Imperial Earth

The literary equivalent of culture shock. Reading it again after so many years and knowing what to expect I was able to see a couple of subtler features. Clarke’s playing with sf tropes. If you have a look at the first several chapters he has to get an awful lot of information across so we’re oriented in a very foreign land. A masterclass in how to do exposition. He doesn’t info-dump, but reveals while apparently talking about something else. And he doesn’t tell you all the information on a subject at once, but comes back to it and gives you a little bit more later. He never actually stops doing this. The entire novel is structured as a series of reveals. It’s exposition as an extended art form.

The other thing he’s playing show more with is the idea of space. Obviously the novel partly takes place in space, but he’s also looking at space as in distance, personal space and privacy, and the emotional distance between the characters. So if you take Titan, so vastly far from Earth, private; anything could go on there and no-one on Earth would know. The inhabitants all crammed in to a tiny area but living with inviolable personal privacy. These ideas crop up again and again in the novel. Cleverly done. If you wanted to get a bit meta there’s also the cultural space between the solar system of the future and our world today. show less

This isn't one of Clarke's more strongly plotted novels, and at over thirty-five years old, well, it's inevitably already quite dated in lots of details. But Clarke's imaginative vision of humanity's future, his descriptions of the wonders of Titan (one of Saturn's moons) and Earth both, makes for good reading nevertheless, and actually I think Duncan Makenzie is one of his most strongly written and memorable characters. Makenzie, who had never seen Earth, but was born there, is one of a line of clones that virtually rules the key hydrogen industry of Titan. He journeys to 23rd century Earth to continue his line--just in time to be a guest speaker at the Washington celebration for America's quincentennial (The book was published in show more 1975, just before America's bicentennial). Surprisingly, through Duncan's perspective what comes through most strongly is not the wonders of Titan, but of Earth--from a Percheron horse to a butterfly. I like how it's casually revealed half-way through the book that MaKenzie is black. A better way of revealing what a non-issue race is in Clarke's vision of the future than any lengthy sermon on the bad old days. Not what I'd recommend for an introduction to Clarke, and it's not as memorable to me as The City and the Stars, Childhood's End or Deep Range, but if you like the author this shouldn't disappoint. show less

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This was one of my favourite Clarke novels as a teenager, and I felt it held up pretty well on a return visit. It's a book about Duncan Makenzie, scion of the ruling family of Titan, and his once-in-a-lifetime journey to Earth to attend the 2276 celebrations of the United States (the book was published in 1975, in time for the Bicentennial) and also incidentally to get himself cloned (he is himself a clone.) The good things about it are actually summarised in the subtitle: fantasy, love, and discord.

Fantasy: If there's one thing Clarke has always done well, it's sensawunda, and his visual descriptive passages of the landscape of Titan, the view of Saturn's rings, the gold-lined coral reefs off the show more coast of Zanzibar, and even the more engineering topics of the Titanic and the asymptotic drive still enthrall me. Of course, his description of some of these have been since overthrown by later discoveries (including those of the Titanic, which led to a much worse later Clarke novel). But it was impossible for me to listen to the real sounds of Titan without thinking of the oxygen flame burning in the hydrocarbon atmosphere. A slightly different aspect of sensawunda was the question of pentominoes, not actually visual description but they did lead to me defacing my school notebooks with peculiar blocky drawings for months after I first read the book.

Also Clarke's vision of the MiniSec units is not at all distant from where it looks like we will be in a very few years when Blackberrys, PDAs and PCs all merge into a single hand-held unit - I'm aware that such things exist already, but Clarke's prediction that they would be practically universal by the early 21st century, and would then stay pretty stable in shape and function for hundreds of years, may well be proved right. What he missed of course was the easy access to information stored elsewhere that we now accept as automatic.

Love and Discord: The setting of the novel reflects Clarke's essentially optimistic humanism. Racism is a dead issue - in A Fall of Moondust, one of the other characters comments on the fact that Duncan McKenzie is an unusual name for a black man; in Imperial Earth, set two centuries later, we don't even find out explicitly that Duncan Makenzie is black until over halfway through (though anyone who's read the earlier book will spot the similarity of the names). In addition, everyone is polyamorous and bisexual, as far as we can tell; and the Duncan-Karl-Calindy love triangle is the core of the plot - yet at the same time we are left in no doubt that the mature Duncan's loyalty remains with the barely sketched Marissa, left behind on Titan. (Yet, of course, at the end of the book we discover that he has disobeyed his elders' instructions and cloned not them/himself, but Karl.)

This was about the time that Robert Silverberg and Ursula Le Guin were writing some of their best work portraying the future of human sexuality, and I think that Clarke, in this book, responded to their challenge much better than Asimov (in, say, his vastly over-rated The Gods Themselves) or Heinlein (who may have set the ball rolling with Stranger in a Strange Land, but whose later works leave me with a strange urge to wash my hands after reading - his book that year was the icky Time Enough for Love). Clarke never rose the challenge as successfully again, and I think Imperial Earth is underappreciated in this regard.

That's not to say that it is without flaws. All the characters seem to be the kind of people you would meet at scientific conferences (or the better class of science fiction convention [whatever that is]). The mystery of What Karl Is Up To has a rather underwhelming explanation - somehow Clarke didn't manage to pull off the sensawunda for me here; the end of the book feels a little rushed by deadline pressure, perhaps. And right at the beginning, the explanation of the Makenzies' genetic problems is clearly wrong - if Malcolm had really suffered radiation damage, it could not have been transmitted to his clone Colin let alone Duncan. But I still like this book a lot. show less

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 show more 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. show less

I decided to re-read this when I came across it cataloging my collection.

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. Which works much better than when he does tackle them directly. The whole novel is written in the third person, as if we were peering over the shoulder of the main character, and had someone guessing at his thoughts and motivations filling in the blank silences. Any characters beyond that are just there as foils for a discussion of technology or a plot point, and only sketched in just enough to fulfill that role.

The technology is really where show more 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. show less

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 show more sight better than anything Clarke wrote after the 1980s. show less

This book took forever to get through. It's not complex. It's not too long. It was just not engaging.

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 change and I would expect Clarke to know better than to use geopolitical names and overly specific limits on technology, and yet here he did. And I thought one part rather cute (this was written in 1974-1975):

No one would ever know how many immature young minds had been ruined by them. "Brain burning had been a disease of the sixties [e.g. 2260s], until the epidemic had run its course[...]

As I said, dated. Not bad, but a forerunner of his later show more Rama writings. show less