Blue Planet Books in Order

“Blue Planet” gathers Arthur C Clarke’s nonfiction about the oceans, especially the mid‑century diving books he wrote around Sri Lanka and the Great Barrier Reef. These volumes sit alongside the space travel essays but look downward instead of upward, treating the sea as another frontier full of unknowns.

The core is the Blue Planet Trilogy: The Coast of Coral, The Reefs of Taprobane, and The Treasure of the Great Reef. In the first, Clarke and photographer Mike Wilson explore the coral waters off Queensland, mixing practical notes on skin‑diving with relaxed sketches of life on and under the reef. The second moves to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), following a loose circle of local divers as they hunt for shipwrecks, map reef systems, and stumble on the submerged ruins of the Koneswaram temple at Trincomalee. The third book chronicles the discovery and salvage of the Great Basses wreck, a silver‑laden Mughal ship found smashed on a remote reef.

Clarke writes these books in the first person, but with the same clear, low‑key style he uses for his science writing. He’s interested in how new equipment – a better aqualung, an underwater camera housing, a small launch – opens fresh possibilities, but he’s just as keen to record the personalities of local boatmen, fellow divers, and village officials. There is a gentle thread of advocacy running through the stories as he rails against dynamite fishing, careless tourism, and the casual destruction of reefs that took millennia to form.

Around the trilogy sit shorter books aimed at younger readers, such as Boy Beneath the Sea, which rework some of the same dives with more photos and less technical detail. Taken together, the Blue Planet titles show another side of Clarke: still a technologist, but also a man genuinely in love with the underwater world he made his home. A page focused on this sequence will usually walk through each volume, explain how they connect, and suggest a reading order if you want to follow his journeys from the Great Barrier Reef to Sri Lanka’s treacherous offshore banks.