Status
Call number
Collection
Publication
Description
Fiction. Science Fiction. HTML: A futuristic tale of intergalactic love and politics from the legendary "colossus of science fiction" and creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey (The New Yorker). In the year 2276, Duncan Makenzie travels from Saturn's moon, Titan, to Earth as a diplomatic guest at the United States' Quincentennial. As a member of Titan's 'First Family' descended from the moon's original settlers five hundred years before, Duncan finds himself welcomed back to Mother Earth and into Washington's glittering political and social scene. But Duncan isn't just on Earth for ambassadorial reasons. Haunted by the memory of a woman from Earth he once loved, Duncan is also on a mission to continue his family line . . . despite a devastating genetic defect. A tour-de-force of vivid characterization, futuristic vision, and suspense, Imperial Earth is one of Arthur C. Clarke's most ambitious and thought-provoking novels. "Clarke at the height of his powers." �The New York Times.… (more)
User reviews
Why?
Because it has almost no plot. It's a sequence of events designed to show the way in which fuel could be cheaply produced from Titan's atmosphere to power transport within the solar system. It's good science (though I don't know if it matches current knowledge or not) but it makes for wonderful scenes that don't relate directly to the story.
Clarke is first and foremost a hard-sf writer, and that is obvious in Imperial Earth. While he does approach some social issues such as sexuality and racism, he does it more by ignoring them than making an explicit point.
The technology is really where Clarke feels at home, and where he shines. From a 1978 perspective he is looking out another 300 years, and talking about the future of radio telescopes, space ship propulsion, computers, housing, and so on. How well does he do? Well, he jokes at the end that Robert Forward liked his space ship drive ideas so much he almost patented them. The "minisec" is an almost perfect analog to the palmpilot/blackberry of today. On the other hand he predicted that the Titanic would be found almost entirely intact & raised to the surface, and that Manhattan would become so run down by the mid-21st century that the only solution would be to buldoze the whole thing.
One bit that where his prescience was working overtime was in creating "Enigma", a company that specializes in customized entertainment experiences that is so similar to Consumer Recreation Services in the 1997 movie The Game, that I have to wonder if one didn't inspire the other, or they somehow came from the same source.
All in all, it is a decent book. It's not a compelling page turner, but it's not a bad read for a Clarke fan either.
Hero Duncan Makenzie is making his first (and likely only) trip to Earth from Saturn's
The political intrigue was probably my favorite part of the book--I'm always a sucker for intrigue, but the descriptions of life on Titan, and the difficulties of adapting both physically and culturally to life back on Earth were also entertaining and well-explained.
A couple of things jumped out at me as irritants--feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken in my beliefs. 1) Titan is described as having no indigenous life forms, yet it has a core of molten petrochemicals--hydrocarbons. I thought you had to have carbon-based life forms to get petrochemicals. 2) England is described as having had the first empire on earth.
Oddly, the disclaimer in the back of the book doesn't address either of those things--it talks about the cloning and the stated genetic reason for it, which I'd just accepted and didn't think anything more about.
This
Clarke's imagination always runs riot but, as this novel ably demonstrates, he had more than adequate literary skills to do his apocalypses justice.
I first read this novel while I was still at school: I loved it then, and found it even more rewarding now!
Clarke might as well have written an essay called, "What I Think Earth Will Be Like In the Year 2276". There's hardly any plot; the characters are wooden. Even when somebody dies, there's no drama.
I picked this up for a quick escapist read, but I could barely finish it. Every once in a while, I
Dated...I was a tad disappointed in Clarke for that. I'm not keen on authors using contemporary terms, mores, etc. when writing a future history novel. Three hundred years is a lot of time for
As I said, dated. Not bad, but a forerunner of his later Rama writings.
I think I've begun to see some of Clarke's patterns. He will often (when writing in the future) describe a list of things. Two or three of those things are well known to us now. The final item in the list is always something that happened in characters' past, but our future. Additionally, Clarke loves to leave a book with hints of future wonders of engineering yet to be built. I've also noticed that for some odd reason, many of Clarke's references to past arts, events, or ideas are 20th century ideas. Once in awhile, these common patterns are interesting - after reading several Clarke books in a row, they start to get repetitive.
In the end, the core of the plot was not all that interesting. The final engineering project was not as compelling as some of Clarke's other man-made wonders. The final surprise reveal was not completely explained - I actually figure out what it meant only by reading some other comments on LibraryThing. The heavy comparisons between Titan and the Titanic were cumbersome and not quite as informative as I would have hoped.