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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.