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Imperial Earth

3.63 of 5 stars 3.63 · rating details · 2,342 ratings · 49 reviews

Imperial Earth is the fascinating odyssey of Duncan Makenzie, traveling from Titan, a moon of Saturn, to Earth, as a diplomatic guest of the United States for the celebration of its Quincentennial in the year 2276. Titan, an independent republic, was originally colonized from Earth three generations earlier. Duncan's initial challenge is to prepare, physically and intellec...more

Mass Market Paperback, 320 pages

Published September 30th 2005 by ibooks (first published January 1st 1975)

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Jun 04, 2007 Illyria rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sf, 2007

This book is chockful of twists and surprises. At the beginning it looked like nothing more than an exuberant, gratuitous, though admittedly juicy, narration of life on Titan, the biggest of Saturn's moons. Clarke's description of hydrocarbon clouds and ammonia snow, the rose-tinted atmosphere and the wax formation that wraps around lukewarm volcanic effluvium is mesmerizing, as is his characters, the Makenzie twins, separated by decades, because they are clones. Add to that the fact that book w...more This book is chockful of twists and surprises. At the beginning it looked like nothing more than an exuberant, gratuitous, though admittedly juicy, narration of life on Titan, the biggest of Saturn's moons. Clarke's description of hydrocarbon clouds and ammonia snow, the rose-tinted atmosphere and the wax formation that wraps around lukewarm volcanic effluvium is mesmerizing, as is his characters, the Makenzie twins, separated by decades, because they are clones. Add to that the fact that book was written in the seventies and yet it had predicted such things as palmtop organizer and the internet, and the kind of propulsion engine powered by mini black holes, the kind only mentioned in the Star Trek series so far. Add to that pentominoes, polyominoes, joy stick, null-G sex and asymptotic drive, and you have your perfect recipe of a jolly romp in space. Still it didn't seem to promise much beyond mere advertisement on life on Titan, and I admitted to a slight feeling of disappointment.

But then on the 500th anniversary of the USA, Duncan Makenzie was invited to give a speech before the assembled representatives of Earth and its colonies. The story switched to the vivid, poignant exploration of an estranged home by Duncan, who not only has to train hard to acclimatize himself to Earth's stronger gravity, but also meets his first horse (...First Monster from Outer Space.... Understandably, since the horse is a Percheron weighing upwards of a thousand kilos, bred in the past to carry fully-armored knights), his first butterfly (an exuberant--no, arrogant--loveliness, is first taste of honey, his first underwater murder

Then suddenly, with the sudden appearance of a gemologist, it seemed that the book had turned into a whodunit, full of mysterious, exotic things like titanite being smuggled and a friend slash ex-lover falling off radio telescopes.

And yet, in the end, the book gives another twist, a profound, unutterably grand, and yet chillingly frightening, capped with a speech rife with courage and heroism it would've made Abe Lincoln proud.

As usual Clarke presented his readers with solid science and a healthy dollop of dry humor, but also as usual, he staggered the mind with a vision of such mindstopping scope and scale. Hence the five stars.(less)

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Nov 18, 2012 sologdin rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: ruling-class-protagonist, speculative

Nutshell: copy of a copy of the colonial administrator on Titan travels to Earth to make yet another copy of himself, gets re-involved in love triangle, gives congressional speech at US quincentennial, &c.

Doesn't ever really get off the ground for me. Not until the final third of the volume does the love triangle reactivate, along with an arbitrarily associated techno-financial intrigue. The latter involves the construction of a very large radio telescope to pick up kilometer-sized radio wav...more Nutshell: copy of a copy of the colonial administrator on Titan travels to Earth to make yet another copy of himself, gets re-involved in love triangle, gives congressional speech at US quincentennial, &c.

Doesn't ever really get off the ground for me. Not until the final third of the volume does the love triangle reactivate, along with an arbitrarily associated techno-financial intrigue. The latter involves the construction of a very large radio telescope to pick up kilometer-sized radio waves that originate in "star beasts," "hundreds of thousands of kilometers across" living for millions of years in the interstices between stars (284). Yeah, I know, right?

Reads like an anthropology of earthlings by an alien for numerous sections (social, geographical, archaeological, zoological). Lotsa humor generated this way, from malapropisms, misrecognized history, and so on. It's like the opposite of Rendezvous with Rama, where now the aliens explore us, which is about as exciting.

Tries to do something slick with a section (174-82) involving a tour of the salvaged HMS Titanic. Narrator is from Titan. Haha CLEVAR! Not sure what the comparison is supposed to be, though.

Cool to track the lapses (not that such lapses toll against the writer--who, after all, can predict the future in all its particulars?): all possible information is stored in various locations, and can be accessed electronically--very internet--but since the library on a ship only holds ten people, it bottlenecks at that point (75)--so, no ipads?

As I mused in discussing Orbitsville, spacefaring narratives have their own magic systems with regard to FTL travel. In this one, we're pre-interstellar travel, but the magic still arises in some engaging discussion of the asymptotic drive, which involves hooking a vessel up to a singularity (87-91). Cool thing is that the singularity is fed hydrogen, and accumulates mass--so they get too heavy eventually for the vessel and must be discarded. Where in the flying fuck do they dump all the used black holes, then? Tell me that, Mr. Clarke!

Earth has developed some useful practices in the near future: public servants are selected by lot from a pool of qualified persons, and those who want the job are by definition not qualified (111); motor vehicles run on autopilot (116); the profit motive is extinct (191).

Thoughtful interpretation of Moby Dick (210-11). Plenty of self-derogating anxiety of influence moments, such as when the narrator "did not relish playing a role in some sleazy, old-time spy or detective melodrama" (219), though the novel is not fairly described in those terms. Flash of Clarke's genius in telling how Earth "probed the surfaces of distant stars, detected their hidden planets, discovered such strange entities as neutrino suns, antitachyons, gravitational lenses, spacequakes, and revealed the mind-wrenching realms of negative-probability 'Ghost' states and inverted matter" (241).

Recommended for barbarians from the outer darkness, those coming from an aggressively egalitarian society, and persons outraged that a god should be afflicted with lice.(less)

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Jun 15, 2011 Lindsay rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 70s, read-for-fun, read-postcollege, science-fiction, space-opera, technology, utopia

Overall, I really, really liked this book --- I withheld one star for some minor complaints that made it fall short of perfect for me, which I will get to later.

It's very well plotted --- things are introduced early on in the story, in the vignettes capturing the protagonist's childhood on Titan, that all get woven into the plot much later, when he comes to Earth to give a speech at the United States's quincentennial celebration.

It also has great character development; the protagonist, Duncan Ma...more Overall, I really, really liked this book --- I withheld one star for some minor complaints that made it fall short of perfect for me, which I will get to later.

It's very well plotted --- things are introduced early on in the story, in the vignettes capturing the protagonist's childhood on Titan, that all get woven into the plot much later, when he comes to Earth to give a speech at the United States's quincentennial celebration.

It also has great character development; the protagonist, Duncan Makenzie, is a clone, and Clarke does a wonderful job of drawing subtle distinctions between Duncan and his two elder clones (whom Duncan thinks of as both his father and grandfather, and also as much-older brothers ... which they are!) to show that even though they are genetically identical, their lives have given them different outlooks, personalities and skills, even though they remain close enough to guess each other's thoughts and complete each other's sentences.

The character I found most intriguing wasn't any of them, however. It was Karl Helmer, Duncan's best friend in childhood (and lover in adolescence --- apparently this future society is "bi-normative" as opposed to heteronormative, because most of the characters assume Duncan is bisexual and Duncan himself says he finds people who are exclusively gay or straight to be somewhat odd) who fell out with Duncan and hasn't spoken to him in years. Karl is very intense, and also very emotional. He's also a genius at math and physics, and it is in his capacity as brilliant physicist that he re-enters the story much later. You don't often see characters in science fiction who are both highly emotional and also masters of some rigorous discipline like astrophysics --- more often science-fiction writers seem to go with the Coldly Impersonal Scientist trope, or The Scientist Who Loves His/Her Work More Than Anything Else.

The last thing I thought was really clever and wonderful about this book is the two worlds it depicts --- Titan, where the atmosphere is made out of methane and ammonia; and Earth, where civilization has advanced to such an astonishing degree that there's no more violence (even Duncan, the rugged colonist, has never handled a weapon, eaten meat, or killed anything), everything is very safe, and Earth's high-technology civilization coexists peacefully with its resurgent wilderness.

The main thing I didn't like was an odd failure of characterization: the one major female character, Calindy, never seemed quite real to me. Part of this is because most of our first impressions of her come from Duncan's rosy, soft-focus recollections of her from early adolescence, when he and Karl both became infatuated with her, but some of it does come from Clarke's failure to give her a discernible inner life.

Finally, there was one scene near the end of the book that made me very, very uneasy. Duncan was going to get himself cloned, to perpetuate the Makenzie line, and while he's doing that we find that the surrogate mothers have volunteered for that duty because they want to have children. That sounds laudable, but consider that when most women say they want children, they mean they want to keep the children, and raise them. Precious few women just want to go through pregnancy and labor, and then hand the child off to some stranger. (Read Ann Fessler's history The Girls Who Went Away for some corroboration of that statement). To make the ethics of this arrangement even murkier, Clarke gives the impression that many, if not all, of these women are developmentally disabled, which calls into question how well they understood what they were signing up for.

Anyway, it's a terrific novel, well realized, well plotted and well characterized, with only one jarring exception, and one troubling detail in its utopian future society.(less)

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Apr 12, 2011 Nick rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, authoritarianism

Well this was pretty cool.

Descriptions of Titan, of space travel, and of a depopulated and reforested earth are all great. I also like the idea of Washington DC as a giant smithsonian. Settings are all great as usual.

The social/cultural observations which are thrown in are pretty neat too. For example (spoilers) the main character is black, but this is only revealed halfway through the book as an inconsequential detail. He is also bisexual, as are most people. Religion and meat eating have also...more

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Sep 29, 2010 Booknerd Fraser rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It's been a while since I picked up Clarke, and somehow I missed this when I was younger. In a lot of ways, I'm glad I waited, because there are some parts of this that would not have effected me the same way when I was younger.

It's probably the best character work Clarke ever did. The main character tours Earth - well, the US, mostly, in 2276, coming from his home on Titan. So it's part future travelogue. It's fun to see how close Clarke comes to things just 30 years later (the Internet, person...more

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Jul 31, 2009 Alicia rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

I thought this book was entertaining. It didn't have any stark life realizations, or a connection to something deeper, and was often quite confusing, but overall it was enjoyable. I think it was probably Clarke's ideas about what the future could hold, and the immense beauty of that, in a novel. It held a lot of unimportant details, unconnected to the real point of the story, and then when it got to the point of the story, there were important parts missing. The ending was a tad confusing, and s...more

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Oct 14, 2010 D-day rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The year is 2276 much of the solar system has been colonized. Duncan Makenzie of the most important family of (Saturn's moon) Titan is traveling to Earth for the first time to partake in the 500th anniversary of the US declaration of independence, and also to clone himself to continue the family line (he is himself a clone).
The plot is of minimal interest, it is just a vehicle for Clarke to expand on various ideas- cloning, living on Titan, space travel, the search for extra terrestrial life, ma...more

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Apr 18, 2009 Britt rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, hard-science-fiction

Vintage Clarke, filled with classic Clarkey goodness, like clunky and weird interpersonal relationships, and such proofs that the book is set In the Future as casual homosexuality, "The President is a woman—and she was chosen by lot!" and "I have waited until page 403 to mention that the main character is black!" (BTW, the dude who did the cover illustration apparently didn't make it to page 403.)

Overall, and amusing tale of an oligarch from Titan who travels to Earth, to, among other things, ha...more

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Dec 29, 2012 Scoats rated it 3 of 5 stars

Published in 1976, which was the Bicentennial of the USA. This book is set in 2276, during the 500th birthday of the USA. Clarke takes us on a tour of Titan, which is a colonized moon of Saturn, an interplanetary cruise, plus various spots on Earth.

The whole thing is basically a mechanism for Clarke to write about things that interest him, such as space, pentominoes, 23rd century social and sexual mores, and diving. Clarke managed to link all these things together, but it doesn't fully work.

If...more

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Nov 23, 2010 Jake rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: arthur-c-clarke, fiction, science-fiction

Unexpectedly romantic are the words that describe Imperial Earth. For many years I have known this novel only by its title. Based on that title, I had assumed the novel would feel bold and grandiose in every respect. So I was not prepared for how unexpectedly intimate and introspective it is.

If novels like 2001 and Rendezvous with Rama are operas, Imperial Earth is more of a play. And I love a good play. Get me musing about deep aspects of humanity and science, and I will pardon the absence...more

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Apr 21, 2010 Lisa (Harmonybites) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction, novels, fiction

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...more

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Oct 21, 2007 Nicholas Whyte added it · review of another edition

http://nhw.livejournal.com/461137.html[return][return]This was one of my favourite Clarke novels as a teenager, and I felt it held up pretty well on a return visit. It's a book about Duncan Makenzie, scion of the ruling family of Titan, and his once-in-a-lifetime journey to Earth to attend the 2276 celebrations of the United States (the book was published in 1975, in time for the Bicentennial) and also incidentally to get himself cloned (he is himself a clone.) The good things about it are actua...more http://nhw.livejournal.com/461137.html[return][return]This was one of my favourite Clarke novels as a teenager, and I felt it held up pretty well on a return visit. It's a book about Duncan Makenzie, scion of the ruling family of Titan, and his once-in-a-lifetime journey to Earth to attend the 2276 celebrations of the United States (the book was published in 1975, in time for the Bicentennial) and also incidentally to get himself cloned (he is himself a clone.) The good things about it are actually summarised in the subtitle: fantasy, love, and discord.[return][return]Fantasy: If there's one thing Clarke has always done well, it's sensawunda, and his visual descriptive passages of the landscape of Titan, the view of Saturn's rings, the gold-lined coral reefs off the coast of Zanzibar, and even the more engineering topics of the Titanic and the asymptotic drive still enthrall me. Of course, his description of some of these have been since overthrown by later discoveries (including those of the Titanic, which led to a much worse later Clarke novel). But it was impossible for me to listen to the real sounds of Titan without thinking of the oxygen flame burning in the hydrocarbon atmosphere. A slightly different aspect of sensawunda was the question of pentominoes, not actually visual description but they did lead to me defacing my school notebooks with peculiar blocky drawings for months after I first read the book.[return][return]Also Clarke's vision of the MiniSec units is not at all distant from where it looks like we will be in a very few years when Blackberrys, PDAs and PCs all merge into a single hand-held unit - I'm aware that such things exist already, but Clarke's prediction that they would be practically universal by the early 21st century, and would then stay pretty stable in shape and function for hundreds of years, may well be proved right. What he missed of course was the easy access to information stored elsewhere that we now accept as automatic.[return][return]Love and Discord: The setting of the novel reflects Clarke's essentially optimistic humanism. Racism is a dead issue - in A Fall of Moondust, one of the other characters comments on the fact that Duncan McKenzie is an unusual name for a black man; in Imperial Earth, set two centuries later, we don't even find out explicitly that Duncan Makenzie is black until over halfway through (though anyone who's read the earlier book will spot the similarity of the names). In addition, everyone is polyamorous and bisexual, as far as we can tell; and the Duncan-Karl-Calindy love triangle is the core of the plot - yet at the same time we are left in no doubt that the mature Duncan's loyalty remains with the barely sketched Marissa, left behind on Titan. (Yet, of course, at the end of the book we discover that he has disobeyed his elders' instructions and cloned not them/himself, but Karl.)[return][return]This was about the time that Robert Silverberg and Ursula Le Guin were writing some of their best work portraying the future of human sexuality, and I think that Clarke, in this book, responded to their challenge much better than Asimov (in, say, his vastly over-rated The Gods Themselves) or Heinlein (who may have set the ball rolling with Stranger in a Strange Land, but whose later works leave me with a strange urge to wash my hands after reading - his book that year was the icky Time Enough for Love). Clarke never rose the challenge as successfully again, and I think Imperial Earth is underappreciated in this regard.[return][return]That's not to say that it is without flaws. All the characters seem to be the kind of people you would meet at scientific conferences (or the better class of science fiction convention [whatever that is]). The mystery of What Karl Is Up To has a rather underwhelming explanation - somehow Clarke didn't manage to pull off the sensawunda for me here; the end of the book feels a little rushed by deadline pressure, perhaps. And right at the beginning, the explanation of the Makenzies' genetic problems is clearly wrong - if Malcolm had really suffered radiation damage, it could not have been transmitted to his clone Colin let alone Duncan. But I still like this book a lot.(less)

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Apr 24, 2008 Cliff rated it 2 of 5 stars

I admit that I haven't read every single book Arthur C. Clarke has ever read, but of his books that I have read this is without a doubt the very worst.

There seemed to be a disconnect between the plot elements in the three acts with little feeling of flow or foreshadowing. The characterization was OK, but it still felt like the characters were put in artificial situations.

Of the themes that it explored, I've seen them done better elsewhere. One of the major themes was the impact of cloning on t...more

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Jun 12, 2012 Jason Vedder added it · review of another edition

I began reading this in 8th grade. The library's copy was ragged. That is all I remember. I can't even remember finishing the book, but I know it was one that I only read in study halls. I finished reading all the books I checked out, I think. Even so, the title was hard to remember. I had to google Arthur C Clarke and clones. I knew the character's name was different... Duncan. Now I know

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Dec 12, 2008 Jenny rated it 1 of 5 stars

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."

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May 02, 2012 Gabriel C. rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: among-others, 2012

One quarter exposition, one quarter puerile nonsense projections of 1970s technology, one quarter utter boredom as the mundane is lovingly described to eyes unused to it, one quarter total lack of dramatic tension, one quarter faddish pop psychology, one quarter colonialism, sexism, and a misguided engagement with race. Who authorized this? Utter tripe.

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Jan 20, 2009 Hannah rated it 3 of 5 stars

i liked this book for entertainment and I thought some of the predictions about the future were interesting and fun to read. my question is, what happened at the end of the book? i am very confused about the child he brings back, can someone enlighten me please?

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Jan 30, 2009 Kisholi rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi

Maybe I should have given this two stars but I really did enjoy the start. Once Duncan left for Earth, things got hazy and I mostly just disconnected from the story. Then the shocker at the end put me back in a favourable mood, which is probably why I have finally settled at three stars.

Interesting ideas and a nice enough book, but glazing over the middle bit might be necessary to get through to the end.

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Jan 19, 2011 Erik Graff rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Clarke fans

Recommended to Erik by: no one

Shelves: sf

Suspect I obtained this from the Science Fiction Book Club, membership in which I held off and on for many years. Clarke was a known quantity unlike many of the other authors available.

Written for the bicentennial, this is not among Clarke's better works.

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Mar 27, 2013 Jacinda rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

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!

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May 13, 2013 Joshua Dewald rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was somewhat slow going, but still good. Especially interesting were his descriptions of some of the technology which was comparable to today's smartphones or Wikipedia.

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Aug 13, 2012 Tony rated it 2 of 5 stars

I couldn't get into this one. I'm a newcomer to Clarke's work, and I'm glad that I didn't read this one first. The magic of Clarke's other works is missing here, for me.

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May 06, 2013 John Godier rated it 3 of 5 stars

Entertaining enough, but not quite up to Clarke's usual standards that he displayed when writing on his own, such as in Rendezvous with Rama and 2001.

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Dec 20, 2012 Evelyn rated it 3 of 5 stars

I love Arthur C. Clarke's novels. This is either his last or next to his last. It is just okay, and a disappointment in that regard.

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Jan 22, 2012 Trish rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-fi

A slow-moving novel whose slight plot seems to be merely a vehicle for Clark to pitch an enormous space-based radio telescope to search for extra-solar life.

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Jan 29, 2011 Laurie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011

I thought the story was a little slow to get going, but I mostly enjoyed this as a tour of Earth in 2276.

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Jun 05, 2009 Charles rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

Good stuff. Not as exciting as the best Clarke but better than a lot of lesser talents.

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Mar 13, 2012 Grundlepuck rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

I've craved an iPad since reading this book. Unfortunately it took Steve Jobs thirty more years after my reading to invent it.

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Apr 04, 2012 Foxtower rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: entertainment

A little too political for my tastes, but a good story of course!

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Aug 28, 2011 Moses rated it 2 of 5 stars

Another SF book with mediocre characters but neat ideas.

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About Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke was one of the most important and influential figures in 20th century science fiction. He spent the first half of his life in England, where he served in World War Two as a radar operator, before emigrating to Ceylon in 1956. He is best known for the novel and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he co-created with the assistance of Stanley Kubrick.

Clarke was a graduate of King's Co...more

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Quotes from Imperial Earth

“For the last century, almost all top political appointments [on the planet Earth] had been made by random computer selection from the pool of individuals who had the necessary qualifications. It had taken the human race several thousand years to realize that there were some jobs that should never be given to the people who volunteered for them, especially if they showed too much enthusiasm. As one shrewed political commentator had remarked: “We want a President who has to be carried screaming and kicking into the White House — but will then do the best job he possibly can, so that he’ll get time off for good behavior.” — 6 people liked it

“Even more alarming were persistent rumors that someone had smuggled an Emotion Amplifier on board 'Mentor'. The so-called joy machines were banned on all planets, except under strict medical control; but there would always be people to whom reality was not good enough, and who would want to try something better.” — 2 people liked it

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