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

[Erudite]

Book: The Songs of Distant Earth
Author: Arthur C. Clarke
Genre: Science Fiction
Suitable for: adults
Pages: 251

This story is happening around the Earth year, 3700AD, but on the planet Thalassa. Earth's Sun has gone nova and there are no humans left there. Thalassa was colonized by a "seedship", a ship in which only robots were sent with the DNA of humans, plants, animals, etc. In their 700th year, another ship arrives, but this one has humans who actually saw the final days of Earth. They have stopped at Thalassa in order to repair their ship before going on to Sagan two. So Earth culture and Thalassa culture interact for the first time.

Unfortunately, Thalassa's culture was built by atheists and amoralists. When the ship was sent, the databanks held nothing that would refer to any kind of God, nothing that referred to any kind of specific morality, and one of the Earth men in looking this over, feels some regret in having had to "give up" God, but no regret in the comparative happiness that amorality has seeming planted on Thalassa.

While I like the imagination that goes into telling a story like this, I hated the background it was set against. Arthur Clarke uses a chapter in the book to describe "God" to a Lassan and describes the concept in such ridiculous terms that I finally skipped the rest of the chapter. He spent more time on the atheism and the amoral behavior of the characters than he did on the more interesting technological aspects and the fact that an intelligent race has been found in Thalassa's sea. I felt nearly preached to by Clarke as he tried to get his atheist point across, rather than an interesting story.

I can not recommend this book at all. I was disturbed by the promiscuous behavior of the characters and by the continual discussions of the lack of "God" that seemed irrelevant if the Thalassan society truly had no concept of God. This is an author I won't be reading any more of.

[natickgirl]

There is a book, or rather a trilogy, that is similar to this one without the atheistic motives. If you like sci-fi, I think you'd really enjoy these books. The 1st book is called "This Star Shall Abide"; the whole trilogy is called "Children of the Star." Unfortunately, I can't remember who the author is, or the names of the other two books. (Forgive me if I've recommended these books before.)

What impressed me most, and really caused me to think, was the concept of truth. Questions that came up in my mind were: What is truth? Who should be told truth? If we have truth, are we obligated to explain it to others even if we know it would not benefit & might even be harmful to them? What is too high a price to pay for truth? It also made me think of what is most important to make a new society function.

These books might be difficult to find, but it's worth the effort.