The 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.

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 one other city remains on Earth. In contrast to walled, technological Diaspar, the city of Lys is a vast green oasis shielded by mountains from the worldwide desert. Its people are not stored and recreated technologically, but are conceived, born, age, and die. They have rejected the hyper-advanced technology of Diaspar in favor of an almost agrarian existence, with machines used only for labor-saving purposes. The people of Lys have instead worked to perfect the arts of the mind; they are telepaths, capable of communicating with each other over great distances and without words.

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. The Mad Mind had devastated the galaxy and its human-dominated civilization before being imprisoned in a black hole; most of the survivors had left our galaxy following the war, leaving only a few, frightened of the outside universe, to found the two surviving cultures of Earth.

Alvin finds the second, successful experiment of the ancient empire: Vanamonde, a being of pure intellect, immensely old, immensely powerful, able to move instantly to any point in space -- but entirely child-like, intelligent but unsophisticated and inexperienced. Vanamonde's ultimate destiny, Alvin realizes, is to battle the Mad Mind, when it escapes its prison at the end of Time.

Alvin's discoveries reunite Diaspar with Lys. He then begins the search for the long-lost cousins of Earth's humanity among the stars.

See also

* Religious ideas in science fiction