Trivia / The Songs of Distant Earth

• Creator's Oddball: Unlike Clarke's other works, this piece focuses on characterization and emotional development, instead of technological change. In some sense, it was written as a response to critics who attacked his writings as cold and impersonal.
• Science Marches On: The Solar Neutrino Problem, which in the book was the first sign that something was wrong with the Sun, has been resolved; the problem was with neutrino detectors of the time and the theory, not the Sun. (Then as now, it was commonly understood that ordinary novas were associated with binary stars; the threat in the book is explicitly presented as an unusual occurrence.)