"Hate" is a

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...

short story A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest ...

by British writer

Arthur C. Clarke Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (16 December 191719 March 2008) was an English science-fiction writer, science writer, futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host. He co-wrote the screenplay for the 1968 film '' 2001: A Spac ...

, first published in 1961Short Stories
''Arthurcclarke.net'', 2007-2011, retrieved June 22, 2011 and subsequently included in several collections of Clarke's writings, including ''

The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke ''The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke'', first published in 2001, is a collection of almost all science fiction short stories written by Arthur C. Clarke. It includes 114 stories, arranged in order of publication, from " Travel by Wire ...

''. The story originated when movie producer

William MacQuitty William MacQuitty (15 May 1905 – 4 February 2004) was a British film producer and also a writer and photographer. He is most noted for his production of the 1958 Rank Organisation / Pinewood Studios film, '' A Night to Remember'', which recre ...

asked Clarke to write a

film treatment A film treatment (or simply treatment) is a piece of prose, typically the step between scene cards (index cards) and the first draft of a screenplay for a motion picture, television program, or radio play. It is generally longer and more detailed ...

titled ''The Sea and the Stars''. Nothing came of the project so Clarke transformed the treatment into a short story. ''If'' magazine retitled it "At the End of Orbit" for publication but Clarke preferred his original title because it has "more punch" and it is under that title that the story has since been published.

Plot summary

Set in an unspecified year, but probably a few years after 1956, the story centers on Szabo Tibor, an expatriate Hungarian, working as a

pearl diver Pearl hunting, also known as pearling, is the activity of recovering pearls from wild molluscs, usually oysters or mussels, in the sea or freshwater. Pearl hunting was prevalent in the Persian Gulf region and Japan for thousands of years. On the ...

on a pearling boat between Queensland's

Great Barrier Reef The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest coral reef system composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching for over over an area of approximately . The reef is located in the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland, ...

and Thursday Island. When an off-course Russian space capsule crashlands in the sea nearby, Tibor is the first to reach it. He makes contact with the still-alive cosmonaut inside, who can hear him talking but cannot respond except by knocking on the hull. Tibor, who escaped from

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia a ...

during the 1956 uprising and whose brother was killed by invading Russians, takes revenge by delaying the salvage attempts until the capsule's air has run out and the cosmonaut is dead. When they get the capsule to land and open the hatch, they find that the dead cosmonaut, a beautiful young girl, has managed to record Tibor's words on a tape recorder, thus branding him as a murderer.

References

Sources

*Clarke, Arthur C. ''The Best of Arthur C Clarke''; 1956 - 1972. Published 1973 *Clarke, Arthur C. ''The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke''. Tor. 2000. p. 767.

External links

* * {{Internet Archive, id=1961-11_IF, name=At the End of Orbit, page=83 1961 short stories Short stories by Arthur C. Clarke Works originally published in If (magazine) Queensland in fiction