The Awakening (short story)

1942 science fiction short story by Arthur C. Clarke

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages)

The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for books. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted.
Find sources: "The Awakening" short story – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

|

This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources.
Find sources: "The Awakening" short story – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2024)

|

(Learn how and when to remove this message)

"The Awakening" is a science fiction short story by English writer Arthur C. Clarke. There are two distinct versions of this short story.[1]

The first was originally published in Zenith Sci-fi fanzine issue number 4 in February 1942. This version was reprinted in The Best of Arthur C. Clarke. It is this version which appears in the almost complete The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke.

A revised version was published in the collection Reach For Tomorrow in 1956, individually copyrighted to 1951.

## Plot summary

[edit]

The protagonist is the Master who is suffering from heart failure and given less than a year to live. The Master opts to be frozen artificially for a hundred years in a remote location, after which he expects to be revived and get an artificial heart implanted in his body. However, the secret of his resting place has been lost over time, and the Master is only revived a long time later than expected (on the order of millions of years). He opens his eyes, eager to visualise how the future Man looked like, and is in for a terrible shock. As he looks at the insects surrounding him, he realises that Man had lost the Man-Insect war. Unable to take this in, his feeble heart gives in and he dies.

## See also

[edit]

* Exile of the Eons for a reworking of this theme by Clarke.

## References

[edit]

1. ^ Introduction to the story in The Best of Arthur C. Clarke

## External links

[edit]

* The Awakening title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

This article about a science fiction short story (or stories) published in the 1940s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

|

* v
* t
* e

*[v]: View this template
*[t]: Discuss this template
*[e]: Edit this template