标题: 《The Songs of Distant Earth》作者： - Arthur C. Clarke【EPUB】 [打印本页] 作者: zaq 时间: 2014-9-4 10:24 标题: 《The Songs of Distant Earth》作者： - Arthur C. Clarke【EPUB】 The Songs of Distant Earth By Arthur C. Clarke ?? Nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom; there may be power; somewhere across space great instruments ... may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever ... -Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (1957) ?? I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. -Melville to Hawthorne (1851) ?? Author's Note This novel is based on an idea developed almost thirty years ago in a short story of the same name (now in my collection The Other Side of the Sky). However, this version was directly - and negatively -inspired by the recent rash of space-operas on TV and movie screen. (Query: what is the opposite of inspiration - expiration?) Please do not misunderstand me: I have enormously enjoyed the best of Star Trek and the Lucas/Spielberg epics, to mention only the most famous examples of the genre. But these works are fantasy, not science fiction in the strict meaning of the term. It now seems almost certain that in the real universe we may never exceed the velocity of light. Even the very closest star systems will always be decades or centuries apart; no Warp Six will ever get you from one episode to another in time for next week's installment. The great Producer in the Sky did not arrange his programme planning that way. In the last decade, there has also been a significant, and rather surprising, change in the attitude of scientists towards the problem of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The whole subject did not become respectable (except among dubious characters like the writers of science fiction) until the 1960s: Shklovskii and Sagan's Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966) is the landmark here. But now there has been a backlash. The total failure to find any trace of life in this solar system, or to pick up any of the interstellar radio signals that our great antennae should be easily able to detect, has prompted some scientists to argue 'Perhaps we are alone in the Universe ...' Dr Frank Tipler, the best-known exponent of this view, has (doubtless deliberately) outraged the Saganites by giving one of his papers the provocative title 'There Are No Intelligent Extra-Terrestrials'. Carl Sagan et al argue (and I agree with them) that it is much too early to jump to such far-reaching conclusions. Meanwhile, the controversy rages; as has been well said, either answer will be awe-inspiring. The question can only be settled by "evidence, not by any amount