"Silence Please" is a
science fiction short story by British writer
Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1950. The piece was later used as the introductory story for Clarke's collection ''
Tales from the White Hart
''Tales from the White Hart'' is a collection of short stories by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, in the "club tales" style.
Thirteen of the fifteen stories originally appeared across a number of different publications. "Moving Sp ...
''.
This comic story describes the efforts of a brilliant college student to design a machine that would produce a field of
absolute silence. The gadget is then used in a prank, with tragic results. The story touches (albeit in a humorous way) on the popular science fiction theme of an inventor coming to grief at the hands of their invention that is best known from
Mary Shelley's novel''
Frankenstein''. The piece also references the composer "Edward England", an obvious parody of the work of
Benjamin Britten.
The "Fenton Silencer" described in the story uses the same phase-inversion principle found in modern
noise-canceling headphones Noise-cancelling headphones reduce unwanted Ambient noise level, ambient sounds using active noise control. This is distinct from passive headphones which, if they reduce ambient sounds at all, use techniques such as soundproofing.
Noise cancellati ...
.
The story was one of two works by Clarke translated by Hungarian writer and politician
Árpád Göncz: the other was ''
2001: A Space Odyssey''.
References
External links
*
Short stories by Arthur C. Clarke
1950 short stories
Tales from the White Hart
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