Songs of Distant Earth

:For the music album by Mike Oldfield, see The Songs of Distant Earth (album)

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Mike Oldfield - The Songs of Distant Earth (album)

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Songs of Distant Earth is the common title of several science fiction works by Arthur C. Clarke. A science fiction short story, a short movie synopsis, and a 1986 soft science fiction novel all bear the same title. The rest of this article deals with the novel.

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Science fiction - Arthur C. Clarke - Soft science fiction

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The story is centred on a rendezvous between human beings far in the future, after the destruction of the Earth, on the oceanic planet of Thalassa.

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Earth - Thalassa

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Unlike Clarke's other works, this piece focuses on characterisation and emotional development, instead of technological change. In some sense, it was written as a response to critics who attacked his writings as cold and impersonal.

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In the story, humans respond to the prospect of unavoidable doom by launching a series of robot colony ships into space, to continue Earth life after the destruction of the homeworld (caused by the Sun becoming a nova). Thalassa is colonised by one such ship, but loses contact due to a natural disaster. Meanwhile, just as the predicted time of cataclysm is due to elapse, vacuum energy technology is invented to allow the construction of one near-light-speed vessel, the Magellan, which is launched to build the last colony of mankind. (Previous colony ships involved frozen embryos, or various forms of DNA synthesis. In Magellan, a living crew is transported in cryogenic stasis.)

Related Topics:
Robot - Colony ships - Nova - Vacuum energy - Cryogenic

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En route to their target, Planet Sagan, the Magellan makes a planned stop at planet Thalassa to replenish their worn down asteroid shield, which has been steadily chipped away by interstellar debris. A small crew is awakened to perform the repair work on the ship's ice shield. Because Thalassa hasn't maintained their interstellar communications antenna, they are unaware of the coming of the Magellan until its entry into the atmosphere. The novel continues by tackling the impact of this reunion, documenting the efforts of the Magellan crew to repair their ship, and most poignantly, the possibility of love amidst the barriers of distance and time.

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ISBN 0-34-532240-1

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