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    The City and the Stars
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    The City and the Stars
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    The City and the Stars
    Audiobook9 hours

    The City and the Stars

    Written by Arthur C. Clarke

    Narrated by Mike Grady

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    About this audiobook

    Men had built cities before, but never such a city as Diaspar; for millennia its protective dome shut out the creeping decay and danger of the world outside. Once, it ruled the stars. But then, as legend had it, the Invaders came, driving humanity into this last refuge. It takes one man, a Unique, to smash the legend and discover the true nature of the Invaders.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Ltd
    Release dateJan 3, 2013
    ISBN9781471226595
    Author

    Arthur C. Clarke

    Born in Somerset in 1917, Arthur C. Clarke has written over sixty books, among which are the science fiction classics ‘2001, A Space Odyssey’, ‘Childhood’s End’, ‘The City and the Stars’ and ‘Rendezvous With Rama’. He has won all the most prestigious science fiction trophies, and shared an Oscar nomination with Stanley Kubrick for the screenplay of the film of 2001. He was knighted in 1998. He passed away in March 2008.

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    Reviews for The City and the Stars

    4/5

    651 ratings23 reviews

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    • 4/5
      As a teenager, I read Against the Fall of Night, and loved its romantic, mythological tone. Late in his life, Arthur Clarke rewrote the same story as the City and the Stars. I'm not sure if the difference in my reaction to this book is a change in Clarke or in me, but this one sure feels mediocre to me now. For one thing, there's relatively limited conflict - the main question is how the various characters will deal with inevitable change, once it is set in motion, but dangerous consequences are never really in the offing. Also, the book switches between the mythological mode, in which characters behave epically and the world is wondrous just because, and a more hard-science mode, in which everything has an explanation that is supposed to be plausible within the world of the story. That switch repeatedly interferes with suspension of disbelief.
    • 5/5
      A story I loved. You made me travel in space and ti.e
    • 3/5
      This is like an action movie except the action consists entirely of people sitting around being agreeable and polite with each other. I guess there was the thing that tried to eat them. That's the closest thing to a villain there was in the whole book

      Diaspar existing unchanged for billions of years makes sense because it was constructed to, but Lys remaining the same for that long is unbelievable.

      The whole "Let's become mortal and have babies!" ending is ridiculous.

      Also wouldn't the sun have expanded into a red giant and melted the Earth by now?
    • 5/5
      This book is profound, and I am not sure Arthur C Clarke intended to write a deep novel. It is possible he just intended to write a good yarn, and he achieved this aim. Yet, if he had stopped there, maybe the book would not be great. Maybe, the book would just be good or very good. However, there are some interesting questions that keep cropping up when we read the book. One, for instance, is the question of where humanity is heading. With social media and the metaverse impinging on our consciousness, will we live in virtual worlds, and forget humanity?Will we run from the fear of the unknown, or disease, to the point where we cut ourselves off from the universe and live in bubbles?With science advancing the way it is, will we achieve some kind of bland immortality?Will we lose touch with ourselves? Read the book, pause and think. It may raise similar questions in your mind as well.
    • 4/5
      This book is everything I enjoy and everything that frustrates me about Arthur C Clarke. Fantastic worldbuilding, excellent writing, a story that works like a machine, and.... no characters. The characters are really just animating forces that appreciate and explore the world and move the plot along. Very much like Asimov’s psychohistory in the Foundation series. Also I can’t stand that he named his main character Alvin when everyone else got cool names like Jeserac and Alystra. (Btw I ship Alvin and Hilvar.) Seriously though, what this book does well, it does very well. I enjoyed it and it reminded me why I love this genre.
    • 4/5
      Published in 1956 this is another entry from Clarke in the Masterworks Science fiction series. Clarke concerns himself with the big picture in fact the biggest of pictures, a search for a superior intelligence that will oversee the cosmos: a guiding hand perhaps for humanity. In his 1953 novel Childhoods End it was the seemingly benevolent overlords who took human life to a further stage in their development. In the 1948 short story the Sentinel that was later opened out into 2001 A Space Odyssey in 1968: Clarke was again looking forward to man's relationship to the universe and searching perhaps for that all powerful being. The City and the Stars takes place much further in the future when man had conquered the galaxy, but his empire had collapsed and his descendants have taken refuge back on their home planet earth. Perhaps they never did find that omnipresent intelligence that was the subject of so many of their dreams, instead they came across the invaders who beat them back to earth where they have fabricated a city (Diaspar) controlled by machines and are content to live and revel in their immortality, but frightened to look up to the stars.Clarke's search for that all knowing intelligence has nothing to do with religion. It is nothing that can be invented internally, one of his characters sums up what might be in Clarke's mind “he (man) suffered from an incurable malady which, it seemed attacked only homo sapiens amongst all the intelligent races of the universe. That disease was religious mania. Throughout the earlier part of its history the human race had brought forth an endless succession of prophets, seers, sages, and evangelists who convinced themselves and their followers that to them alone were the secrets of the universe revealed."Diaspar has not had a human newborn for ten million years, then along comes Alvin a unique event. There have been a few other "uniques" recorded in the history bank memories of the machines, but they have all disappeared. As Alvin approaches adulthood he feels the confines of the city and starts to look outside. His escape fuels the story and once again homo sapiens are reaching for the stars. Like other Clarke novels this is a story of a search for something else and readers have to go with the flow and allow themselves to be swept along by Clarke's vision, however opaque that maybe. Arthur C Clarke was a fine writer and storyteller, he was able to put flesh onto the skeletons of his visions and so in this novel the futuristic city of Diaspar is lavishly described. He is able to place his readers into a world that he invents without resorting to pages of background material. He is largely free from the sexism and racism that can mar other writers of this period. One can still pick up his novels and feel the wonder even if the world of science fiction writing has now moved on from the sometimes naive writing of the period. I was hooked from the start and stayed with it till the end 4 stars.
    • 3/5
      Only two settlements remain on Earth, and seemingly never the twain shall meet. An adventurous spirit instigates a chain of events which connects the separated races and makes contact with alien entities.This isn't my favourite Clarke novel. The science is functional, used more to expand the reader's horizons than to expound on the laws of physics. It has a YA adventure feel to it, short and fast-paced. Characters make flitting appearances, notably a love interest whose involvement promised so much but yielded so little. For the right audience, I can see the attractions of this novel, but for me it's not one that leaves an imprint.
    • 5/5
      This is a beautiful novel of the far future. I much prefer this to my schoolboy memories of 2001: A Space Odyssey (though, to be fair, I ought to reread that to form an adult opinion). In this far future, humanity has withdrawn from its galactic empire and retreated to the safety of a mega city on Earth, Diaspar, for the last billion years. The inhabitants live a thousand years and their memories are preserved in an archive to be reborn in the future; thus there are no children, and a stagnant society wholly ignorant of the world outside the city walls. The central character, Alvin, is different and yearns to explore the city confines. When he finally manages to do so, he makes discoveries that will lead to seismic change for his home city and a confrontation with its lost distant past. This is beautifully and simply told and, especially in the first half, carries a real sense of wonder and otherworldliness that a lot of more recent SF lacks in my view. A wonderful read.
    • 5/5
      The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke – This is a truly amazing book about the future of the human race and its civilizations. It was first published in 1956 and has been called Clarke’s finest book by some. It was also nominated for the Best Science Fiction Book of All Time award by Locus in 1978. Millions of years in the future, Earth’s human population has been divided into two huge cities. Diaspar is a totally-enclosed city where the people never go outside and have achieved eternal life. Lys is a smaller civilization were people enjoy outdoor activities, communicate with each other through their thoughts, and they are not eternal. Unfortunately, the populations of Lys and Diaspar have no contact with each other. However, Alvin is different from his fellow Diaspar citizens and he finds a way to get out of the city and visits Lys where he becomes friends with Hilvar. The two of them explore wilderness terrain around Lys and eventually explore several star systems, and change the course of human civilizations. This is a fascinating tale of the complex future of the Universe and humanity. I enjoyed it very much.
    • 5/5
      A grand leap forward. One billion years.
    • 3/5
      A billion years into the future, a young man is born in the only remaining city on Earth, which ha been completely closed off to the outside, and feels the urge to explore.This is Arthur C. Clarke's first novel, the fifth novel of his that I have read, and now I feel like I don't have to read any more by him. I get him, I think. Clarke's fiction tackles very big ideas and very big timescales, ranging from the dawn of humanity in 2001 to the far, far future in this novel. He is concerned with the future evolution of mankind, which is tied to getting off the planet and even out of the galaxy. Without such evolution, we stagnate. His ideas are so big, they become remote, and it becomes difficult for this reader to relate to his characters, who often seem to function as mouthpieces, or engage with his stories. Once again, Clarke fails to produce any realistic female characters, and for a visionary who can imagine humankind's far future, he seems incapable of placing a woman in a role other than secretary or concubine. This quality doesn't endear him to me. But as concerned as he is with humanity, the human element seems to be missing from his novels. His ideas are fascinating, but his people seem lacking.My favorite novel by Clarke is 2001. The rest were interesting and thought-provoking, but I'm not sure I'd call them required reads.Reading science fiction classics; available for free loan to Amazon Prime members on Kindle. (2013)
    • 5/5
      Oh wow. This is one brilliant SF book. Its scope begins narrow (and slightly confusing) and becomes so wide it's almost overwhelming. From one city on a very distant future Earth, you travel (as the title suggests) to the stars and back and then piece together the history of humankind that spans billions of years. It reads as an adventure (Alvin's, the main character of the book), but woven into it a lot of issues are tackled such as religion, the stagnation of the human race (with two completely opposite examples), the achievement of scientific perfection, mortality vs immortality and most of all, fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of being discovered.The only thing I can complain about is that the science in it is at best iffy and most of the technology used is considered so advanced that it just works and we don't care how or if it makes any sense - or is regarded almost as being magic. It might annoy some people, but it is not the focus of the book and I accepted it as such.I recommend this book to anyone, be it a fan of science fiction or not.
    • 4/5
      An ambitious epic set in humanity's distant future, addressing cultural stagnation and the human need to grow and transform. The first two-thirds (the Earth-based sections), are the more interesting; after that, it feels like it becomes unbalanced, as all sorts of new ideas and revelations come crowding in thick and fast, without time for the story to properly absorb them. While it is set against a backdrop of uncounted millennia, it's actually very hard to feel the weight of all that time (and not just because the city of Diaspar is a closed system), and on top of that, I find the characterisation to be fairly thin. Having said that, it is absolutely *chock-full* of ideas that have echoed so strongly through the SF that came afterwards (e.g. the control over matter and space, the seamless communications, non-corporeal intelligence being a goal for human evolution, the computer-run city, and what we'd now call virtual reality), and that certainly made it worth reading.
    • 5/5
      This is one of my favorite Clarke novels. It centers on Alvin, the first child born in ten million years in Diaspar, the city of the title, the last city on Earth. He's a "unique" rather than someone reborn from the Hall of Creation, and unique in wanting to go beyond the bounds of the city. Diaspar is a completely enclosed and stagnant culture, on an Earth so old the oceans are gone and there's no longer a moon. This is a slim, fast reading book of 196 pages, well-written, thought-provoking and makes a good introduction to Clarke. It deals with a lot of his trademark themes of transcendence, immortality and exploration and is interesting and unusual in treating of a far future Earth. I actually prefer this book to more famous Clarke novels such as Childhood's End and Rendezvous with Rama.
    • 5/5
      Some reactions upon reading this book in 1990. Spoilers follow.Like Clarke’s Childhood’s End, this book uses the metaphor of childhood to weave a story of loss and gain, the poignancy of innocence lost, and adventure. Protagonist Alvin’s adventures propel man from the fearful adolescent of Diaspar’s and stagnation in Lys to its place -- again -- among the stars. Clarke builds, block upon block, a suspenseful story that moves ever outward. We start the narrative in a cave (at least the image of one) and end with the stars, with the illusion and threat of white worms to the reality of Vanemonde’s pure mentality and the threat of the Mad Mind which will be freed one day. The people of Earth, locked in decadence, are the new children of the cosmos. The other intelligences of the cosmos and Man have left the universe. As in Childhood’s End, transcendence is a theme. It is also, as critics have noted, a “what’s over the next hill” story. The novel obviously owes its lyrical, sweeping, poignaint, grandiose tone not only to John W. Campbell’s “Night” and “Twilight”, but also Clarke’s reading of Olaf Stapledon’s and his uniquely sweeping vistas. Clarke may not have been the first to address some typically sf themes in this novel, but they seem early examples of the treatments: specifically I’m talking about the dichotomy of the contrasting societies of Diaspar and its physical sciences and Lys with its mental and biological sciences society. Clarke, in this novel, seems to have been one of the first to think of the computer as a tool for social administration. Diaspar, though a stagnant place, has some interesting features: storing popular, well-liked art, the simulations (Clarke was quick to grasp this feature of computerized information processing -- in essence, what we would today call virtual reality), its twisted byways. This novel is also interesting for its religious themes. There is a rationalized form of reincarnation with the Hall of Creation. Man -- with the creation of the Mad Mind and Vanemonde -- assumes the role of Creator God and transcends the universe, and there is a prophet and his last disciple who faithfully awaits his return over millions of years and the Master’s robot servant -- compelled to silence least he reveal the truth of the Master. Clarke chides religions who insist they alone are true, calls the religious impulse a uniquely human aspect. Yet the Master’s message appeals to alien and human, and Clarke takes a ecumenical viewpoint in saying a religion that appealed to so many must have had much that was true and noble, even if the master’s evangelical message of miracles and prophecies was false and eventually deluded even its speaker. There is also the interesting biology of the polyp patiently awaiting his master and the robot who -- at story’s end -- becomes a messanger to the galaxy of man’s rebirth. I liked many other elments of scenes of this novel: Vanemonde’s childlike state, Clarke’s use of immortality and the Halls of Creation though I’m not sure I agee with Clarke’s ideas about immortality leading to cultural stagnation and the necessity of ending. He sees immortality destroying personal intimacy by eliminating the need for the family and procreation and dulling life by taking the cutting, driving edge of death away. I also liked the legend of Shalmirane which turns out to be a myth to cover up Man’s cowardly retreat to Earthly isolation and stagnation, the starship buried in the sand, Alvin eventually questioning whether or not he’s just been obsessively selfish, and, of course, the eerie city of Diaspar at the end of time. Lastly, I liked Alvin being a rogue agent, a sport in the social planning of the closed system of Diaspar specifically intended to revolutionize, abolish, and change that system.
    • 5/5
      In this timeless, classic dystopia we can travel from a closed, isolated city-world to the vast, unknown universe. An early masterpiece from Clarke...
    • 3/5
      The best part of The City and the Stars is the city of Diaspar, home to the eternal civilization in whose midst we find ourselves as the story begins. I quickly fell in love with Diaspar's immortality, and knew that this novel was a keeper. I was, however, somewhat disappointed with the way things played out. Clarke, evidently less enamored with his own creation than I am with it, has his protagonist (Alvin) come to view Diaspar as an unsatisfactory society hemmed in by its need for stasis. Unfortunately for us, Alvin's increasingly far-fetched journeys never seem to lead him anywhere as interesting as the place he started from.Still, the fantastic opening makes up for the lackluster finale. My take: Worth reading if you get the chance.
    • 4/5
      One of the classics of the genre, first published in 1956, but a chilly read withal. It is set in the far distant future, in the city of Diaspar -- a city that its residents believe to be the last home of humankind, and a place they can never leave. One person is born with a unique personality; unlike the other residents, he is not living a long series of lives, one after the other, but has appeared de novo. Of course, he sets forth to solve the mysteries around Diaspar, the fate of human kind, the stars, etc. etc. Interesting, but the people in it don't seem very human.
    • 4/5
      As with the majority of A. C. Clarke's work, the idea is excellent, but also as with a lot of his work, the book itself reads like a film. This is not to say it is a bad thing, just a little odd once you realise it. As for the story you have your post `incident' society that has adapted into something alien but perceivable to ourselves, and of course the lead character is the agent of change. The world Clarke has constructed in this environment is interesting, and provides a reflection of a fundamentally protectionist society with an all powerful but benevolent Big Brother. The characterisation unfortunately is lacking substance, though the ancillary characters of the book are interesting and diverse enough, the protagonist `every-individual' is to put it simply, a bit boring. This is not to say the book itself is boring, there is more than enough to guarantee reading through to the end, it is just a little disappointing and idealistic.
    • 4/5
      Its a good story. It can be a little long winded at times, and the lead character, Alvin, isn't very developed beyond a need to find something new.
    • 4/5
      When Clarke passed away earlier this year, I decided to read a book of his I hadn't read before as a tribute. I chose "The City and the Stars". What is most remarkable about this book, is that it was published in 1955, and Diaspar still feels very much like a city of the future. Without giving away any fun surprises, I can assure the potential reader that they won't be encountering clunky examples of now defunct technology, and they will be treated to more than a few examples of technology that have you wondering if Clarke had himself a time machine hidden away in Sri Lanka for research expeditions to the future.While the city of Diaspar and its inner workings are well developed, the characters are a bit underdeveloped, but adequte for the purpose. Clarke's novel is really a novel of ideas - reflections on culture, progress, and synergy. It's what Clarke does best, and he leaves the rounding out of the characters, even the city's most unique citizen Alvin, to the reader.To get a sense of the far future from words penned over half a century ago is a testimony to Clarke's wonderful imagination. A most fitting tribute and highly recommended if you are in the mood for contemplating the passage of vast expanses of time.
    • 4/5
      The City and the Stars is the story of humanity's last city, and the one man who wants nothing more than to leave it. The city, Diaspar, is a huge, enclosed environment, where the last vestiges of mankind has retreated after leaving the stars. Maintained by incredible and infallible machines, Diaspar has stood for a billion years, its immortal inhabitants living life after life, with periods of rest in the great memory banks of the city in between. Outside of the great barriers Earth has died, become nothing but a giant desert. Safe in the city, humans have lost their natural curiosity and cannot bear the thought of leaving the safety of their city. So it goes on, in stasis, until a man who has never lived before is suddenly brought forth by the computers, without the mental barriers, who goes about attempting to leave.This story was a good enough read, but it never truly gripped me. Mankind has apparently edited out all the traits it found undesirable, so the characters all seem to be paragons of patience and understanding. While this is all well and good from the perspective of future society, it makes it harder to identify properly with most of them. The only flaw they seem to have retained is fear.Clarke is masterful when it comes to describing the society of the future, however. The insights into the structure and machinery behind the city is inspired. I did at one point think that the insistence on the infallibility of the computers and machines was a bit too much, especially as the expectation was never reversed by a breakdown, but that's nitpicking. The glimpses into the great forgotten past are the most interesting of all. As Alvin, the main character, finally gets out and about and stumbles over the remains of galactic civilisation, we are at Clarke's greatest strength; the incomprehensible artefacts that clearly have much story behind them, but whose true purpose are never revealed to us. No one but Clarke can write mystery like this so masterfully, and I could easily get lost in the speculation.Of course, this is also the most frustrating part of Clarke's writing, knowing that the answers I so want will not come.Overall, it is a good book, especially if your tastes lean towards the "science" part of science fiction. Clarke is a artisan at world building, but the characters leave something to be wanted.
    • 4/5
      "Diaspar is not merely a machine, you know -- it is a living organism, and an immortal one. We are so accustomed to our society that we can't appreciate how strange it would have seemed to our first ancestors. Here we have a tiny, closed world which never changes except in its minor details, and yet which is perfectly stable, age after age. It has probably lasted longer than the rest of human history."Alvin is a young man coming of age in a static society, in an enormous city, far, far in the future. Once, humanity had reached the stars. But something had happened to cause a retreat. At the expense of growth, we achieved stability. Alvin, uniquely, is not satisfied with this. He feels a need to explore, to discover what else might be out there, to learn about the past and find a new future.Like many of Clarke's novels, this is primarily about a big idea, rather than characters. But what an idea! Mere survival, let alone stability, on the time-scale depicted here, is a towering achievement. In the hands of a lesser writer, this would have been little more than a story of rebellion against stultification. It's easy to support the lone hero against the forces that would have him conform. But Clarke manages to put both sides of the case. Is Alvin right to risk so much, for such uncertain rewards?Recommended for Clarke fans, or those who like thinking about deep time.