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I quote from one of Arthur C. Clarke's introductions in his ‘Collected Stories’:

Written as an entry for a short story competition run by the Observer newspaper, on the subject ‘2500 AD.’, ‘The Star’ wasn't even a runner-up. However, on magazine publication, it received a Hugo award in 1956.

Decide for yourself whether that says more about the Observer or the Hugo awards, but before you do, consider that ‘The Star’ is one of the most awesomely awesome sf stories I have read, so awesome I have two paper copies of it.

I first came across it in ‘Peter Davison's Book of Alien Worlds’, a 1983 short-story collection blatantly targetted at people who read Target novelizations of Dr Who, among whom I counted myself at the time. Nestled among some quite good sf, a rather uneventful piece by Ray Bradbury, and Clarke's earlier (and marginally less good, but equally memorable) ‘History Lesson’, it shines out of that book like a star, right from its first sentence.

It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican.

That's a striking opening line, and the prose throughout is more grandiose, less chatty, than Clarke's usual. The story is about a Jesuit astrophysicist charting the frontiers of space in the far future, who suffers a crisis of faith. It sounds like a recipe for boredom and cheap, anti-religious dogma, but Clarke neatly skirts coffee-house theology to reach original thought. Unlike many of Clarke's stories, the plot doesn't hinge around little-thought-of implications of the physical laws, or the mechanics of space travel and moon exploration, but the detailed and glossy depiction of space and its astronomical occupants is unmistakeably Clarkean. This made the story accessible to me as a boy but the gravitas of its subject matter and the lavishness of its prose made it much less patronising and adventure-y, and more involving, than its neighbours in the collection.

The striking opening is matched, in the best possible way, by an unforgettable ending. After what must be more than a decade since I first read it, the after-taste of that shock I felt when Clarke revealed how unexpectedly he'd deployed his One Assumption still lingers when other stories have been forgotten, and re-reading the story brings back a lump to the throat.

I've never come across anyone who had anything bad to say about ‘The Star’, except (hypothetically) the judging panel for the Observer. The story is an excellent ambassador for science-fiction, having nothing to do with space adventure and no technobabble, and everything to do with human feelings and mind-expanding novelty.