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Silence Please
"Silence Please" is the title of two science fiction short stories by British writer Arthur C. Clarke. The first was published in 1950 under the pseudonym Charles Willis. The second was used as the introductory story for Clarke's collection Tales from the White Hart.[1] The “White Hart” 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.[2] The magazine version has a completely different plot from the book version, and has no connexion to the White Hart. It is set in the distant future and has elements of satire of Labour policies. The name of the invention (though not of the inventor) is the same, though the reason for its failure is different. The fictional opera is similar, though “Edward England” is the real name of a dissonant composer in the distant future, not a euphemism for (presumably) Benjamin Britten. The "Fenton Silencer" described in the stories uses the same phase-inversion principle found in modern noise-canceling headphones. The story was one of two works by Clarke translated by Hungarian writer and politician Árpád Göncz: the other was 2001: A Space Odyssey.[3] References
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