Arthur C. Clarke
The Songs of Distant Earth
Nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom; there may be power; somewhere across space great nstruments… may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever…
I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.
Del Rey
cover art by Michael Whelan
Author’s Note
This novel is based on an idea developed almost thirty years ago in a short story of the same name (now in my collection The Other Side of the Sky). However, this version was directly — and negatively — inspired by the recent rash of space-operas on TV and movie screen. (Query: what is the opposite of inspiration — expiration?)
Please do not misunderstand me: I have enormously enjoyed the best of Star Trek and the Lucas/Spielberg epics, to mention only the most famous examples of the genre. But these works are fantasy, not science fiction in the strict meaning of the term. It now seems almost certain that in the real universe we may never exceed the velocity of light. Even the very closest star systems will always be decades or centuries apart; no Warp Six will ever get you from one episode to another in time for next week’s instalment. The great Producer in the Sky did not arrange his programme planning that way.
In the last decade, there has also been a significant, and rather surprising, change in the attitude of scientists towards the problem of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The whole subject did not become respectable (except among dubious characters like the writers of science fiction) until the 1960s: Shklovskii and Sagan’s Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966) is the landmark here.