The Songs of Distant Earth

As loved and prolific as Clarke was, I never found his books to be that amazing. I often found them a bit tedious with so much time spent on the science and so little effort spent on the characters. The Fountains of Paradise, one of his Hugo winners, was a yawner. His other Hugo winner, Rendezvous with Rama, was like Space Odyssey, full of wonder, but lacking character development. This book is not really full of wonder, but full of interesting science. It questions why there are so few neutrinos from the Sun striking the Earth and devises a 20% of the speed of light form of propulsion. There are a lot more characters than usual, and a lot more time with them. There's not much development, but at least we get some human interaction.

Come visit my blog for the full review...