the city and the stars
Sir Arthur C Clarke wrote The City and the Stars in 1956. It is basically a rewrite of his earlier novel Against the Fall of Night, updated to take into account the then-nascent Information Revolution.
The city from the title is called Diaspar, the last remnant of the collapsed human galactic empire, on a dessicated, oceanless Earth. Diaspar is essentially ruled by a benevolent Central Computer, which provides for every need and want of the city’s inhabitants. In its memory banks are stored not only the patterns encoding every object that can be materialized instantaneously at an inhabitant’s whim, but also the patterns encoding every inhabitant themselves. In this way, every inhabitant has immortality. The computer materializes full-grown at regular intervals, and they can choose to dematerialize back into the memory banks, either keeping their accumulated memories, or choosing to selectively excise the parts that they don’t like. The computer also maintains the structure of the city itself, so that changes to its programming will directly result in changes to the city itself.
The main character is named Alvin, who happens to be a Unique. Unlike all the other inhabitants of the city, this is his first lifetime ever, and before him, there have only been fourteen other Uniques, who have disappeared. The novel is concerned with his desire to leave the city, and the ramifications of his actions as he attempts to achieve this goal. Of note, no other citizen of Diaspar would ever dream of leaving the city, believing everything outside is merely desert wasteland, and it is initially uncertain whether it is even possible to leave the city.
I must have read this book back when I was in college, and just re-read now, and what struck me was how the ideas in this book presage ideas in (relatively) recent science fiction movies. The city that you cannot leave, where no one except the main character ever thinks of leaving, where you can reshape the structure of the city just with thought makes me think of “Dark City”. The storage of personalities and objects in a computer’s memory banks, the recurring cycle of Unique personalities presumed to have some predestined, appointed function, the hitherto unknown remnant civilization that lives outside the city makes me thinks entirely of “The Matrix”.
Smaller bits also evoke more recent stories. The Mad Mind, an insane galactic AI that sought to destroy all life in the galaxy is locked inside a structure called The Black Sun, which will one day weaken and release the psychotic entity makes me think of the pulverized supercomputer Hactar and the planet Krikkit in Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams who are also intent on destroying all of the universe, and after a costly and deadly galactic war, are enclosed in a Slo-Time envelope that is meant to be unlock near the end of time.
The other story that I found some parallels with is City of Illusions by Ursula K Le Guin, although only really in the back-story. In The City and the Stars, Diaspar is the lone city on the planet, the last remnant of high civilization on an otherwise now-sterile Earth, after the galactic empire had shrunk, supposedly due to losing a conflict with an enigmatic race known only as the Invaders, with terms of surrender including the condition that humans would never again attempt to reach the stars. In City of Illusions, Es Toch is the lone city on an Earth whose ecosphere has reverted to a pre-industrial state, with the return of primeval forests, after the collapse of the galaxy-wide League of All Worlds, supposedly in the aftermath of losing a conflict with a race known as the Shing, with terms of surrender including the condition that humans would never build complex technology. Other than the fact that the central focus is a single city, and a journey (in one, a journey out of the city, in the other, a journey into the city), I probably associate the two stories only because I read them around the same time.
It’s interesting that while there are some ideas that seem archaic in Clarke’s story, it’s still a very interesting tale. Part of it is probably because he set it so far into the future with technology still way completely out of reach of today’s technology, let alone the technology of the 1950s, so that most of the tech is still completely in the realm of science fiction. The idea of a “Central Computer” relegated to the function of a single city seems really quaint in this era of a world-wide interconnected network of networks (although, to be fair, the Central Computer really is a network of machines rather than a single massive machine.) But the most jarring anachronisms are really cultural rather than technological, mainly in terms of assumption regarding gender roles, and these are really extremely minor points if you compare it to the outright misogyny present in other science fictional works of the early 20th century.
But the way The City and the Stars presages the Matrix reminds me of the short story Neil Gaiman wrote set in the same universe as the Matrix entitled “Goliath”, where the Agents and the Architect are not really malevolent against humanity, although they did still imprison us in a massively multiplayer consensual hallucinatory simulation, but for a far different purpose than what Morpheus thinks—not as an energy source (which I’ve always thought was absurd anyway), but as storage units, hard drive space, RAM, or maybe as processing units, each person single component of a massive 10-billion-way cluster array. Even more so than the inhabitants of Diaspar whose lives are stored in the Central Computer, the people plugged into the Matrix are part of the machine. And the reason why the machines need all this memory and CPU is to orchestrate a defense from an alien invasion.