Of the above 114 pieces, 95 were published in six major short story collections during Clarke's lifetime. They are distributed as follows (all cross-references with the above list are noted):
- "Expedition to Earth" (1953, 11 stories: nos. 7, 12, 14, 19–21, 28, 31, 32–33, 39)
- "Reach for Tomorrow" (1956, 12: nos. 5, 8–9, 11, 13, 18, 23–24, 26, 36–38)
- "Tales from the White Hart" (1957, 15: nos. 25, 42, 45–46, 49, 57–64, 66–67)
- "The Other Side of the Sky" (1958, 24: nos. 15–16, 34–35, 41, 44, 47–48, 51–56, 65, 69–74, 76–78)
- "Tales of Ten Worlds" (1962, 15: nos. 27, 75, 79–89, 91, 93)
- "The Wind from the Sun" (1972, 18: nos. 90, 92, 94–109)
Note that nos. 50 and 68 above are not short stories but two cycles of six pieces each.
Later collections consist mostly of previously collected material, with the following exceptions (all cross-references with the above list are noted):
- The Best of Arthur C. Clarke: 1937–1971 (1973, four "new" stories: nos. 1, 3, 6, 10)
- The Sentinel (1983, 2: no. 22)
- The Wind from the Sun (1987 edition, 3: nos. 110, 111)
- Tales from Planet Earth (1989, 3: nos. 40, 43, 113)
As can be seen, of these 12 "new stories", 10 are reprinted in The Collected Stories. 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.
For the remaining nine pieces (2, 4, 17, 29, 30, 112, 114–116) this is either their first appearance in book form at all or first appearance in a book by Arthur C. Clarke. There are, however, two exceptions. "The Lion of Comarre" (no. 17), although published in magazine form as early as 1949, first appeared in book form in 1968, in an omnibus edition together with Clarke's early novel Against the Fall of the Night (1953). "The Steam-powered Word-Processor" (no. 112) had previously appeared in Clarke's "science-fictional autobiography" Astounding Days (1989).
