The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke

[mmcirvin]

Another good one was The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke. In this one it's the stilted, lecture-filled prose style that seems dated, much more than the ideas, some of which are startlingly ahead of their time. I suspect that The City and the Stars provided part inspiration for the goofy movie Zardoz as well as much of the "transhuman" philosophical SF of the 1990s.


The City and the Stars takes place something like a billion years in the future. Humans once roamed the galaxy freely, but then retreated to Earth, driven back by a mysterious menace. Gradually they abandoned most of Earth itself, and confined themselves to a couple of closed, stiflingly static societies with indistinguishable-from-magic ultra-tech: the city of Diaspar, inhabited by endlessly reincarnated immortals who are resynthesized as young adults out of the city's digital memory bank; and the rustic country of Lys, whose citizens are your basic psychic supermen disguised as bumpkins (think Organians). History has been rewritten and memories wiped; nobody knows the truth any more about what happened back at the dawn of history when things were allowed to change.

You know approximately what has to happen with this kind of set-up. One day, for inscrutable reasons of its own, the central computer of Diaspar barfs up a wholly new being named Alvin who seems destined to be a revolutionary explorer (I'd guess that this inspired the Orphan in Greg Egan's Diaspora): he lacks the physically ingrained fear that keeps most people from leaving Diaspar. Eventually he discovers Lys, unites the remaining people of Earth, and even goes on a wild space adventure to the old center of galactic civilization, where he meets an early draft of the Star Child from 2001.

This is a great read if you don't expect thrilling prose or nuanced characterization; it's a highly imaginative story in the grand hypercosmic Stapeldonian tradition, with much of that strange melancholy that pervades all of Clarke's writing, and it was pretty influential. I've heard that The City and the Stars was actually a reworking of an earlier Clarke novella called "Against the Fall of Night," but I haven't read that.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, and the center of galactic civilization has a multicolored multiple sun that bears a striking resemblance to the subterranean sun of the vegetable Mangaboos from Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. I wonder if there was a connection. (If so, I guess that comes back around to Zardoz as well.)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

When did Clarke stop writing good stuff and start writing facile fluff like "Songs of Distant Earth" and "3001"?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I actually kind of liked "Songs of Distant Earth," but it's clear that he was slipping at the time. The basic scenario for that one was something he had been chewing on for decades; it had previously been a novella and a screen treatment, in substantially different form.

His last really solid novel, I think, was "2010", which was much better than the Hyams movie. After that he started collaborating with people like Gentry Lee, and the stuff he wrote on his own got pretty thin.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

By the way, I did kind of like the collaboration he did recently with the spectacularly uneven Stephen Baxter, The Light of Other Days (not to be confused with the classic Bob Shaw story). It was obviously mostly by Baxter, though there were a few specific passages that I suspect actually were written by Clarke.

It's a riff on the "universal time/space viewer that destroys privacy and reveals history" theme, like T. L. Sherred's "E for Effort" or Isaac Asimov's "The Dead Past." My favorite bit is the part about how popular historians are shocked to learn that Abraham Lincoln was not gay.

Songs of Distant Earth

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I was trying to think of that book the other day because I recently read a pair of short stories that reminded me of them. Both were written by a Kuro5hin.org contributor localroger a.k.a. Roger Williams:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/user/localroger/stories

"Passages in the Void" is the first, and "Passage Home" is the second. It's about sentient ships who have been sent out into space to grow, from scratch, the human species. Because of the way humanity reached its end in the Earth system, the machines have an institutional dislike of star-systems, so they try to find alternatives.

Williams also wrote the novella "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect,"

http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/

which involves characters stuck in a utopia generated by an Asimovian computer. Contains the obligatory "Why?" *sparks fly, tape reels explode* scene, but it was pleasant reading. The "Passage" stories are better, IMO, though.