It includes 114[1] stories, arranged in order of publication, from "Travel by Wire!"

The story "Improving The Neighbourhood" has the distinction of being the first fiction published in the journal Nature.

This edition contains a foreword by Clarke written in 2000, where he speculates on the science fiction genre in relation to the concept of short stories.

Of the above 114 pieces, 95 were published in six major short story collections during Clarke's lifetime.

The missing ones are a movie outline of The Songs of Distant Earth (from "The Sentinel"; this is not the short story of the same name) and a short sketch titled "When the Twerms Came", which originally appeared in Clarke's non-fiction book The View from Serendip (1978) and was later reprinted in the 1987 edition of The Wind from the Sun.