"Hate" is a

science fiction Science fiction (often shortened to sci-fi or abbreviated SF) is a genre of speculative fiction that deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts. These concepts may include information technology and robotics, biological manipulations, space ...

short story A short story is a piece of prose fiction. It can typically be read in a single 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 old ...

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. Clarke co-wrote the screenplay for the 1968 film '' 2001: A ...

, 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, Arthur C. Clarke. It includes 114 stories, arranged in order of publication, from ...

''. 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 pearl fishing or pearling, is the activity of recovering or attempting to recover pearls from wild molluscs, usually oysters or mussels, in the sea or freshwater. Pearl hunting was prevalent in India and Japan for tho ...

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 Thursday Island, colloquially known as TI, or in the Kalaw Lagaw Ya, Kawrareg dialect, Waiben or Waibene, is an island of the Torres Strait Islands, an archipelago of at least 274 small islands in the Torres Strait. TI is located approximately ...

. When an off-course Russian space capsule crash-lands in the sea nearby, Tibor is the first to reach it. He makes contact with the still-alive

cosmonaut An astronaut (from the Ancient Greek (), meaning 'star', and (), meaning 'sailor') is a person trained, equipped, and deployed by a List of human spaceflight programs, human spaceflight program to serve as a commander or crew member of a spa ...

inside, who can hear him talking but cannot respond except by knocking on the hull. Tibor, who escaped from

Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, 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 and ...

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.

Citations

General and cited 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 Queensland in fiction Short stories set in Australia Short stories by Arthur C. Clarke Works originally published in If (magazine)