Love, Philosophy, and Cosmic Melancholy: The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke

The Songs of Distant Earth is not my favorite Arthur C. Clarke book, but it has its moments. Since he's my favorite of the Big Three 20th century SF writers (Clarke, Asimov, and Heinlein), I've been meaning to check it out. What spurred me to do so now is that I just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Arthur C. Clarke-Award-Winning Children of Time, which is a much newer and different book, but one with some Clarke-style Big Ideas (multiple waves of far future space exploration, hibernation, animal intelligence, etc.). In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Tchaikovsky was influenced by this book.



Let's start with the things I didn't like. Have you ever wondered how Arthur C. Clarke handles sexual and romantic relationships? No, nobody ever has, and for good reason. But don't hate him for it. That's not his thing. Nobody reads Clarke for the sex (although I'm sure someone has written HAL-9000 erotica).

It's also obvious this was originally a shorter piece that got stretched and merged with other ideas, especially when the novel is lagging in the middle with short chapters on all of the ideas Clarke had written down but couldn't get into another project (underwater lobster creatures on the verge of culture? Cool! Mutiny? Neato. Politics? Sure. Future history? Sign me up. Language has barely changed in hundreds of years? Um, that's, convenient, I guess... But don't expect much of this to get a lot of treatment or really drive the plot. But at least the lagging chapters are quick, and the book isn't too long.

There's also a bit of philosophy. A lot of it's the kind of 20th century "science has killed God, thus making religion superfluous in the future" kind of stuff that only Richard Dawkins really believes anymore (I'm not a religious type myself, but I don't see religion disappearing any time soon).

There's a chapter that was painful to read that describes the future history of discarding most of the religion and literature of the world (although Clarke has the decency to describe it as dystopic in the long run to eliminate a lot of the accumulated wisdom of humanity). Buddhism gets some special treatment, maybe not a surprise as Clarke lived in Sri Lanka.

After a genuinely amusing bit on how probability dissolves the problem of evil while leaving humanity with a widely accepted case for atheism, he has the intellectual decency to have a spacefaring character say, after pontificating to his native girlfriend/student, "No serious philosophical problem is ever settled" (p. 260).

(This is also a good example of the fact that both groups of humans seem to be depicted as egalitarian even though almost all of the scientists and smart people are men and the women are mostly there as romantic partners and sounding boards, but maybe I'm being too hard on Clarke. I'm not sure.)

But it all ends with a nice dose of the cosmic melancholy Clarke does best. And there's some genuinely moving stuff, especially in the final chapters. There are a lot of great lines, like this one that explains the title, "All these the listeners heard in the music that came out of the night--the songs of distant Earth, carried across the light-years..." (p. 288).

The aching beauty of conscious beings grasping into a mind-expanding void is a feeling nobody does better than Clarke. And that's why you should read this or any other Arthur C. Clarke book.


See also my Goodreads review.