“He felt like a young student again, confronted with all the art and knowledge of mankind. The experience was both exhilarating and depressing; a whole universe lay at his fingertips, but the fraction of it he could explore in an entire lifetime was so negligible that he was sometimes overwhelmed with despair.”

Seldom do I encounter works as streaky as The Songs of Distant Earth, though the perceived streakiness likely says more about my sensibilities than the underlying quality of Arthur C. Clarke’s writing. When it comes to hard sci-fi and the hypothetical development of possible near-future innovations, Clarke’s work is scrumptious. He knows his stuff and revels in whipping up a sense of wonder and discovery. He might even engage in some tasteful showboating. The tale conveyed here spans lightyears and millennia, depicting humanity’s crippled crawl across the galaxy in the wake of the earth’s destruction, and the meeting of two distinct factions on a distant planet after centuries of separation. For better or worse, though, Clarke does not approach his story exclusively from the angle of science fiction. Sure, there’re brainy tidbits on embryonic seed pods, cryosleep, near-lightspeed travel, and the construction of a gigantic conical shield made of ice. But the approach here is largely from a human angle. Unfortunately, the author is not as adept at writing in this mode and my enjoyment level was knocked down a few pegs once the central narrative was underway. Further hampering the proceedings is the novel’s previous life as a short story published in a magazine, causing it to suffer from the unintegrated inclusion of several random ideas that were looking for a home.

In the 1960s, scientists on earth measure neutrino emissions from the sun at levels far below those expected. (This observation was actually made and remained unresolved at the time of the book’s writing.) Clarke uses this conundrum to suggest that the sun will go nova in approximately sixteen hundred years. In those centuries, mankind develops the technology to send out seedships containing embryos of humans and other mammals and various bacteria (and later merely stored DNA sequences). However, in earth’s waning years, manned space travel becomes feasible with the surprise breakthrough of the Quantum Drive—Clarke’s most obvious contrivance here. The passengers of Magellan lift off a mere three years before earth’s destruction and its crew witnesses the cataclysm from afar while millions cryonically sleep in dreamless slumber.

I found myself far more intrigued by all of the end of the world stuff than the drama that kicks off when Magellan makes a halfway pitstop on the failed colony planet Thalassa, but what can you do? As the ship approaches the panthalassic planet, it becomes clear that not only have the Thalassans survived, but thrived.¹ It turns out they never repaired the comms dish that was destroyed in a volcanic eruption but they’ve otherwise remained a healthy, happy society. The native earthlings select a handful of representatives from their sleeping ranks and send them down to negotiate with the Thalassans to ensure a smooth process of rebuilding the ablative ice shield that protects Magellan from space debris.

Hotshot engineer and ping pong champion Loren Lorenson reacts to the discovery of Thalassan natives in an understandable way. Having cryogenically slept for a couple hundred years and facing another centuries-long slumber, finding himself on a lush, idyllic planet populated with beautiful, carefree people, he immediately breaks professional protocol and romantically pursues a young Thalassan named Mirissa. And it’s this shallow hot-blooded romance that drives most of the action and leaves me unsatisfied. I can only take so much “magnetic attraction” and animal sex when the characters are little more than cardboard.

There are other intriguing excursions that are tossed into the mix in an effort to piece together a coherent narrative of sufficient length. Some Magellan passengers become disenchanted with their quest to reach Sagan 2 and wish to stay behind. Some others call for an officer’s meeting to request that they terminate their mission on Thalassa, using the volcanos to produce additional land mass to accommodate all of the sleeping passengers. A huge lobster-like creature that farms kelp is discovered and studied and it is determined that the creatures may evolve into intelligent beings in the distant future. A young Thalassan goes into a coma and his parents choose to send him out to sea instead of cryogenically suspending him in hopes that one day technology could revive him on Sagan 2. Eventually, with the ice shield replenished, Magellan resumes its original course.

I mentioned in opening that The Songs of Distant Earth is streaky. The book as I’ve just summarized it—with strong scientific backing and a so-so romantic drama as its driver—would be a decent if light read; a pleasant sci-fi adventure grounded by sound physics and a broad knowledge of the cosmos but lacking engaging characters. But Clarke embarrassingly exposes himself as an elementary philosopher when it comes to matters of sociology and religion. And his fangs come out too frequently to ignore. He describes in one chapter how every religious text and any work based upon them was thrown away and forbidden to be sent out on the seedships’ databanks.² “They purged history and literature of ten thousand years, and the result has justified their efforts,” he writes, but then references classic works of literature that would have been lost in his gleeful purging of history. He names a character Moses and gives him some of the cringiest lines, such as describing how statistically speaking good and evil balance out and therefore the problem of evil simply isn’t (no mention of what good or evil mean absent a moral framework). This is just downright laughable. The problem of evil doesn’t suggest that evil outweighs good, but rather forces theists to square the existence of God with the existence of evil. Plus, the problem of evil is not inherently an argument over the existence of God in the first place; it’s just a point that must be contended with, i.e. explaining it away doesn’t magically make God disappear along with it. He also cites some theorems offhand that are apparently sufficient to completely dismiss God and hence, after a distinction is made between Alpha and Omega, the concept simply drops out of the social consciousness.

Despite all the wealth of beauty and wisdom these works contained, they could not be allowed to reinfect virgin planets with the ancient poisons of religious hatred, belief in the supernatural, and the pious gibberish with which countless billions of men and women had once comforted themselves at the cost of addling their minds.

Since the citizens of Thalassa have culturally evolved in an environment stripped of religion, they are free of prejudice, intolerance, jealousy, hate, greed. Thalassa is a progressive utopia where people exhibit only the most positive of human qualities. They’re so free of selfish ambition that everyone is content to have the country’s president selected at random. Mirissa’s mate does not get jealous when a man descends from the stars and starts humping his partner. In these cringy didactic moments the main theme of the work emerges: that if mankind would just rid himself of all his silly superstitions such as God and morality then a perfect world would emerge. Again, no mention of what scales are used once we jettison notions of justice, righteousness, good, evil, etc.

There’s also clear confusion between the notion of doctrinal religious practice and the religious nature of man. To posit that taking away the bible would cause man to stop seeking the numinous is beyond absurd; though I have the unfortunate benefit of witnessing millions of my generation claim to reject religion while consulting the stars, praying to “the universe” and “manifesting” good vibes as evidence to counter Clarke’s implication. Anyway, the moment he steps off his soapbox and tries to bring you behind the curtain to show you the truth, he undercuts his own argument by showing reverence to a relic of the Buddha (one of his teeth) and the golden mask of King Tutankhamun. If Clarke is brilliant in the realm of science then he’s just as far on the other end of the seesaw when it comes to the nature of man.

It’s crude, for sure, but it is tied together at the end with a very solid turn toward melancholy. The final chapters include some impactful prose about the limited minds of humans grasping at the implications of sailing off into the infinite unknown that serve to provoke that same feeling in the reader, that sense of just how small each of us is against the vastness of the universe. This is exemplified by Loren submitting to cryosleep for several hundred more years with the knowledge that he would awake to read of the life and eventual death of Mirissa as well as his child that remained in her womb at his departure and who would likewise be long dead from old age. And again by the bright starlike light that the ship generated as it traveled toward Sagan 2 and which was visible from the surface of Thalassa for decades after its departure, viewed for the last time by Mirissa just before her eyesight failed; after that she would ask her grandchildren if they could spot it.

Superb highs but dreadful lows. Solid science-fiction, lousy social commentary. In my estimation, the worst of it could have easily been smoothed over if the author did not exhibit such ferocity and dismissiveness toward something he clearly had not taken the time to understand. Those moments do not dominate when tallying up page count, but the ideas permeate the novel and detract from what is otherwise an enjoyable book.

1. Thalassa’s human history is shrouded in mystery because the first humans didn’t arrive there as mature adults. The nascent colony on Thalassa was overseen for a time—maybe even several generations—by a robot caregiver raising humans from embryos à la I Am Mother. These shady origins are left mostly untouched by the author, but it would have been neat to explore the effects of having been raised not by humans with differing worldviews, diverse skill sets, and various innate qualities, but a ruthless computer program that selectively culled its herd for specific traits.

2. Amusingly, the original library aboard Magellan is only a few hundred terabytes. Nowadays, you can buy 12TB hard drive that’s the size of a wallet for a couple hundred bucks. It’s really amazing how much smaller and cheaper data storage has gotten over the years.