The Songs of Distant Earth

Arthur C. Clarke published The Songs of Distant Earth in 1986, building it up from a story he had first written in 1958. A step outline of the same title had appeared in Omni magazine and was collected in The Sentinel in 1983, and Clarke said afterwards that this novel was his favourite of all the ones he wrote.

The story belongs to the thirty-ninth century, after the Sun has gone nova and the Earth is gone. The spaceship Magellan is carrying close to a million colonists in suspended animation towards a planet they intend to settle, and part of the way there it has to put in for repairs at Thalassa.

Thalassa was settled seven hundred years earlier, from an embryonic seed pod, and its people lost touch with Earth a couple of centuries back. Their culture is small, quiet, stable and free of religion. The arrival of the Magellan brings the end of the home planet into that world's news for the first time, and the novel is largely about the meeting between the travellers and the Thalassans and what two very different societies make of each other.

Clarke uses the situation to think about long voyages, high technology, survival, adaptation and the difficulty of beginning again on an alien world, as well as about what the disappearance of Earth means to people who never saw it.