Arthur Charles Clarke

The paradise of Thalassa is threatened by an evolutionary event brewing beneath the calm seas and by a spacecraft of refugees hovering in orbit above the planet. The arrival of a spaceship from Earth--destroyed when its sun went nova--carrying five million Earthlings in suspended animation, as well as an uncensored cultural record of Earth, threatens to destroy the paradisiacal planet of Thalassa.

The Songs of Distant Earth

Tobias V. Langhoff

With a few plot points reimagined, this 1986 novel could be very relevant to 2015. Earth has been destroyed, but not from climate change; the Sun has gone nova some time in the fourth millenium (due to neutrino decay, an unsolved problem in physics at the time this book was written, but which has since been explained). There’s a refugee crisis which results in the displacement of thousands of people, but not from war; before Earth was engulfed in flames, a ship carrying survivors was launched to colonize space.

These technologically advanced astronauts are not the ones who have to deal with the refugee crisis, however. Even before their expedition, a seed ship was sent out in the cosmos, reestablishing the human race on a faraway planet in a utopia where human history has been rewritten to minimize strife. Among other things, all of humanity’s past religions have been purged from the records.

This peaceful community is invaded (albeit in a calm manner) by the survivors, who are in a way from their “future” in Earth history. This creates a first contact scenario where both sides are human, but with very different outlooks on life. There’s also a different first contact scenario, as it turns out that the planet might harbor indigenous sentient life, creating some further moral dilemmas.

These concepts are all very interesting on a macroscopic level. The science is cool and the cultural differences are interesting. The story is, however, told from the points of view of several individuals on both sides, and this is the biggest and also weakest part of the story. The characters are flat and pretty uninteresting. The inevitable romances that occur between them are clinical, undeveloped and completely devoid of passion.

Despite this, I liked the prose and the pacing. Going back to Clarke after having read a lot of more modern science fiction, it was refreshing to read an old classic that simply had well written descriptions and plot. It’s just too bad that the characterization wasn’t also well written.

The Songs of Distant Earth

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