the songs of distant earth by arthur c clarke

Visitors: a group of colonists aboard the Magellan, a late-model spaceship that left Earth just before its fiery destruction. The transplanted humans, having created an idyllic island society, now find themselves with unexpected Clarke's story begins seven centuries after the arrival of a seedship on the planet Thalassa, so called because it consists largely of ocean. Since the seedships, with their ''primitive'' propulsion systems, require centuries to reach even the nearest habitable planet, no living humans can make the journey. Race manages to launch a fleet of ''seedships,'' each carrying enough genetic material (frozen human embryos, plants, animals and microorganisms) to stock an entire planet, along with robot mechanisms to nurture theĮmbryos until they can care for themselves. Not a very spectacular one - but big enough.'' With a millennium and a half of lead time, the human The sentences summarizing this forecast show Mr.Ĭlarke's style at its purest: ''In the year 3600, plus or minus seventy-five years, the Sun would become a nova. ''The Songs of Distant Earth'' takes place some 200 years after the sun blows up - right on schedule, according to a forecast made by a scientist at the beginning of the 21st century. Tools from both logic and poetry, intends to tell us how to live and die with dignity. The secret of his appeal lies in his revival of the oldest form of how-to literature - philosophical fiction, which, borrowing With Stanley Kubrick) and ''Childhood's End,'' are still in print after several decades.

Before that his ''Fountains of Paradise'' sold in the hundreds of thousands, and his best-known books, ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' (co-written Despite these drawbacks, more than two million copies of his last science-fiction novel, He writes best sellers that have virtually no sex or violence in them, no family tensions, no conventional heroes or villains. The Songs of Distant Earth By Gerald Jonas

The songs of distant earth by arthur c clarke