Reading through Arthur C. Clarke’s Wikipedia page makes me think of those “The Most Interesting Man In The World” commercials. Clarke’s biography includes being lieutenant in the RAF during WWII, a scuba diver and discoverer of the sunken original Koneswaram temple off the coast of Sri Lanka, an inventor and futurist (he was one of the first people to propose the idea of geostationary communication satellites), a regular correspondent with C.S. Lewis, knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1998, and of course he’s one of the most influential science fiction writers in the history of the genre. (Maybe even the most influential, if you put him in front of Heinlein and Asimov. Which I do.)
Clarke’s books predate quite a lot of our modern technology, and yet he had this almost scary ability to predict future developments, like online banking, handheld personal transceivers with GPS ability (cellphones, anyone?) and bioengineering. The societies that he invented for his 1948 story Against the Fall of Night (rewritten in 1956 as The City an the Stars) are fantastical and far beyond anything seen even today, and yet every bit of the technology has some kind of basis in something we already take for granted. And each society just barely misses the mark of being Perfect, since they were both designed by scared, fallible humans.
Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten how to learn and a robot which had never known how to forget.
The story begins a billion years in the future in the city of Diaspar. (I think the city’s name is a clue, a combination of two words that become relevant at the end of the book.) The grand interstellar empire is gone, and humanity has retreated to a single domed city on the the now-ruined Earth. Don’t worry about a Logan’s Run type of storyline, because Diaspar has an ingenious solution to overpopulation: immortality. Human lifespans last for centuries, and then their personality and memories are “stored” electronically. After a restful amount of time (a hundred thousand years is standard) they’re awakened in an adult body and spend about twenty years re-learning everything about the city and their world before getting their old memories back. So everyone gets to constantly re-discover their lives…and since the same people keep coming back over and over, there’s never any real need to change anything. The city provides everything they need, there’s an infinite number of fun things to do so no one has any reason to be bored, and no one would ever, ever, even think about leaving the city.
So of course Alvin, the main character, wants to leave.
It’s not giving much away to say Alvin eventually manages to escape, and then finds out that Diaspar isn’t the only city left on Earth. The citizens of Lys are almost the polar opposite of Diaspar. They live in the open, in a section of the planet that’s been made into a kind of environmental paradise. They have short life-spans and children, they don’t depend on robots or a Central Computer to take care of them, and they’re inquisitive and always learning more about their world. And most importantly they all have telepathic abilities, so they have a peaceful society based on complete and total understanding of their fellow citizens.
And Alvin finds out that they’re just as frightened of change, and even more ruthless than Diaspar about fighting it.
Alvin is obviously The Force Of Change in this story, so he spends most of the book annoyingly certain that what he’s doing is Right and Good, even if he doesn’t have much of a plan for anything he does. Still, it’s obvious that Clarke had a lot of fun creating the two cities, especially Diaspar. I loved any scene that involved Alvin strolling through the city, past constantly changing artworks, down physics-bending walkways and architecture that doesn’t have to pay much attention to gravity, and through displays made of mirrors where the scenes that are reflected don’t actually match what’s in front of them.
Oddly enough the book bogs down a little once it hits the interstellar travel section. The planets that Clarke invented are pretty fascinating, but it all seemed like a the characters are just killing time while things move forward back on Earth.
Things pick up again with the big reveal at the end, when you find out that the superior, “I’m more advanced than you” attitude of each city isn’t really justified, and that there’s a reason why Clarke didn’t title this book “The Cities and the Stars”.