"Improving the Neighbourhood" is a science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 short story

Short story

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

 by Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...

. It was first published in Nature

Nature (journal)

Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...

on November 4th 1999 and was the first piece of science fiction Nature ever published. It is also the last story included in The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke

The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke

The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, , first published in 2001, is a collection of almost every science fiction story shorter than novel length that Arthur C. Clarke has ever published: with 114 in all arranged in order of publication, "Travel by Wire!" in 1937 through to "Improving the...

, where it is dedicated to Dr. Pons

Stanley Pons

Bobby Stanley Pons is an American-French electrochemist known for his work with Martin Fleischmann on cold fusion in the 1980s and '90s.-Early life:...

 and Dr. Fleischmann

Martin Fleischmann

Martin Fleischmann is a British chemist noted for his work in electrochemistry. He came to wider public prominence following his controversial publication of work with colleague Stanley Pons on cold fusion using palladium in the 1980s and '90s.-Early life:Born in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia,...

.

Plot summary

The story is written as a monologue

Monologue

In theatre, a monologue is a speech presented by a single character, most often to express their thoughts aloud, though sometimes also to directly address another character or the audience. Monologues are common across the range of dramatic media...

 and tells of the development of a civilization and a disaster which destroys them when they are on the verge of abandoning their "clumsy chemical filled bodies and thus achieve multiple connectivity." The monologue's narrator reveals that they are a germanium

Germanium

Germanium is a chemical element with the symbol Ge and atomic number 32. It is a lustrous, hard, grayish-white metalloid in the carbon group, chemically similar to its group neighbors tin and silicon. The isolated element is a semiconductor, with an appearance most similar to elemental silicon....

-based lifeform after their ancestors switched from being carbon

Carbon

Carbon is the chemical element with symbol C and atomic number 6. As a member of group 14 on the periodic table, it is nonmetallic and tetravalent—making four electrons available to form covalent chemical bonds...

-based lifeforms long ago. This would point to the narrator being either an alien or a human from the far future.