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The Songs of Distant Earth

Clarke is a strange writer: His stories can be evocatively lyrical at times, and then a paragraph later he can lapse into prosaic scientific descriptions. At heart, I think Clarke is a short story author who writes novels as if they were a series of connected short stories (as often they are, especially in his earlier work), and I think this is a major factor in his style.

The Songs of Distant Earth takes place in the middle of the fourth millennium. The sun has gone nova, destroying life in the solar system. Centuries earlier, mankind had sent robot 'seed ships' to other stars to spread human life through the near galaxy by reproducing human life from the elements on the planet. One seeded planet was Thalassa, a water world with three modest islands on one side. Also, however, before the sun went nova, Earth sent out a handful of 'sleeper' ships heading to other stars, to be colonized by actual people born on Earth. One such ship, the Magellan, stops off at Thalassa on its way to Sagan Two. It needs to rebuild its ice shield to protect it from ambient dust in space on the second half of its voyage. Songs is the story of the meeting of these two cultures.

The story takes place over two years, and is told in a series of very short, to-the-point chapters, resulting in a sort of gestalt feel to the book, as a whole is built out of many very small pieces. Some pieces work, others don't.

Perhaps more than any of his other books, in Songs Clarke seems filled with an optimism about humanity, and is certainly unafraid of putting his own stamp on it, in ways that others might find a little strange, if not immoral. Thalassa's knowledge of its heritage is through the literature sent with the seed ship - literature which was carefully chosen to minimize the chance of conflict among the new humans, excluding, for instance, all religious texts. The plan has worked, in the book; although the Thalassans have a wide range of human emotions, they deal with them in a very matter-of-fact way, and things like jealousy are far less important motivators than they are on Earth.

Songs is pointedly devoid of sharp conflict; the really serious problems - a group who might sabotage the Magellan to remain on Thalassa, and a possibly intelligent undersea native race of Thalassa - are dealt with without direct conflict, and in a way that seems almost too easy. (Clarke does hint at the end, however, that the native race will cause serious problems for the humans a few decades down the road.)

The book's glaring weakness is the heavy-handed approach taken towards the romance between two principals of the book: A sort of love-at-first-sight, it-was-meant-to-be description which conveniently avoids much exploration of why these two characters feel drawn to one another. In that sense, the book feels rather fantastic even for an SF novel, if not outright disingenuous, and this undercuts much of the novel's power.

The Songs of Distant Earth reads quickly, and has a reasonable surface exploration of the culture clash of two technologically advanced human cultures, but it feels lacking in many respects, and overall it doesn't rise much above providing a glimpse of the lives of two much more intricate cultures.