SF Masterworks 39 - a full reworking of his first novella/novel Against the Fall of Night, is an astounding piece of future fiction reality building set aeons in the future where man has conquered and then lost space and resides in a massive automated city, where people essentially live forever with every need and want at hand. So why just Two Stars from me? Clarke's later great work was astounding because it had reality building + tension and/or mystery bound issue that needed to be resolved; i...

Such a nice written book, this, by Arthur C. Clarke !! The ideas, and their intensity, even the language at several places, used in this book surpasses at least fifteen of his other titles that I have read so far !Having published this book in 1956 is a great achievement I would say considering the imagination involved that passes a billion years into the future, by not involving simply humanity, but goes as wide as outside of space and time at one moment. This one surpasses everything ... there...

Classic fifties SF by Clarke. Widely regarded as one of his best works. So what do you know? I have to check it out.First of all, its 50's feel for SF is quite noticeable. It's mostly straight adventure with travel and discovery and a few interesting locations, notably two last cities of mankind after a LONG retreat from the galactic scene. Most of them don't even realize that they were pushed back into a self-sustaining lethargic existence without change or hope, relying on a massive computer t...

The City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clarke The City and the Stars is a science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke, published in 1956. The City and the Stars takes place one billion 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, theirs is the only city left on the planet. The city of Diaspar is completely enclosed. Nobody has come in or left the city for as lo...

Clarke wrote (or rewrote) “The City and the Stars” in 1955 and it was published in 1956. Interestingly, it’s a complete rewrite of his first novel, “Against the Fall of Night” which was rejected by John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding Science-Fiction. I have mixed feelings about this book, but overall, it was a wonderful read.Let’s start with the positives. When I said it’s a wonderful read, I mean that literally, it’s full of wonder. The hallmark of the Golden Age of science fiction is t...

One knows the situation: Just as one has found an interesting area, someone else comes and hunts one way. A great pity if the area is the whole universe and one humankind and the other overlord aliens and any violation could lead to extermination.It doesn´t really matter if it´s done to protect the incarcerated from themselves and self-extermination, everyone from them, to build an intergalactic zoo attraction or just for fun, it sucks if you can´t go out for a spaceship ride, terraforming, and

I have neglected Sir Arthur C. Clarke for far too long. Way back when I started reading science fiction I tended to read more of other two authors from the group commonly known as "Big Three of science fiction", these other two being Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. I felt their works were somehow more flamboyant and entertaining. As for Sir Arthur I read may be three of his books as I found his writing a little too dry and his science was beyond my ken. Now decades later other sf readers are s...

In Higher Speculations, a book I unsuccessfully keep recommending to people, Helge Kragh has an exasperated chapter on the subject sometimes referred to as "physical eschatology": the so-called scientific forecasting of the very distant future, where people, apparently seriously, discuss whether life will be possible 10 to the something or other years from now, when all the stars have run down and the black holes have evaporated due to Hawking radiation or whatever. The problem, of course, is th...

"When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce an emotional effect." (p. 32)In Diaspar, the echoes of the past permeate the present. According to the legends, man had traipsed across the galaxies and conquered the stars. Our spread across the cosmos, aided though it was by technological marvels unfathomed in earlier ages, eventually was terminated by a tragic encounter with an advanced race known only as the Invaders. After a series of devastati...

This hardcover edition is copy 40 of 250 produced and is signed by Robert Silverberg (Introduction) Bob Eggleton, Who produced the cover and interior illustrations.

How do you plan to spend the impeding eco-apocalypse?Personally, I'm looking forward to roaming the toasty-warm desert wastes of Australia, eating rat-on-a-stick and tracking down former politicians to have, uh... conversations about their inaction on climate change. The reason I ask is that if you read much SF then this is something you've probably thought about. I seem to come across apocalyptic scenarios every few books I read - its a common setup in the genre and speaks to a widespread inter...

The City and the Stars has tremendous personal appeal in my universe. This was the first Science Fiction book I can remember reading as a young girl. Science fiction soon became a genre that I enjoyed and Arthur C. Clarke had become a mainstay. I have wanted to reread this book for several years since joining gr to see how the book stands up to the test of time and forming minds. (view spoiler)[A brief synopsis: Diaspar is a domed city on earth billions of years in the future. The oceans have dr...

What a great story. Characters you could be friends with or who could live on your street. Well written.It's one of those stories that make you wish you were there, joining in on the adventure.I definitely have to go back over the Clarke list and see what else I missed.

4.0 to 4.5 stars. Another superb novel by one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. One of Clarke's earlier works, this is actually a re-write of [book:Against the Fall of Night|33841 and thus does not read like an early novel. Well written and full of BIG, BIG ideas it is classic Clarke. Set billions of years in the future, this is the story of a stagnant society, disconnected from the rest of the galaxy that, with the help of the main character, rediscovers it's place in the uni...

” Each discovery I’ve made has raised bigger questions, and opened up wider horizons. I wonder where it will end…” The City and the Stars is a 1956 Golden Age science fiction novel by a British author whose essays, novels and screen plays distinguished the genre and won him awards. Diaspar, a planned, controlled, subterranean, self-contained community, was founded on a deep-seated fear of the Invaders and had survived this way on Earth for billions of years. People were no longer born here, the...

The City and The Stars: Restless in a perfect future city(Also posted at Fantasy Literature)This a rewrite of his first book Against the Fall of Night (first published in 1948 in Startling Stories). There are plenty of adherents of the original version, but the revised version is pretty good too. As one of his earlier classic tales, this one features many familiar genre tropes: A far-future city called Diaspar, where technology is so sophisticated it seems like magic, a young (well not exactly,

Clarke uses the classic A-B-A storytelling format for two different cities, A and B. A- ennui. B- learning!. A again- add learning to ennui equals stuff!! We see this often in literature. Rude Vile Pigs by Leo X. Robertson is another shining example.So good that I'll let him off with telling me his protagonist's feelings like EVERY TIME or ending chapters with stuff like "She just made a promise she couldn't keep", like, okay- are you telling me the twist in the coming chapters is that she doesn...

This is an early example of far future SF by one of the Grandmasters, Arthur C. Clarke. The novel, published in 1956 is a remake of his early (but not his first published book as erroneously stated in several sources, the first being Prelude to Space, 1951) novella (from 1948) Against the Fall of Night. I read it as a part of monthly reading for December 2021 at The Evolution of Science Fiction group.The story starts in the last city on Earth, named Diaspar, with remaining a planet-wide desert....

Originally published on my blog here in June 2008.I had the impression that in my teenage years I read pretty much all of Arthur C. Clarke's output to that date. Yet I managed to miss The City and the Stars, one of his best known novels, until I picked up a copy in a secondhand bookshop recently. (I went off Clarke after a while, which explains not picking up on this omission earlier.)Far in the future, when humanity's galactic empire has risen and fallen, and alien invaders have pushed us back

To be honest, I am a little disappointed. Mr. Clarke’s works usually are brimming with ideas, which here were not the case, unfortunately. It felt like a cartoon for children – the way characters are shaped, the environment, the robots, the city, the universe… Maybe I did not get the message right; maybe this is how it was supposed to be – all the above to be just a blurred background for what the author wanted to transmit us: in isolation and without progress we regress and disappear but also t...