A weird and wonderful story. There's a _lot_ of scientific thought in here, but it mostly doesn't obscure the interactions between the well-developed characters. I was surprised when the full story of Karl's intentions came out - it seemed rather minor after the buildup of possible conspiracies and secrets - but the ideas are interesting. So is the secret drive. Oh, and there was one moment of realizations - Clarke goes on for a couple paragraphs about the wonders of the comsole, through which a person can read anything and everything ever written or produced - or could, if he wouldn't die of old age before making a serious dent in the volume of records available through the comsole. It was only after I finished that bit, and was feeling puzzled at his insistence, that I realized this was written in 1975, before the Internet existed. :). The end is a neat twist - it both surprised me and didn't, it had been nicely and subtly foreshadowed. I'd be very interested to read a story about the next generation out on Titan. Good story. Not a favorite, but I'm glad I read it and may well do so again. ( )

Imperial Earth is pretty classic science fiction. Futuristic--300 years in the future from when the book was written (1976), with space travel, and Clarke's vision of how society would have changed in that time.

Hero Duncan Makenzie is making his first (and likely only) trip to Earth from Saturn's moon Titan, on a political mission--the development of a new propulsion system threatens Titan's economy, the major industry of which is providing hydrogen for rockets, and while he's there, to ensure his family's dynasty by having himself cloned--he's a clone of his "father", who is, in turn, a clone of his "father."

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 Arthur C. Clarke book is long on ideas and short on plot. Fortunately, he's got such good ideas that it took me half of the book to realize that I wasn't reading a novel, I was reading a travelogue! There's some neat ideas on display-- Clarke has of course extensively thought through his ideas for the future of Titan and Earth. I did groan a bit when he attributed some of Earth's cultural advances to the telecommunications satellite, though. The plot manifests in the last fifty pages out of three hundred, and it turns out its seeds were sown earlier, but there was a lot of other stuff going on that ultimately had nothing to do with anything. And the plot's not even that interesting. Despite some shortcomings, though, it's a long sight better than anything Clarke wrote after the 1980s.

I first read this book many years ago, and yet working along my shelves I failed to recognise it as familiar. I realised why as I started to read it again. It was loaded with scenes that had stayed in my memory - the boy hearing the sound of the Titanian wind and storing it for later play; the two historians conversing in slave lingo; the pentaminos, the disastrous effects of using an emotion enhancer;Duncan's first sight of a butterfly. All these came vividly back to me as I encountered them again - but none had I remembered as being from this novel.

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. ( )

Clone succession economics.

A Titan clan are a power in the solar system thanks to being the source of the fuel that drives the ships that allow commerce over such a wide scale. However, their existence has led to genetic damage and periodically they must make a pilgrimage to Earth to acquire the clone that will be the next generation.

Advances in technology are catching up with the family, however, so some fast footwork is needed.

The Novel explores the story in the pleasant and the past via a failed past relationship between three people in their youth, and when they meet again on the trip to Earth.

This has always been a memorable book to me despite not being the most brilliant work around.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2007/11... ( )