Sat 12 Jun 2021
Diary Review: ARTHUR C. CLARKE – The City and the Stars.
Posted by Steve under Diary Reviews , Science Fiction & Fantasy[5] Comments
ARTHUR C. CLARKE – The City and the Stars. Frederick Muller Ltd, UK, hardcover, 1956. Harcourt, Brace & Co, US, hardcover, 1956. Signet S1464, US, paperback, December 1957. Collected in From the Ocean, from the Stars (Harcourt, Brace & World, US, hardcover, 1961). Note: This novel is a revised and extended version of Against the Fall of Night (first published in Startling Stories, November 1948; then in book form from Gnome Press, hardcover, 1953).
The city of Diaspar, a tremendous achievement of social engineering, stood isolated from the world for billions of years. Machines maintained mankind in a permanent environment, protected from their fears of invaders.
Alvin, a Unique, the first child to be born in ten billion of those years, was designed for the welfare of the race and to return humanity to its place in the universe. He leaves the city for the community of Lys, and then to the stars. There he finds a mental being once created by man, and which has memories that will free Earth from the myths and legends of the past.
The story has as a basic flaw the lack of any suspense, for in spite of the quite poetic style, there is little to persuade the reader to keep turning the pages. It is not a struggle to read, but a matter of indifference. One scene is rather sappy, that of Alvin’s first view of Lys, but the feeling of loneliness and smallness when he reaches the stars is overwhelming. Toward the end there is a most appropriate description of what makes an explorer.
Rating: 3½ stars.
June 12th, 2021 at 7:43 pm
It;s one of those books you either love or hate, but few are indifferent to it. Certainly for when it was written it was a throwback to and earlier more philosophic kind of SF mixed with the newer sociological take.
Intellectually it was a stimulating read for fourteen year old me, for seventy something me its a bit naive and obvious at times though the poetry still works and I still can be moved by Alvin’s first glimpse of the enormity of the vastness of the world beyond his own.
Like CHILDHOOD’s END it is in many way a younger SF readers book. A place to first come to those concepts and ideas, but for readers already exposed to them the lack of much in the way of movement, suspense, or action negates some of the revolutionary qualities of the work when it was first published.
June 12th, 2021 at 8:22 pm
Reading this old review this evening, I can see that I really didn’t have the words I needed to describe the book all that well. But looking to back when I was in my mid-20s, it’s obvious that I was rather ambivalent about it.
I think you’re right. It’s a book that at the time it was written was a great introduction to a 15-year-old to what science fiction was all about.
June 13th, 2021 at 6:40 am
I can’t speak for a fourteen-year-old like David reading the book for the first time but, for a twelve-year-old, it knocked my socks off. I followed this book by reading Clarke’s CHILDHOOD’S END and have been a fan ever since. I then went back and read AGAINST THE FALL OF NIGHT and found it to be also a great read, but somewhat less mature and more pulpy than the revised and expanded book.
June 13th, 2021 at 7:12 am
Oh, to be 12 or 15 again!
June 13th, 2021 at 2:32 pm
You don’t have to be a kid to like these books!
I read AGAINST THE FALL OF NIGHT maybe 7 years ago. It’s an impressive work. It’s flawed as people say – there is little action or conventional plot, and it runs out of steam towards the end. But it is also a visionary work with the SEnse of Wonder. We need more of that…
I plan to read THE CITY AND THE STARS sometime. It too is supposed to be very good.