The City and the Stars

This is a book of ideas more than of characters or plot, although there certainly is a plot and a main character who keeps pushing it forward. The most challenging part of reading this book was trying to wrap my mind around the vast sweeps of time encompassed by the overall story—not the story of Alvin, Hillary, and Jeserac, but of humankind, the Empire, and the Galaxy.

Are fear of death and of space, both vast and mysterious, so dominant in our psyche? Would we turn our backs on the knowledge and experience of other intelligence in the galaxy? Is it basically curiosity that ultimately fuels us and drives progress? Is home a place or a feeling? These are the questions I pondered as I read this book, and after I finished it as well.

In his preface, Arthur C. Clarke identifies this 1950s work as a second pass at his first novel (i.e. Against the Fall of Night). I haven't read the earlier book, but the two share about 25% of their content, and the author presents The City and the Stars as a very complete revision.

The City and the Stars is plot-intensive, and the ratio of major, world-tilting events to page count is quite high. The characters are fairly flat, but the high concepts tend to compensate for that. As is typical for him, Clarke's futurological intuition is very solid, and in the long lifetime since this book was written there have been no technological developments to trammel up and obsolesce the details of the far future that he offers here. He has show more virtual reality, distributed computing, matter synthesis, artificial intelligence, non-viviparity, and gravity control as features of a post-imperial no-longer-star-voyaging technocracy.

Although this book has aged reasonably well, it didn't really blow my mind--especially given how many of its concepts have been taken up and rehearsed in later science fiction works. It is tangent to, if not firmly within, the "dying earth" subgenre, as it features terrestrial posthumanity in a stagnant, insular society. It could have supplied some inspiration for Michael Moorcock's excellent Dancers at the End of Time books. Another work that may exhibit traces of its influence is John Boorman's Zardoz. Even Logan's Run bears some similarities to it in general shape. Clarke's protagonist Alvin, a "unique" who is in his person a calculated disruption of his engineered, sealed society, seems also to be echoed in the Neo of the Wachowskis' Matrix movies.

The book as a whole isn't terribly long, and the short chapters and intense plotting keep it moving at a fast clip. show less

Mind-bending stuff. Clarke does a good job of bringing out the terror and sadness of deep time. There’s rather a lot going on thematically. A lot of it you could boil down to death and rebirth, but that really doesn’t do it justice; there’re so many variations on that. Clever writing.

Whether you prefer this or the earlier version Against the Fall of Night is probably personal choice. I’m with Against. It’s short enough to read in one sitting and if you do it on a quiet Sunday afternoon it’ll put you into a dreamlike state. That’s lost in this version.

This book is profound, and I am not sure Arthur C Clarke intended to write a deep novel. It is possible he just intended to write a good yarn, and he achieved this aim.

Yet, if he had stopped there, maybe the book would not be great. Maybe, the book would just be good or very good. However, there are some interesting questions that keep cropping up when we read the book. One, for instance, is the question of where humanity is heading. With social media and the metaverse impinging on our consciousness, will we live in virtual worlds, and forget humanity?

Will we run from the fear of the unknown, or disease, to the point where we cut ourselves off from the universe and live in bubbles?

With science advancing the way it is, will we achieve show more some kind of bland immortality?

Will we lose touch with ourselves?

Read the book, pause and think. It may raise similar questions in your mind as well. show less

This is a beautiful novel of the far future. I much prefer this to my schoolboy memories of 2001: A Space Odyssey (though, to be fair, I ought to reread that to form an adult opinion). In this far future, humanity has withdrawn from its galactic empire and retreated to the safety of a mega city on Earth, Diaspar, for the last billion years. The inhabitants live a thousand years and their memories are preserved in an archive to be reborn in the future; thus there are no children, and a stagnant society wholly ignorant of the world outside the city walls. The central character, Alvin, is different and yearns to explore the city confines. When he finally manages to do so, he makes discoveries that will lead to seismic change for his home show more city and a confrontation with its lost distant past. This is beautifully and simply told and, especially in the first half, carries a real sense of wonder and otherworldliness that a lot of more recent SF lacks in my view. A wonderful read. show less

Another classic science fiction story, this one from my dad's collection. Even though I have only read 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke before, he is already on my list of science fiction writers I like and want to read more from.
This is the story of Diaspar, a city on Earth a billion years into the future. The city is huge and completely self-containing, in fact, the rest of Earth is nothing but a desert. The people in Diaspar live completely reliant on the Central Computer. Everything in the city, including furniture and food is created on the fly by this computer from patterns stored in its vast memory-banks. The people live a thousand years, after which they are stored in the memory-banks to be reborn in the future. The show more people have an immense fear of outside Diaspar, because of the threat of the invaders which drove humanity into Diaspar, and leaves them alone on the condition they never venture out again. In this city, Alvin is "born". Alvin is unique, he has no previous lives, and no fear of the outside. His curiosity and refusal to accept things as they are mean big changes for the future of Diaspar.
Because Alvin is unique, we discover the city and the world along with him. He is close to us in his manners and way of thinking, which makes the story very accessible. Slowly we discover Earth, and the history of Earth, and the way forward for humankind. I loved the sense of mystery and discovery in this book, and the pace which is fast, even though there is not much action going on. A great what-if science fiction book, five out of five stars. show less

wanted to read The City and the Stars after reading about it in Michael Benson’s book on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I felt in the mood for some classic science fiction.

Clarke’s story is set in the far distant future, when the Earth has turned primarily to desert. The story begins in an isolated, self-contained city, Diaspar. In this distant future, social structures, political structures, and even the biology of the characters has long disconnected from our own. Life is all too stable and idyllic in Diaspar. The people of Diaspar know little to nothing of the Earth outside the city, and, in fact, show little curiosity about it or even their own history. Their lives are cyclic, being electronically infused into new show more (fully grown) bodies in life after life, with a kind of hamster-wheel feel.

The plot involves the threat of destabilization. And here I liked very much the inherent monkey wrench that Clarke threw into the carefully planned life of Diaspar. Two elements — the role of a “Jester” and the role of “Uniques” assure that stability isn’t absolute, and that adaptation and change, while facing formidable barriers, can happen.

The distance in time, the artificiality of life, and the unfamiliar but neatly drawn social structures give the book a kind of fantasy feel that i didn’t expect from Clarke. By contrast with the books I’m more familiar with, like Childhood’s End or Rendezvous with Rama, as well as 2001 itself, there’s less continuity between our own current lives and the characters’ lives here. There are technological elements, as in those other books, that are prophetic — virtual presence is a prominent feature — but even there, this is farther from “hard science fiction” than what I associate with Clarke.

This is not my favorite of Clarke’s books. It ages well, but it doesn’t rate with the others I’ve mentioned — Rendezvous with Rama, Childhood’s End, 2001. The fantasy feel isn’t my thing, I have to admit. And there is, for Clarke, I think, an odd compression of the end of the story. The story really takes on an impressive galactic scale, but that vastly enlarging scale isn’t enacted or shown — it is actually told through one character’s speech. The speech outlines a story I would have liked to have read, as played out in a novel itself. show less