The City and the Stars

The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the immortal city of Diaspar nothing changes - until Alvin is created, the first new human in eons, and the first to ask what lies beyond the city's gilded walls.

Diaspar is populated by immortal humans who stave off boredom with art and science, and by a process of artificial reincarnation that allows them to cycle through stages of existence and storage. The agoraphobic inhabitants long ago imprisoned themselves in the face of an alien threat, becoming risk-averse and incurious, content to exist in a labyrinth with no exit.

Alvin, though, is a Unique. He has no memories of past lives to discover when he reaches adulthood, because he is a completely new person. In his beautiful, self-contained home, Alvin finds himself growing restless at its inhabitants' futile, inward-facing lives. But there is nowhere else to go - beyond the walls they are surrounded by a cold desert: all that remains of Earth. Alvin attempts to learn long-forgotten secrets and is aided by a Jester named Khedron (part of the city planning was to insert agents of controlled chaos to keep things interesting), a man who describes himself as "a critic, not a revolutionary" (57).

What Alvin finds outside could either annihilate the highly polished remnants of human civilization or grant them a freedom they never imagined, and possibly begin a rejuvenation the species so desperately needs.

There is no writer quite like Clarke, who delights in introducing mysterious landscapes and contemplating huge swaths of time. Long-view science fiction like this can be dizzying (and sometimes defeatist, full of dying suns and senescent species), but Clarke keeps Alvin moving from discovery to discovery. There is an optimism that I find appealing, particularly since so much modern science fiction skews toward absolute dystopia.

He's also a golden age author, which leads to some drawbacks; it's a male-dominated world (the only female character worth even a passing mention is Alvin's stalker, Alystra). Clarke also expresses an insulting view of religion, calling it a "disease" to be destroyed by science, a form of irrationality inevitably overruled by superior logic. I find this incredibly narrow-minded, but it's a common philosophical difference I have with much of hard science fiction. (Clarke was a firm atheist as well as a logical positivist.)

As the title hints, this book is less about character or plot than it is about setting, so fans of Clarke's novel Rendezvous With Rama will find much more to enjoy here. Other books where setting is primary are the fantasy classic Titus Groan (first in the Gormenghast books) by Mervyn Peake and the modern speculative fiction novel The City and the City by China Mieville. You might also try Larry Niven's Ringworld if old-school sexism isn't overly bothersome to you as a reader.

Quotable:

"Diaspar had been planned as an entity; it was a single mighty machine. Yet thought its outward appearance was almost overwhelming complexity, it merely hinted at the hidden marvels of technology without which all these great buildings would be lifeless sepulchres." - 28

"No single individual, however eccentric or brilliant, could effect the enormous inertia of a society that had remained virtually unchanged for over a billion years." - 30

"Sympathy, for one whose loneliness must be even greater than his own; an ennui produced by ages of repetition; and an impish sense of fun - these were the discordant factors which prompted Khedron to act." - 58

"There was only one thing of which he could be certain now. Boredom would not be a serious problem for a considerable time to come." - 102

"Alvin would never grow up; to him the whole universe was a plaything, a puzzle to be unravelled for his own amusement. In his play he had now found the ultimate, deadly toy which might wreck what was left of human civilisation - but whatever the outcome, to him it would still be a game." - 177

The Stars My Destination

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After being abandoned to die in space, Gulliver Foyle seeks his monstrous revenge on the people who wronged him.

Gully Foyle is a man of no talents and little worth to those around him: "Of all brutes in the world he was among the least valuable alive and most likely to survive." The actions of the Vorga, a ship that receives his distress signal but passes him by, give his life new meaning. He transforms himself into an instrument of revenge, driven only by a bottomless bloodlust.

The world Foyle inhabits is classic science fiction, vivid and strange: the galaxy is heavily populated, full of human half-telepaths and grotesques. Most of the population has a limited ability to teleport from place to place using psychic power (this is called "jaunting"), a leap in technology that has radically shifted culture and the economy. Women are considered property, values are Victorian, and organized religion is an outlawed perversion. There is war between Earth and the Outer Satellites.

In the tradition of sci-fi, the woman are gorgeous and often prey to instalove with the aggressive anti-hero (though they are still fuller characters than what you'll find in, say, Larry Nivens' Ringworld). There is Jisbella McQueen, a rebel that Foyle meets in a pitch-black prison designed to foil jaunting. Then there is Robin Wednesbury, an unfortunate 'telesend' (a half-telepath: she can only broadcast her thoughts, not receive those of others) who Foyle brutally misuses. And Lady Olivia Presteign, the blind daughter of a business tycoon who can only see the infrared spectrum of light.

Add to this an insane traveling circus, the atavistic 'Scientific People', a tigerish facial tattoo, a mysterious element known as PyrE, and weird visions of a burning man, and you have a perfect example of golden age science fiction at its wildest. It's got the retro appeal of the most outlandish original Star Trek episodes, and the reforged Foyle could easily be a rough-edged version of the irresistible Captain Kirk.

Just like this.

Bester is also known for his novel The Demolished Man (1953), the first-ever winner of the Hugo Award, but I think The Stars Our Destination is a better book. The Demolished Man relies too heavily on Freudian pseudo-psychology, though its story about an impossible murder committed in a society of "Peepers" (more telepaths!), has a great starting premise with plenty of noir appeal. (Some silliness with a love interest who undergoes an infant regression knocked The Demolished Man down from a loved-it to a shaky liked-it for me.)

There is a definite connection to be made between The Stars Our Destination and Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. Both feature men on a quest for revenge who happen into large fortunes and a bit of reeducation.

For more excellent old-school sci-fi, don't miss The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. After a mysterious meteor strikes everyone on Earth blind, giant man-eating plants engineered by the Soviets start taking over the world. It's a zombie apocalypse with walking asparagus. But awesome.

Quotable:
"He was Gully Foyle, the oiler, wiper, bunkerman; too easy for trouble, too slow for fun, too empty for friendship, too lazy for love." - 18

"Olivia Presteign was a glorious albino. Her hair was white silk, her skin was white satin, her nails, her lips, and her eyes were coral. She was beautiful and blind in a wonderful way, for she could see in the infrared only, from 7,500 angstroms to one millimeter wavelengths. She saw heat waves, magnetic fields, radio waves, radar, sonar, and electromagnetic fields." - 42

Ringworld

Ringworld by Larry Niven

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


On his birthday, two-hundred-year-old human Louis Wu is startled to be recruited to a mysterious mission of exploration by a member of a long-vanished alien race.

The Puppeteers are a great concept, though perhaps their name is a bit too telling. They are a cowardly but far-sighted alien race which has decided to move house after the discovery of a giant explosion that will destroy most of inhabited space - in twenty thousand years. I thought that Nessus was the strongest character, because for him to be pedantic and dull is expected. (Whereas I expected more interesting things from a Kzin.)

If you're into detailed descriptions of a vast alien world, read Rendezvous with Rama, because the Ringworld is a tad bit disappointing and less than shocking once the explorers land. Niven is far more interested in the theories behind how such an odd artificial world could come to be than he is in inventing a new kind of alien to populate the Ringworld.

Unfortunately, the book is hugely marred by rampant sexism. Teela Brown, the human female recruited for her luck (no, I'm serious, she's lucky), is a wide-eyed innocent who needs to have everything mansplained to her by the three "males" in her group (two are aliens, but male by default, since the "females" of both their species are non-sentient. Eye roll, exasperated sigh). She's something of an idiot savant, and so obnoxious I truly hoped she would get lost and never be heard from again (unfortunately, our bad luck keeps her around until nearly the end. She's the Jar Jar Binks of Ringworld). When she does bow out (actually, she gets sold by our hero Louis Wu to a beefcake who's a dimmer bulb than herself, which is saying something), she's replaced by an even more offensive space hooker, because heaven forbid Louis Wu suffer the trip home without some nookie! I can only give Niven so much leeway for having written in the 70s. I don't think I can forgive him for Teela Brown.



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