The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke

(He did hint at an answer in a late book.) Because of this he did not raise the issue of why there were no aliens there just weren't. He later explained that this was originally a way of avoiding an implicit assumption on the part of his editor that the humans somehow represented white people and would be somehow better than aliens. Note: Isaac Asimov, after his early period, mainly wrote SF set in an all-human galaxy.

Arthur Clarke tended to become more downbeat in his later work, and the novel is a lot sadder than the original story. A colonizing ship on a longer mission stops at this planet. The action in both the original short story and the novel takes place on a planet with a small human colony.

(See separate page on ' hard and soft SF'.) In addition, the continued failure of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) raises the question: suppose we are alone, after all-at least in the space anywhere near us, where we might communicate? Clarke thought that it was too early to draw this conclusion, but the novel assumes that Earth has still not found any alien life over a thousand years hence. Arthur Clarke commented that while he found Star Trek enjoyable, it is basically fantasy rather than science fiction since the whole thing depends on faster-than-light travel, and he wanted to write something in response. Hard SF is about what is within the range of what is believed to be scientifically possible (or at least not yet known to be impossible). But unlike Star Trek, for example, there is no warp drive or hyperspace: it is a 'hard science fiction' take on interstellar travel. The Songs of Distant Earth is about interstellar travel. (book first published 1986, based on his earlier short story of the same title, 1958)

The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke