What Fiction are you reading this week, June 7, 2026

[Jeebo]

12. The Songs of Distant Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke

I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but I think this is his best novel. The premise is fascinating. We have sent out seed ships to nearby star systems, containing not human passengers but frozen embryos with robots looking out for them. When a habitable planet is found, the robot caregivers incubate the embryos and raise the first generation of humans on the new world. The novel begins perhaps 15 generations after First Landing on a watery world called Thalassa, with just a few habitable islands on a planet that is almost entirely ocean. The technology improves and later seed ships don't even carry embryos, but just store DNA patterns in computers that can construct humans and other species — livestock, food animals, crops, etc. — from raw materials on the new planet. If we humans ever colonize other star systems, I think it'll have to be using methods like these, because otherwise, interstellar distances are just prohibitively vast. This, incidentally, is why I believe we are NOT being visited by extraterrestrials. Those distances are just too vast.

— Ron