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primeidealThis year the USA will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. So in that spirit, I read a book published in the year of the 200th anniversary (1976), about the 500th anniversary (2276), by a British guy living in Sri Lanka.
Duncan Makenzie comes from a prominent family on Titan, the hospitable low-gravity moon of Saturn. He gets invited to Earth to give a speech at the quincentennial party. A lot of the book is kind of random worldbuilding speculation about how Titan's hydrogen would contribute to the economy of the solar system, and various touristy adventures on Earth without a lot of connective plot or characterization.
The title refers to the idea that Earth might play a role in a dispersed solar system similar to that of the capital in the ancient Roman empire; most of the other planets and moons can do their own thing, but if you really want patronage and cultural influence, you have to visit the capital. Why? Because interplanetary communication suffers from the light-speed barrier; you can't have a real-time video chat and observe the facial expressions and nonverbal communication of someone on another planet. On Earth, however, everyone can video chat with each other instantaneously, which made a one-world government inevitable (so while the USA's anniversary is an important symbolic occasion, it really doesn't function as an independent country). Man, I wish. D:
Makenzie is a clone. His grandfather, Malcolm, suffered DNA damage on a shuttle between Earth and Mars, which made it impossible for him to have a healthy child the old-fashioned way. So he cloned himself, and then his son cloned himself, yielding Duncan. Duncan plans to take advantage of the trip to Earth to have a fourth-generation kid and continue the family.
I would probably have bought "the Makenzies have DNA damage and it's not reparable, cloning is the only workaround" if it hadn't been for the "sustained between Earth and Mars" bit--like, would that have affected every cell? In an afterword to the paperback edition, Clarke admits that he's gotten pushback and criticism on this point, even though he tried to keep it vague, and winds up joining Ray Bradbury in the "sometimes you just have to run with it for artistic license" response.
There are a few nods to "hmm, creating unused embryos might have some ethical issues, is it okay to treat surrogate mothers this way...IDK let's just throw up our hands" that felt kind of underwhelming, but in the same way a lot of contemporary discourse is underwhelming. (1976 was two years before the first child was born through IVF, so this was still, just barely, SF.) More frustrating for me was the text trying to insist that the Makenzies all have other partners and stepkids who they love just as much as their biological relatives and are totally part of the family--but these characters barely get any interiority or screen time, there's a lot more emphasis on a love triangle from Duncan's teenage years that didn't carry over into long-lasting family ties. There is a twist ending to the clone plotline, but I couldn't suspend disbelief for the "oh yeah I totally love my non-biological family" part.
Presented without comment:
Duncan enjoys pentomino puzzles; in an afterword, Clarke notes that he got into them via Martin Gardner's recreational mathematics writing. (Same here.)
Duncan Makenzie comes from a prominent family on Titan, the hospitable low-gravity moon of Saturn. He gets invited to Earth to give a speech at the quincentennial party. A lot of the book is kind of random worldbuilding speculation about how Titan's hydrogen would contribute to the economy of the solar system, and various touristy adventures on Earth without a lot of connective plot or characterization.
The title refers to the idea that Earth might play a role in a dispersed solar system similar to that of the capital in the ancient Roman empire; most of the other planets and moons can do their own thing, but if you really want patronage and cultural influence, you have to visit the capital. Why? Because interplanetary communication suffers from the light-speed barrier; you can't have a real-time video chat and observe the facial expressions and nonverbal communication of someone on another planet. On Earth, however, everyone can video chat with each other instantaneously, which made a one-world government inevitable (so while the USA's anniversary is an important symbolic occasion, it really doesn't function as an independent country). Man, I wish. D:
Makenzie is a clone. His grandfather, Malcolm, suffered DNA damage on a shuttle between Earth and Mars, which made it impossible for him to have a healthy child the old-fashioned way. So he cloned himself, and then his son cloned himself, yielding Duncan. Duncan plans to take advantage of the trip to Earth to have a fourth-generation kid and continue the family.
I would probably have bought "the Makenzies have DNA damage and it's not reparable, cloning is the only workaround" if it hadn't been for the "sustained between Earth and Mars" bit--like, would that have affected every cell? In an afterword to the paperback edition, Clarke admits that he's gotten pushback and criticism on this point, even though he tried to keep it vague, and winds up joining Ray Bradbury in the "sometimes you just have to run with it for artistic license" response.
There are a few nods to "hmm, creating unused embryos might have some ethical issues, is it okay to treat surrogate mothers this way...IDK let's just throw up our hands" that felt kind of underwhelming, but in the same way a lot of contemporary discourse is underwhelming. (1976 was two years before the first child was born through IVF, so this was still, just barely, SF.) More frustrating for me was the text trying to insist that the Makenzies all have other partners and stepkids who they love just as much as their biological relatives and are totally part of the family--but these characters barely get any interiority or screen time, there's a lot more emphasis on a love triangle from Duncan's teenage years that didn't carry over into long-lasting family ties. There is a twist ending to the clone plotline, but I couldn't suspend disbelief for the "oh yeah I totally love my non-biological family" part.
"[Saturn's] remaining satellites were barren aggregate of rock, overgrown snowballs, or mixtures of both. By the mid-2200s, more than forty had been discovered, the majority of them less than a hundred kilometers in diameter. The outer ones--twenty million kilometers from Saturn--all moved in retrograde orbits and were clearly temporary visitors from the asteroid belt; there was much argument as to whether they should be counted as genuine satellites at all."
Clarke underestimated that one, already we've discovered several hundred moons, some of which make people go "these are too puny they shouldn't even count'!Presented without comment:
"And the Kennedy Center--that is the original, more or less. Every fifty years some architect tries to salvage it, but it's been given up as a bad job."
2276 people don't care about the details of 1700s-2000s technology:"...quaint old photographs of stiffly-posed and long-forgotten eminences (perhaps the original George Washington--no, cameras hadn't been invented then)..."
More worldbuilding notes: 2200s political officials are chosen by random sortition, again one of those NationStates "crazy third option" policies. :) Earth only has four time zones now, global communication made it impossible to stick with 24. Real meat is not illegal, "yet," but manual driving has been illegal for a century."Though enthusiasm was not actually illegal, it was in somewhat bad taste; one should not take one's hobbies and recreations too seriously."
Why do whales make big jumps above the surface sometimes?"Nobody really knows. It may be pure joie de vivre. It may be to impress a lady friend. Or it may be merely to get rid of parasites--whales are badly infested with barnacles and lampreys."
How utterly incongruous, thought Duncan. It seemed almost an outrage that a god should be afflicted with lice.
Great mental image! And the evocation of beings existing beside each other in massively different orders of magnitude comes up later, but mostly it's just vibes.How utterly incongruous, thought Duncan. It seemed almost an outrage that a god should be afflicted with lice.
Duncan enjoys pentomino puzzles; in an afterword, Clarke notes that he got into them via Martin Gardner's recreational mathematics writing. (Same here.)
...when, on July 24, 1975, I appeared as a witness before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Space Science (in the very building libeled and destroyed in Chapter 33!), I was able to quote extensively from Duncan's address to Congress in Chapter 41. Thus the House of Representatives' hearings now contain extracts from the Congressional Record for July 4, 2276, which should cause confusion among future historians.
Bingo: Book in Parts; Stranger in a Strange Land; LGBTQIA protagonist (Duncan comes from a culture where bisexuality is default, and "could never feel quite happy with someone whose affections were exclusively polarized toward one sex.")
