snpmurray's Full Review: Arthur C. Clarke - The Songs of Distant Earth
The lives of two colonies of survivors from the end of the world are examined in Songs of Distant Earth.
When our sun explodes, with only a few centuries of warning, mankind evacuates the planet. This happens in three ways.
Firstly, large space craft are built, and enormous numbers of people are placed aboard in suspended animation, and shot starward. Such is the case with the ship Magellan and her crew.
Secondly, robotic factories are shot out to the stars, carrying technological factories, genetic material, and archives, in order to begin civilizations from scratch when inhabitable planets are discovered. This is successfully achieved on Thalassa, a small planet similar to Earth but far smaller.
Thirdly, strict laws forbid the birth of any humans after a date some eighty years before the cataclysm. When the Earth is destroyed by the sun, the only people watching are looking back, not looking up.
In Songs, Arthur C. Clarke tells the story of what happens when the Magellan stops to refuel at the planet Thalassa, to find it inhabited by earlier refugees from Earth. The two cultures, with completely different backgrounds but a common heritage, find a way to help each other, and together discover things about themselves, and planet they both need for survival, including inhabitants that were there before either of them.
The Magellan has had to stop as it needs ice from the planets seas for its impact shielding. The process will take a number of years, and in the meantime, the temporarily awakened crew members who will complete the task learn all about the culture which has been created by the robots their own scientist launched.
Each of the “Mother ships” carries a generic constitution, taught to the brood it raises, which is the best Earth could come up with, and yet which is flexible enough to allow any society to evolve according to the needs of its environment. The Thalassans, in the seven hundred years that they have been alive, have created a society which is carefree, utopian, egalitarian, and seemingly often drunk. Life is easy, fair, and balanced.
Sounds good, eh?
The Magellans crew, on the contrary, are headed for a target world which is known to be harsh, barren, and will require a lot of work in order to make it even half as livable as Thalassa. Magellans crew are disciplined realists, survivors of the very last days, and share a common gritty spirit lacking in the Thalassans for the most part, and clearly attractive to its women. Relationships bloom, Platonic and otherwise, and gradually , as happens whenever cultures meet, neither will ever be the same again.
Meantime, as a discovery due in equal part to both collectives, it is discovered that Thalassa already possesses inhabitants of its own, who , previously unknown, may have their own idea about what the future should hold.
Arthur C Clarke blends all these elements in a deft and elegant piece of story telling, which will provide you with something interesting to consider on every page. In classic Clarke style, it so happens that one has rarely spent time considering any of these concepts before!
This book contains an uncommon (for Clarke) degree of character development. Clarkes novels are for the most part considered “Hard” Science fiction, this meaning that the emphasis of the writing is weighted heavily towards the technical and mechanical aspects of the future. “Soft” science fiction, by contrast, emphasizes the socio-cultural implications of the future speculated. Here, he seems to break out of his usual mold, and the entire book is peppered with the insights and dreams of the characters it draws.
Characterization is, in fact, excellent in this piece. Main characters from Magellan include Ships captain and engineer, both in the “bold and technically competent adventurer” mold, Ships counselor, a wise elder, and diplomat for the collective wisdom of Earths last days, and a small group of potential mutineers, strongly inclined to never leave this paradise planet. On the Thalassan side, main characters include a mayor and president, both in the “self serving happy ignorant bureaucrat” mold, a young intelligent woman (for purposes of complex love triangle), her former mate (technical expert of the planet and stoic), and a youthful version of the same guy (a young hero figure).
Everything you need, right?
As is very typical for Clarke, Songs of Distant Earth provides, as I said , plenty to think about.
The way in which a culture might be created with nothing but robots for genesis is explored in depth. A fascinating storyline, and one in which the posited details are to be admired for their informed imaginativeness, Clarke writing here in the early nineteen eighties, before the biggest leaps forward in genetic manipulation had been made. I particularly enjoyed his description of the “mark three constitution”. Coming from the United Kingdom originally, as does Clarke, who like myself emigrated, I voted with my feet regarding a nation without a written constitution to guide it. I did wonder though, who had the mark two and mark one??!
Among other concepts which you will find explored in depth in this book are space travel under hibernation (you will doubtless be familiar with this from another Clarke project, namely ? a Space Odyssey”). Also explored ..... Alien first contact, the preservation of cultural heritage, planetary engineering, cross cultural contamination, and that old chestnut, sexual politics. Clarkes angle on all of these, I thoroughly expect you will find intelligent, light hearted, and entertaining.
I first read this book in my teens, and reading it again in my thirties it is probably more interesting than before. I find science fiction books, like fine wines, show their quality most in their later years. If you can look at a book written twenty years ago and not find the authors prescience to be short-sighted or narrow-minded, you have found a master. Such is Clarke.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.