as a travelogue of the settled space he expected to see within fifty years, so the station and the daily work aboard it are the main attraction. Roy is the only visitor in the story; the apprentices are residents, and their routines of study, maintenance and exercise give the book its unhurried middle.

The plot arrives when a ship called the Cygnus anchors nearby and her crew decline to explain themselves, setting the apprentices, primed by a television detective serial and their own reading on space piracy, to work. Their conclusion is wrong, and the long final section becomes a rescue run aboard an old rocketship kept as a clubhouse, which gives Roy a better story than the one he came up with.