The Songs of Distant Earth

The Songs of Distant Earth By Gerald Jonas

THE SONGS OF DISTANT EARTH By Arthur C. Clarke

ARTHUR C. CLARKE breaks all the rules. He writes best sellers that have virtually no sex or violence in them, no family tensions, no conventional heroes or villains. Despite these drawbacks, more than two million copies of his last science-fiction novel, ''2010: Odyssey Two,'' are in print. Before that his ''Fountains of Paradise'' sold in the hundreds of thousands, and his best-known books, ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' (co-written with Stanley Kubrick) and ''Childhood's End,'' are still in print after several decades. The secret of his appeal lies in his revival of the oldest form of how-to literature - philosophical fiction, which, borrowing tools from both logic and poetry, intends to tell us how to live and die with dignity.

''The Songs of Distant Earth'' takes place some 200 years after the sun blows up - right on schedule, according to a forecast made by a scientist at the beginning of the 21st century. The sentences summarizing this forecast show Mr. Clarke's style at its purest: ''In the year 3600, plus or minus seventyfive years, the Sun would become a nova. Not a very spectacular one - but big enough.'' With a millennium and a half of lead time, the human race manages to launch a fleet of ''seedships,'' each carrying enough genetic material (frozen human embryos, plants, animals and microorganisms) to stock an entire planet, along with robot mechanisms to nurture the embryos until they can care for themselves. Since the seedships, with their ''primitive'' propulsion systems, require centuries to reach even the nearest habitable planet, no living humans can make the journey.

Mr. Clarke's story begins seven centuries after the arrival of a seedship on the planet Thalassa, so called because it consists largely of ocean. The transplanted humans, having created an idyllic island society, now find themselves with unexpected visitors: a group of colonists aboard the Magellan, a late-model spaceship that left Earth just before its fiery destruction. The Magellan is headed for a planet named Sagan Two; it carries a million frozen survivors of Earth and a living crew of 161; all its captain wants from the Lassans (as the inhabitants of Thalassa call themselves) is 150,000 tons of ice to rebuild the ship's protective nose cone. Where another author might explore the potential for conflict in this meeting, Mr. Clarke sees only an opportunity for friendly cooperation.

The drama that interests Mr. Clarke is played out on a much larger canvas. It concerns the lures and limitations of knowledge, the destiny of mankind and the fate of the universe. He writes about these things with a confidence that readers accustomed to mincing ambiguities and ironical self-doubt must find bracing. His sentences are lean and declarative, his paragraphs uncluttered, his chapters short. He knows what few philosophers (or poets, for that matter) know - prolixity only diminishes big themes. Here is his description of the moment when scientists first discovered there was something wrong with the sun: ''The world as a whole neither knew nor cared; but the countdown to doomsday had begun.'' This is what the departure of the Magellan from orbit looks like to observers on Thalassa: ''The entire horizon was ringed with fire. . . . Long streamers of flame reached up out of the ocean, halfway toward the zenith, an auroral display such as Thalassa had never witnessed before, and would never see again.''

Mr. Clarke understands that, in the proper context, even big numbers become poetic. ''Since writing was invented, until the end of Earth,'' a crew member from the Magellan tells a Lassan, ''it's been estimated that ten thousand million boooks were produced. . . . We have about ten percent of that on board.'' It is typical of Mr. Clarke to leave the final computation to the reader.

The question of which books to save is a major theme of ''The Songs of Distant Earth.'' The seedship that colonized Thalassa contained an electronic archive filled with information that the designers of the mission thought might be useful to the colonists. Before creating this archive, a committee of ''men of genius and goodwill'' went over 10,000 years of history and purged it of ''the decay products of dead religions'' - not just all holy books per se but also ''the immense body of literature - fiction and nonfiction - that was based upon them. Despite all the wealth of beauty and wisdom these works contained, they could not be allowed to reinfect virgin planets with the ancient poisons of religious hatred, belief in the supernatural, and the pious gibberish with which countless billions of men and women had once comforted themselves at the cost of addling their minds.'' Consigned to the flames were most of Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Tolstoy, Melville and Proust (who is referred to as ''the last great fiction writer before the electronic revolution overwhelmed the printed page'').

Mr. Clarke takes some pains to distance himself from this act of pre-emptive censorship, while noting its salutary effect on Thalassa, where ''the very word 'God' has almost vanished'' from the language and the people ''seem remarkably free from such unpleasant traits as envy, intolerance, jealousy, anger.'' This is philosophical fiction at its narrowest and most prescriptive: how to build a better society; how to live in peace and harmony with your neighbors. If Mr. Clarke's work were only this, I doubt that its appeal would be as broad as it is. THE key to his achievement is to be found not in his utopian fantasies but in his poetic evocation of human dignity in the face of death. Thinking of the ''tragedy of Earth'' as the sun becomes a nova, a crew member of the Magellan remembers what he saw ''through the lenses of cameras that had survived a few minutes longer than the devoted men who had sacrificed the last moments of their lives to set them up'':

''The Great Pyramid glowing dully red before it slumped into a puddle of molten stone . . .

''. . . the floor of the Atlantic, baked rock hard in seconds before it was submerged again by the lava gushing from the volcanoes of the Mid-ocean Rift . . .

''. . . the Moon rising above the flaming forests of Brazil and now itself shining almost as brilliantly as had the Sun, on its last setting, only minutes before . . .

''. . . the continent of Antarctica emerging briefly after its long burial as the kilometers of ancient ice were burned away.''

This is not a poetry that relies on fresh language or fresh insights; it is a poetry of perspective, of attitude; it invites us to forget our petty problems in the contemplation of a mortality so immense as to mimic immortality in scale.