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Book Home  Books Information City and The Stars
City and The Stars
The City and The Stars (1956) is a science fiction novel
by Arthur C Clarke. It is a complete rewrite of his earlier novel,
Against the Fall of Night.
Against the Fall of Night was Clarke's first novel.
It was published in Startling Stories in 1948 (after John W. Campbell,
Jr. rejected it, according to Clarke's own account). A few years
later he revised the book extensively and retitled it. The new
version was intended to showcase what he had learned about writing
(and it did). The major differences are in individual scenes and
in the details of his contrasting civilizations of Diaspar and
Lys. To everyone's surprise, the first version remained popular
enough to stay in print after the second version came out. In
introductions to it he has told the anecdote of a psychiatrist
and patient who admitted they had discussed it one day in therapy,
without, however, realizing at the time that one had read one
book and one the other. Most recently it has appeared with a sequel
by Gregory Benford called Beyond the Fall of Night. However, except
for the specific role of Khedron the Jester, what follows is a
valid description of either of the books about Alvin.
The City and the Stars takes place billions of years
in the future, in the city of Diaspar. By this time, the Earth is
so old that the oceans have gone and humanity has all but left. As
far as the people of Diaspar know, they are the only city left in
the world. The city of Diaspar is completely enclosed. Nobody has
come in or left the domed city for as long as anybody can remember,
and everybody in Diaspar has an instinctive fear of everything outside
of Diaspar. The story behind this fear tells of a race of ruthless
invaders that beat humanity back from the stars to Earth, and then
made the deal that humanity could live if they never left the planet.
In Diaspar, the entire city is run by a central computer.
Not only is the city repaired by machines, but people's lives are
created by the machines as well. The computer creates bodies for the
people of Diaspar to live in and stores their minds in its memory
when they die. At any time, only a small number of these people are
actually living in Diaspar, the rest existing in the computer's memory
banks.
All the people of Diaspar have had past "lives"
within Diaspar except one person — Alvin, the main character
of this story. He is different from everybody else in Diaspar, not
only because he doesn't have any past lives to remember, but because
instead of fearing the outside of Diaspar he feels compelled to leave
it. In the novel, Alvin has just come to the age where he is considered
grown up, and has put all his energies into trying to find a way out.
Eventually, a wild character called Khedron the Jester helps Alvin
use the central computer to find a way out of the city of Diaspar.
Once out, Alvin finds that people still live outside
of Diaspar, though these people live a lifestyle completely different
from his own. In contrast to Diaspar's electronically-ran society,
these people live outside and are born similarly to how we are now.
They call the community where they live Lys. These people are also
telepathic, with much of their society built around it.
Once out of Diaspar, Alvin continues his quest until
he finds out the truth of why the people of Diaspar are so frightened
of the external universe and why Lys is so scared of space travel
and mechanical things. The fearsome Invaders, it turns out, were a
myth. Instead, the people of Diaspar are the descendants of those
humans who deliberately turned away from the universe in rejection
of history's greatest scientific project: the creation of a disembodied
intellect. The first attempt had created a powerful but insane being,
the Mad Mind. Alvin finds the second, successful attempt: Vanamonde,
a being of pure intellect, immensely old, immensely powerful, able
to move instantly to any point in space . . . and entirely child-like.
(Vanamonde's ultimate destiny is to battle the Mad Mind.)
Alvin's discoveries reunite Diaspar with Lys. He then
begins the search for the long-lost cousins of Earth's humanity among
the stars.
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