The City and the Stars in Beyond Reality

Mar 02, 2015 Maggie K rated it it was ok

Shelves: couldn-t-finish

This had a lot of big ideas, and I started out liking it.....but I found myself avoiding it all the time. Sometimes an annoying lead character really can destroy any liking for an otherwise good novel

10 likes · Like · see review

Sep 02, 2024 Tomislav rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, read-2-times, science-fiction-great-course

Second read – 2 September 2024 - ****. Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night first appeared as a novella in Startling Stories November 1948. In 1953, that was expanded and published in book form. But by 1956, Clarke had substantially rewritten the novel, and published it with the new title of The City And The Stars, intending it to replace the earlier versions. But the original remained popular. In 1990, with Clarke’s permission, Gregory Benford wrote a sequel to the original entitled Bey Second read – 2 September 2024 - ****. Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night first appeared as a novella in Startling Stories November 1948. In 1953, that was expanded and published in book form. But by 1956, Clarke had substantially rewritten the novel, and published it with the new title of The City And The Stars, intending it to replace the earlier versions. But the original remained popular. In 1990, with Clarke’s permission, Gregory Benford wrote a sequel to the original entitled Beyond the Fall of Night. And in case that wasn’t enough, in 2004, Gregory Benford rewrote that as a new novel titled Beyond Infinity. These versions are all substantially different. This review is for 1956 The City And The Stars.

Over a billion years hence, a young man named Alvin reaches adulthood in the last city on Earth - Diaspar. The Central Computer of Diaspar has maintained the unchanging city for at least half a billion years, by enforcing physical specifications to a detailed model stored in its memory, and by reanimating its stored inhabitants through a succession of extended lifetimes, always in different combinations. But Alvin is different; he is one of the extremely rare Uniques, in his very first lifetime and with no past lives to remember, and without the entrenched conservatism and fear of the outside of his friends, parents, and tutor. Something in Alvin drives him to challenge the barriers that have confined humanity for eons. While he has adventures and there is drama, this work is for fans of hard-sf where expansive concepts take center stage. Alvin narrates Clarke’s guided tour of the future Earth and universe, revealing Clarke’s vision of a deep future inspired by Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men and foreshadowing themes later used in his own 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I re-read this because it is discussed in Lecture 4 “Evolution and Deep Time in Science Fiction” of Gary Wolfe’s video lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works.

First read – 1 May 1975 - ***. I first read this novel during my early undergraduate college years. In those days, I liked SF that had space travel, but did not care for SF with telepathy. This novel has both, and so my response was in the middle. ...more

6 likes · Like · see review

May 23, 2019 Kathi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

This is a book of ideas more than of characters or plot, although there certainly is a plot and a main character who keeps pushing it forward. The most challenging part of reading this book was trying to wrap my mind around the vast sweeps of time encompassed by the overall story—not the story of Alvin, Hillary, and Jeserac, but of humankind, the Empire, and the Galaxy.

Are fear of death and of space, both vast and mysterious, so dominant in our psyche? Would we turn our backs on the knowledge an ...more

1 like · Like · see review