“Our fondest dream is that in the year 2001, the dog-eared first edition will be quaintly obsolete.”

There were two phenomenally good books I devoured when I was a kid, Clarke’s “The Exploration of Space”, and “The Challenge of the Spaceship”. The latter, in particular, really made a deep impression on me, it concentrated on and made the case for the cultural (as opposed to technological or economic)benefits to be derived from space travel. But they both, as I recall, concentrate on solar system exploration.

The cover art of the paperbacks is still how I visualize a spaceship: a sort of flying oil refinery, all tanks, pipes and conduit hung on a frame of steel girders and struts, rocket nozzles at one end and a spherical crew compartment, bristling with antennas, at the other.

There was one book I read as a kid that did really leap ahead to interstellar travel, although it was of course highly speculative in nature, but as I recall, strictly faithful to the science of the 50s. I can’t remember the name or the author now, but I vividly remember the cover art. It depicted a man’s two hands, on either side of a porthole on a spaceship hull. Outside the ship, neatly framed by the edges of the port, is a contact binary star.

Wow. I still have dreams about that.

I see a lot of theoretical work in these areas in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.

There’s a book (out of print) by John W. Macvey called How We Will Reach the Stars. When I read it back in high school it was called Journey to Alpha Centauri. It was science fact about star travel interspersed with chapters of a fictional generation-ship trip to that star. The checkout card in the library book had only my name, over and over again.