The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke

The Songs of Distant Earth 

By Arthur C. Clarke 

Rating 2.5/5

Genres Science fiction, Fantasy, Romance,2022-read.

Just closed the book and there are a myriad of thoughts floating in my head. This is a short book and a quick read. It is only 200 pages or so in digital format. Many of the scenes seem to hold no weight against the overall plot. I am no longer surprised to read really below average and underwhelming work from really great authors as I used to in the past. This is one of the works which Clarke seems to have undertaken to convince the science community of a point rather than make himself more successful in the line of novelisists - probably because he is already a very well established author in the science fiction genre. 

The point he seems to be making is not to abandon research into alien contact and also not to stop any steps being taken towards reaching distant stars and making them home if they are uninhabited. The prologue to the book seems to convey this much before even starting on the book. So, the plot makes for a ripe material for good soap on TV and a decent movie on big screen .. but its value as a science fiction/fantasy novel is moot. And really questionable is how much of the book is even "new" to the reader. Not much. Nothing at all. There are elements of romance, grief, fear and suspense attempted to be thrown in to the storyline but it only makes for a haphazard mixture. 

The plot goes thus. Earth had searched for aliens and tried to make some kind of contact through endless signaling for hundreds and thousands of years with no success. The scientists have discovered that they are soon approaching a point when sun in our solar system would explode and become a nova. In the process burn away the entire solar system. So Earthians have started sending seed ships filled with embryos to distant planets which they think are not yet habited and where life is possible. One such establishment is Talassas which is a small human settlement that stopped communication with Earth a little time after reporting its successful landing. Seven hundred years after this happened and a couple hundred after earth is destroyed by the exploding sun, a spaceship Magellan from Earth makes contact with Talassians. They have a strange request to make. They want hundreds of tons of water loaded from the Talassian land so that they could go ahead on their journey to a distant star and attempt at habitation. During the 1-2 years it takes for this process to complete, there are new romantic affairs formed between the Magellanians and Talassians. Some undersea scorpions are discovered to have an evolving consciousness that could become threatening if left unmonitored. And there are also other elements which are unnecessarily added along with poor characterization to the main players that the book becomes farcical. I skimmed some sections of text out of sheer irrelevance of them and my own restlessness to get this thing wrapped up. Anyways, getting back to the review, towards the end .. some people wanted to stay back on Talassian land but neither the Talassians nor the Megallians were in favor of that idea and the ship moves on .. sailing far away into a distant land .. from where songs of earth c(w)ould one day be heard hundreds of years later. 

Overall, liked the idea but not how it is all put together. And definitely not the twists he tried to add to an already poor and weak plot. 🤢