Review: Cities Not Built to Last

The City and the Stars. Arthur C. Clarke. Frederick Muller, London, 1956, 256 pp.

Over seventy years ago, the visionary writer Arthur C. Clarke, who died 19 March 2008 (1), published his first novel, Against the Fall of Night (2), in the magazine Startling Stories. Not satisfied, he subsequently rewrote and expanded it as The City and the Stars. The earlier title, taken from a poem by A. E. Housman (3, 4), more closely matches the novel's somber opening—Earth, a billion years hence: mountains ground to dust; all the land a desert wherein lies a lone city, Diaspar, refuge for the last remnant of a once Galaxy-spanning empire. The later version's title instead linked Diaspar to its destiny among the stars—a belief and desire that Clarke held also for humanity.

The cover of the SF Masterworks edition.

Clarke, one of the greats of 20th-century science fiction (along with such contemporaries as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein), rehearsed in The City and the Stars themes that appeared in many of his subsequent books and stories. The plot, a simple and unerringly linear quest, is unremarkable even by the standards of the time, and the characters rarely rise above subservience to the story arc. What marks the book out are Clarke's sweeping vistas, grand ideas, and ultimately optimistic view of humankind's future in the cosmos.

The inhabitants of billion-year-old Diaspar—a breed of lotus-eating immortals "as carefully designed as [the city's] machines"—have ceded their Galactic empire to the "Invaders" and, on threat of their lives, have accepted confinement within Diaspar's city walls. The all-powerful Central Computer [a benevolent precursor to the more famous HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey (5)] runs the life of the city. Into this highly controlled environment comes Alvin, a "Unique," one of a vanishingly few individuals born anew.

Alvin's curiosity-fueled explorations, frowned on by his fellow immortals yet tacitly condoned by the Central Computer, reveal first a way out of their utopian prison and then its hidden sister settlement, the idyllic wooded villages of Lys. He eventually travels to the deserted ruins at the center of the Galaxy, where he finds the key to understanding the myths that imprison Earth and, ultimately, the true fate of the Galactic empire is revealed.

The inherent danger of scientific exploration—even Alvin worries about "the ruthless drive to satisfy his own curiosity"—forms the core of the some-what-hurried final denouement. The myth of the Invaders is based upon the creation of a "pure mentality" that was "inspired and directed by Man" and that, in best monster tradition, promptly turns upon its creators and wreaks havoc across the Universe before it can be contained. Transcendence of the physical to something "other" also motivated Clarke's stories Childhood's End (6) and 2001. There is no religious intent; Clarke's transcendence is simply a state of being beyond the limits of material experience. His (and our) incomprehension of this (engineered) transformation is a manifestation of his own third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Clarke's asides on organized religion show his disdain for the real thing clearly enough: it is a "meaningless morass" of ideas, suffers from "unbelievable arrogance," and engenders the "misplaced devotion" of its "deluded" adherents. The long-dead messiah of The City and the Stars fakes miracles, lies to his followers, and requires his lonely robot apostle to cover up for him.

Clarke's passion for exploration encompassed both outer space and the oceans. He was a keen scuba diver, and in 1954 he moved permanently to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) so he could dive year-round. As a charming consequence, the alien creatures in the book all have a decidedly aquatic nature: for example, an intelligent colonial polyp that dissociates into its constituent cells when stressed, and huge gas-filled floating medusae harbor-ing entire ecosystems in their trailing tendrils. These latter surely inspired those in his Nebula award-winning 1971 novella A Meeting with Medusa (7), and he developed the idea of large-scale under-water aquaculture in the novel The Deep Range (8).

For all its bravado and youthful vigor, I do not think the book (even in its rewritten form) has weathered as well as Clarke's reputation, and it has rightly been eclipsed by later works. Still, for those of us who read and fell in love with The City and the Stars in our youth—in my case, merely some 30 years ago—that doesn't matter one iota.

References and Notes

1. J. N. Pelton, J. Logsdon, Science 320, 189 (2008).

2. A. C. Clarke, Against the Fall of Night (Gnome, New York, 1953).

3. A. E. Housman, "Smooth between sea and land," in More Poems (Cape, London, 1936); www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/—martinh/poems/complete_housman.html#MPxlv.

4. The title of this review is also taken from that poem.

5. A. C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (New American Library, New York, 1968).

6. A. C. Clarke, Childhood's End (Ballantine, New York, 1953).

7. A. C. Clarke, in The Best of Arthur C. Clarke, A. Wells, Ed. (Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1973).

8. A. C. Clarke, The Deep Range (Frederick Muller, London, 1957).

First published in Science, 04 Jul 2008: Vol. 321, Issue 5885, pp. 42-43

Copyright AAAS, 2008, all rights reserved