Time to recommend a book again. This time, one by Arthur C. Clarke, one of my three favorites when I was younger (Heinlein and Asimov were the other two, in case you were wondering). Arthur C. Clarke is the verbose one. His writing is poetic, polished and intelligent; reading it is like driving a really nice sports car. Furthermore, he has a talent for creating situations and environments which challenge you to embrace and encompass them, ideas that inspire awe and wonder. That said, his characters lack a certain variety, and there is a somewhat cold repetitiveness of style.

Michael Chricton exemplifies the extreme end of this flaw. While interesting, all his stories tend to be the same: a group of disparate and highly intelligent people are brought together in an environment where high technology has wrought terrible problems; they explore, theorize, discover, elucidate, and eventually about half of them die violently. The end.

Clarke is not so strikingly repetitive, but he does not range far from his base; he revisits more generalized themes and impressions. His novels tend to focus on grand, poetic mysteries, with intelligences far greater than our own, mysteries of tremendous age, artifacts of unimaginable size and scope. His protagonists tend to all be cooly rational, and even his characters with flaws tend to be calm and reasonable. His novels are about discovery, awe and grandeur.

The City and the Stars definitely fits this profile, but it does so in a fascinating way. Set in the extreme future, the billion-year-old city of Diaspar, thought to be the last remnant of mankind, is frozen in a stagnant but wondrous state. With technology that can do almost anything, the last humans live in a utopian state. Death has been beaten, and Clarke outlines a wonderful system by which these immortals can escape boredom. After a thousand years of life, a person selects which memories they wish to carry forward, and then is converted into stored energy patterns for a hundred thousand years. They awaken as a nearly-full-grown adult, but without access to their memories, and spend decades learning everything anew as a blank personality. After a certain time, their youth ends and their full memories return, and they pick up life where they left off, perhaps with a new perspective from having experienced life afresh. People are resurrected randomly enough so that they rarely encounter the same people in consecutive lives. Everything is safe and luxurious; people can indulge in any pastime or career they wish, with an endless supply of art, knowledge, and philosophy. Any item can be summoned at a thought, any adventure created in perfect simulation. The people have fallen into such an idyllic slumber that they now fear even the idea of the outside, a fear that even goes beyond the legendary past when faceless invaders beat a triumphant mankind back to its home planet, forbidding it to strike out into space again.

Of course, the story must be about the one citizen who rebels. Alvin is a curiosity: he is the first person to be born in Diaspar in ten million years, with no memories or past lives. His existence is part of a mysterious and ancient plan laid out by those who created the City, emphasized by Alvin’s prime characteristic: he wants out. And that’s where the story begins.

As is usual with Clarke’s novels, you are offered a wealth of speculation and scenarios on grand ideas that allow you to explore issues you might never have considered before. Would you want to be immortal, considering the pitfalls? Would you pay the price? Would you be satisfied with the necessities forced by immeasurably long life? And of course, Clarke serves up grand mysteries, a billion years’ worth of history for your imagination to fill in, strange planets only briefly described that you might wonder at what else exists there. He creates environments that you’d love to explore, and leave it up to you and your imagination to do so or not.

The City and the Stars is at the very least an engaging read, and along with Childhood’s End, one of Clarke’s best novels. Strangely, however, the novel is no longer printed by itself, but bundled with another of Clarke’s books, The Sands of Mars. Why, I don’t know. But it’s worth it to read this story, at least.