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    Imperial Earth
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    Imperial Earth
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    Imperial Earth
    Audiobook9 hours

    Imperial Earth

    Written by Arthur C. Clarke

    Narrated by Mike Grady

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Set in 2276, Imperial Earth is the fascinating odyssey of Duncan Makenzie, travelling from Titan, a moon of Saturn, to Earth, as a diplomatic guest of the United States. Duncan's initial challenge is to prepare for the 500-million-mile trip to Earth. Once there, he is caught up in a sweep of new experiences—including the social whirl of Washington, a strange visit to a carefully preserved ancient city, and a search for the woman he loves.

    The result of twenty years of thought by a celebrated novelist and scientist, and overflowing with skilled characterization and exciting events, Imperial Earth is one of Arthur C. Clarke's most ambitious, successful, and important novels.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Ltd
    Release dateNov 1, 2012
    ISBN9781471209246
    Author

    Arthur C. Clarke

    Born in Somerset in 1917, Arthur C. Clarke has written over sixty books, among which are the science fiction classics ‘2001, A Space Odyssey’, ‘Childhood’s End’, ‘The City and the Stars’ and ‘Rendezvous With Rama’. He has won all the most prestigious science fiction trophies, and shared an Oscar nomination with Stanley Kubrick for the screenplay of the film of 2001. He was knighted in 1998. He passed away in March 2008.

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    Reviews for Imperial Earth

    3.5/5

    311 ratings14 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I did not realize this was the second time I'd read this book. It's hard sci-fi with heart. Not especially action packed. Lends new meaning to the word expat. A young man from Titan makes a rare (and very expensive) trip back to the home planet as an emissary in 2276. This is Clarke making his case for continued space exploration.
    • 3/5
      Duncan Makenzie, invited to speak at the 500th anniversary of the American Revolution as a representative of Saturn's moon, Titan, has a problem. 70 years earlier, his "grandfather", Malcolm, was the leader of colonists on Titan, but also had a problem. Malcolm's problem was that he had acquired a genetic defect that made it impossible for him to father children. Wanting to retain the family name, Malcolm went to Earth and had a clone made. This clone was Duncan's "father", Colin, who in turn had a clone made who was Duncan. Now it was Duncan's turn to get a clone made, and it had to be done now, otherwise the elevated gravity on Earth would have a made trip impossible. Duncan's problems would only get worse, though, as it turned out his best friend, Karl, was doing things he should not have been. Dealing with Karl's extracurricular activities would shape the rest of Duncan's life.I think I've begun to see some of Clarke's patterns. He will often (when writing in the future) describe a list of things. Two or three of those things are well known to us now. The final item in the list is always something that happened in characters' past, but our future. Additionally, Clarke loves to leave a book with hints of future wonders of engineering yet to be built. I've also noticed that for some odd reason, many of Clarke's references to past arts, events, or ideas are 20th century ideas. Once in awhile, these common patterns are interesting - after reading several Clarke books in a row, they start to get repetitive.In the end, the core of the plot was not all that interesting. The final engineering project was not as compelling as some of Clarke's other man-made wonders. The final surprise reveal was not completely explained - I actually figure out what it meant only by reading some other comments on LibraryThing. The heavy comparisons between Titan and the Titanic were cumbersome and not quite as informative as I would have hoped.
    • 4/5
      Duncan Makenzie, ruler of the world of Titan, returns to Earth to create a successor by cloning.
    • 3/5
      Titan og Jorden, 2275Indeholder kapitlerne "1. Titan", " 1. A shriek in the night", " 2. Dynasty", " 3. Invitation to a centennial", " 4. The red moon", " 5. The politics of time and space", " 6. By the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Hellbrew", " 7. A cross of Titanite", " 8. Children of the corridors", " 9. The fatal gift", " 10. World's End", "2. Transit", " 11. Sirius", " 12. Last Words", " 13. The longest voyage", " 14. Songs of empire", " 15. At the node", " 16. Port Van Allen", "3. Terra", " 17. Washington, DC", " 18. Embassy", " 19. Mount Vernon", " 20. The taste of honey", " 21. Calindy", " 22. The ghost from the Grand Banks", " 23. Akhenaten and Cleopatra", " 24. Party games", " 25. The rivals", " 26. The Island of Dr Mohammed", " 27. Golden Reef", " 28. Sleuth", " 29. Star day", " 30. A message from Titan", " 31. The eye of Allah", " 32. Meeting at Cyclops", " 33. The listeners", " 34. Business and desire", " 35. Argus Panoptes", " 36. Independence day", " 37. The mirror of the sea", "4. Titan", " 38. Homecoming", "Acknowledgements and notes".Duncan Makenzie rejser fra Titan til Jorden. Familienavnet var oprindeligt Mackenzie, men en computerfejl kostede c'et livet. Den første til at rejse ud var Malcolm Makenzie. Han er stadig i live, men en mutation har ødelagt hans muligheder for at få levedygtige børn. I stedet rejste han til Jorden og blev klonet. Resultatet Colin Makenzie er også stadig i live. Men mutationen fulgte med, så i moden alder fulgte han i Malcolms fodspor og returnerede med Duncan. Malcolm, Colin og Duncan er sorte, men Malcolm Jr er designet til at være hvid.Lad være med at tænke for meget over hvordan samfundet kan udvikle sig så meget og så ikke kunne reparere en simpel genfejl? Ditto med hvordan mutationen kan være arvelig?
    • 3/5
      This book took forever to get through. It's not complex. It's not too long. It was just not engaging.

      Dated...I was a tad disappointed in Clarke for that. I'm not keen on authors using contemporary terms, mores, etc. when writing a future history novel. Three hundred years is a lot of time for change and I would expect Clarke to know better than to use geopolitical names and overly specific limits on technology, and yet here he did. And I thought one part rather cute (this was written in 1974-1975): No one would ever know how many immature young minds had been ruined by them. "Brain burning had been a disease of the sixties [e.g. 2260s], until the epidemic had run its course[...]
      As I said, dated. Not bad, but a forerunner of his later Rama writings.
    • 3/5
      A fun story with interesting characters. The computers are hilariously out of date: in the future, two devices wired together can communicate at megabits per second! You can pull up data using a phone menu style numeric keypad!
    • 1/5

      Clarke might as well have written an essay called, "What I Think Earth Will Be Like In the Year 2276". There's hardly any plot; the characters are wooden. Even when somebody dies, there's no drama.

      I picked this up for a quick escapist read, but I could barely finish it. Every once in a while, I thought to myself, "I'm not nerd enough for this book."
    • 4/5
      This isn't one of Clarke's more strongly plotted novels, and at over thirty-five years old, well, it's inevitably already quite dated in lots of details. But Clarke's imaginative vision of humanity's future, his descriptions of the wonders of Titan (one of Saturn's moons) and Earth both, makes for good reading nevertheless, and actually I think Duncan Makenzie is one of his most strongly written and memorable characters. Makenzie, who had never seen Earth, but was born there, is one of a line of clones that virtually rules the key hydrogen industry of Titan. He journeys to 23rd century Earth to continue his line--just in time to be a guest speaker at the Washington celebration for America's quincentennial (The book was published in 1975, just before America's bicentennial). Surprisingly, through Duncan's perspective what comes through most strongly is not the wonders of Titan, but of Earth--from a Percheron horse to a butterfly. I like how it's casually revealed half-way through the book that MaKenzie is black. A better way of revealing what a non-issue race is in Clarke's vision of the future than any lengthy sermon on the bad old days. Not what I'd recommend for an introduction to Clarke, and it's not as memorable to me as The City and the Stars, Childhood's End or Deep Range, but if you like the author this shouldn't disappoint.
    • 4/5
      Arthur C Clarke at his best. Written in the run up to the American bicentenary celebrations in 1976, this novel promulgates a 500th anniversary of the Union in 2276, and the main character, Duncan Makenzie fro Titan, one of the moons of Saturn being invited to address the whole of Earth.This context gives Clarke the opportunity to give his own vision of the technological advances that might be evident in the latter half of the twenty third century. To this end he gives an alarmingly accurate description of what could easily be a smart-phone from 2011!Clarke's imagination always runs riot but, as this novel ably demonstrates, he had more than adequate literary skills to do his apocalypses justice.I first read this novel while I was still at school: I loved it then, and found it even more rewarding now!
    • 4/5
      A weird and wonderful story. There's a _lot_ of scientific thought in here, but it mostly doesn't obscure the interactions between the well-developed characters. I was surprised when the full story of Karl's intentions came out - it seemed rather minor after the buildup of possible conspiracies and secrets - but the ideas are interesting. So is the secret drive. Oh, and there was one moment of realizations - Clarke goes on for a couple paragraphs about the wonders of the comsole, through which a person can read anything and everything ever written or produced - or could, if he wouldn't die of old age before making a serious dent in the volume of records available through the comsole. It was only after I finished that bit, and was feeling puzzled at his insistence, that I realized this was written in 1975, before the Internet existed. :). The end is a neat twist - it both surprised me and didn't, it had been nicely and subtly foreshadowed. I'd be very interested to read a story about the next generation out on Titan. Good story. Not a favorite, but I'm glad I read it and may well do so again.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      I first read this book many years ago, and yet working along my shelves I failed to recognise it as familiar. I realised why as I started to read it again. It was loaded with scenes that had stayed in my memory - the boy hearing the sound of the Titanian wind and storing it for later play; the two historians conversing in slave lingo; the pentaminos, the disastrous effects of using an emotion enhancer;Duncan's first sight of a butterfly. All these came vividly back to me as I encountered them again - but none had I remembered as being from this novel.Why?Because it has almost no plot. It's a sequence of events designed to show the way in which fuel could be cheaply produced from Titan's atmosphere to power transport within the solar system. It's good science (though I don't know if it matches current knowledge or not) but it makes for wonderful scenes that don't relate directly to the story.
    • 4/5
      This is what I was reading in 10th grade when everyone else was reading Stephen King and the Hobbit.
    • 3/5
      I decided to re-read this when I came across it cataloging my collection. Clarke is first and foremost a hard-sf writer, and that is obvious in Imperial Earth. While he does approach some social issues such as sexuality and racism, he does it more by ignoring them than making an explicit point. Which works much better than when he does tackle them directly. The whole novel is written in the third person, as if we were peering over the shoulder of the main character, and had someone guessing at his thoughts and motivations filling in the blank silences. Any characters beyond that are just there as foils for a discussion of technology or a plot point, and only sketched in just enough to fulfill that role.The technology is really where Clarke feels at home, and where he shines. From a 1978 perspective he is looking out another 300 years, and talking about the future of radio telescopes, space ship propulsion, computers, housing, and so on. How well does he do? Well, he jokes at the end that Robert Forward liked his space ship drive ideas so much he almost patented them. The "minisec" is an almost perfect analog to the palmpilot/blackberry of today. On the other hand he predicted that the Titanic would be found almost entirely intact & raised to the surface, and that Manhattan would become so run down by the mid-21st century that the only solution would be to buldoze the whole thing.One bit that where his prescience was working overtime was in creating "Enigma", a company that specializes in customized entertainment experiences that is so similar to Consumer Recreation Services in the 1997 movie The Game, that I have to wonder if one didn't inspire the other, or they somehow came from the same source.All in all, it is a decent book. It's not a compelling page turner, but it's not a bad read for a Clarke fan either.