Book Review: Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke

Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke
My rating: 71 of 100 stars

Pages : 256

Year : 1986

Genre : Sci-Fi

Series : Solo

Giving 71 and recommending? Well, yes. First of all, have in mind that this book was written and re-written but it's old. The premises come from the golden age of Science Fiction and it's one of the most memorable being written at that time. IT was then re-written in the 80's. Don't know what was changed but I believe the premises stay the same.

This book deals with space exploration, colonization of a new world. Being a 230 page novel it has a lot of ideas from the ones I mentioned before to interaction between two different branches of humanity (imagine shogun stuff when Europeans saw for the first time Japanese people. They were for all purposes aliens). this book also deals with the end of the earth (due to neutrino problem that was solved a couple of years after Arthur C Clarke died). There is a reason why this is his most beloved novel.

So why the 71 rating? Although it deals with a lot of interesting topics (I forgot xenobiology , encounters with other species, terraforming, spaceships stuff) it never really dwell much on each individual topic. IT's like he crammed all of this interesting topics , probably being the top runner in several, but never really solving\delving to much on them. So, you may find interesting stuff on terraforming, psychology, sociology etc it never really provides anything too deeply and so was a bit boring...

So, I didn't talk about what's the book about right?

So basically earth is doomed and they know it's being destroyed around 3500 (or so). So humanity started exploring other planets with different methods (again we don't really know much about them) but the vast majority just lost contact. In a last stretch finally we discovered something that allow to send people (hibernating) instead of embryos. Hop we go to another planet but had to stop in a previous colonized world to get more ice. One of the things that most annoyed me was the lack of info on this... how did humans who stayed behind felt about being left on a doom planet? Did they revolt? I mean as the time progress I Would think there would be wars and revolt since everyone would want to go and not being on sinking ship...

So as I said, this ship arrived and encounter the inhabitants living in paradise with no knowledge of war, gods and so on. While I would think it would be interesting of more clashes between two different societies it was cool to see. But again very very superficial... This book could have been 500 pages. The end was interesting since it deals with idea of staying on that planet or leaving to their destination... there were dissidents but again too superficial.. Alas... great premise but lack of depth. (

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