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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining but Meandering,
By A Customer
This review is from: Imperial Earth (Mass Market Paperback)
If you want to start reading the works of Arthur C. Clarke, one of the 20th century's great visionairies, you can do worse than this one, but you could also do better. This work is basically the Earth of 2276 as seen through the eyes of an outsider. A lot of what he sees is remarkable and quite plausible, and the cast of characters is generally likeable. Like many Clarke novels, there is little in the way of conflict here - Clarke is not one for hero vs. villain - but unlike Childhood's End or 2001 or Rendevous with Rama, there is no sense of grandeur either. There are just a lot of incidents that just barely add up to something more.Still, Clarke's unusual approach to writing - he is the only novelist who writes in stle of an essayist - and his appealing vision of a mature secular utopian Earth still works after seeing it often. Fans of dystopias are best advised to stay home. Fans of a happy tomorrow, where everyone is well-fed and sexually liberated and needs nothing more than a nice vacation, are invited in. If you care for this, I recommend you move onto to his somewhat more action-oriented Rama and then to his masterowrk, Childhood's End.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Lackluster collection of notes about popular science seasoned with rudimentary human interest,
By
This review is from: Imperial Earth (Paperback)
What happened to Arthur C. Clarke in 1975? The masterful author of short stories from the 1940s and 50s created a confused mess titled "Imperial Earth" in 1975. In this novel, Clarke displays his poorly-concealed desire to appear as something other than a science-fiction writer: namely, a mover-and-shaker of science and technology. This unfortunate tendency appears throughout Clarke's later work. Who cares that Clarke once spoke to Neil Armstrong (note to chapter 21)? I can't put my finger on when, exactly, Arthur Clarke digressed from the creation of superbly crafted fiction into the monotonous exposition of dull popular science, but "Imperial Earth" appears, to me, to be the epitome of this digression.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing. Poor effort. Why was this book written?,
By Clarke Asimov "HOMES" (Dudley, MA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Imperial Earth (Hardcover)
Imperial Earth seems like a book written to fulfill a contractual obligation. As I read this book I kept getting the feeling that Clarke had collected various notes he had written for ideas and tried to make a book out of them without much further effort. This is a very shallow book. Characters were poorly developed, and the story meandered with no purpose. At the end of the book I wondered why Clarke had introduced many (most?) of the characters and settings.
Imperial Earth includes descriptions of Titan, where people live mostly underground but can go on the surface with oxygen and a thin thermosuit. The trip to Earth wasn't especially interesting. Descriptions of future Earth were given little historical background. Cultural changes were simply stated rather than explained. Way too many blanks were left for the reader to fill in. You might as well write your own book instead.
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