Customer Reviews

Imperial Earth

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Having read just about everything that AC Clarke has put out, I believe that this tale of the futures energy barons (Hydrogen, not Oil) shows a plausable future and is Clarkes best (And yes I have read the RAMA series). In it a family that has become very rich and powerful has to come to terms with the fact that a new "Drive" that does not use H2 has been developed. The young protogei (SP?) is sent to earth to sort things out. But a life long friend of his, scared by their version of LSD has become obsessed with SETI.Clarke has all his normal future talk and ideas (Cloning, space travel, future society etc). The two become entangle in a plot, that as the title suggests, is more about colonies and empires as it about future tech and SciFi. Think of it as Scifi meets Imperial India and you have a good idea.

After the incredible back-to-back success of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous With Rama, Clarke returned in 1976 with Imperial Earth, a novel less about science than the human spirit. The story revolves around a Titanite making a trip to Earth, and seeing the vast differences between the two places ("For a horrifying second, Duncan thought he was going to have to eat real meat"), but also touches on the elements of the human spirit and mind that will always be with us. Along the way, many predictions about the future are made, and a generally exciting (though not exactly fast-paced) story is told throughout. A rather touching story quite different from most of Clarke's other works, this is a story that will stay with you long after you have read the last page.

Like many of Clarke's other books, Imperial Earth was a very enjoyable read and you don't have to be a sci-fi fan to relate to the subject matter. It tells the story of the central character's journey to Earth from one of the space colonies in the solar system. In doing so, we come across several recurring themes of cultural and economic differences between colonialists and mother Earth, as well as political intrigue and unrequited love. What I found quite absorbing was Clarke's narration of the relationships between each of the characters, and this sets the book apart from other 'shoot 'em up' sci-fi publications. I had no problem purchasing this book (in fact it was a 1997 copy, published by Vista).

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.

The year is 2276 much of the solar system has been colonized. Duncan Makenzie of the most important family of (Saturn's moon) Titan is traveling to Earth for the first time to partake in the 500th anniversary of the US declaration of independence, and also to clone himself to continue the family line (he is himself a clone).
The plot is of minimal interest, it is just a vehicle for Clarke to expand on various ideas- cloning, living on Titan, space travel, the search for extra terrestrial life, mathematical puzzles and what Earth's culture and society might look like 300 years from now. These are all interesting in their way, but the novel as a whole suffers from a rather pedestrian plot. For fans of 'idea' science fiction only.

This is a very solid sci-fi novel, a scenario of the future that is complex and unpredictable. It is not about swashbuckling adventure, but paints a vivid picture of a future world with absolutely wonderful details, from the hand-held computing device that records every moment of your entire life - if you can find where you filed it, such as a strange howling on the moon's surface that the narritor hears- to the neural stimulator that functions as a kind of drug, permanently altering the brain in unforeseen ways. It also brings in cloning as an issue as well as the economics of supporting a colony far far away from Earth, all with systematic musings that completely surpass normal sci-fi standards. WHile these aspects may sound fantastical, they are woven in to a rather mundane story that drags a bit in the middle, but winds down to a surprise at the end.

Recommended. Clarke was one of the absolute best. He will be missed.

This was one of the first Sci-Fi novels I ever read, and I still go back and re-read it every so often. An all-around excellent example of Clarke's work, it places high on my own list of recommended reading.