Arthur C. Clarke is my favorite science fiction writer and one of my favorite writers in any genre. I decided somewhat recently that I wanted to read all of his books. Last year, I went through his entire collection of short stories, spanning over 60 years of a long career. I'll eventually go back to it and write my thoughts on it, but for now, I want to talk about The City and the Stars, a novel from 1953.
I decided to start with The City and the Stars because I had read the novella a short time ago, and this novel is an expansion of it. I wanted to approach it while the novella was still fresh in my memory. This is one of his earlier novels, but in it, there are already many of the aspects that make me like this writer so much. His heartfelt enthusiasm for the expansion of the human mind, both through technical and scientific progress as well as the push to make man a truly intelligent entity in this universe, meaning, an ethical being with respect for life, an unending, almost childish curiosity about the cosmos, and the vigor to improve his knowledge of all things. The motto of this novel, "No true intelligence can be hostile," presents a very sunny, optimistic view of life, and it's not a completely ridiculous position if you understand what he means by intelligence. Like always, it depends on the definition, and in his own terms, I agree with him. His faith in humanity is contagious, and I very much enjoy how this novel and his other works make me feel. I mostly come from the other end of the spectrum, being a shy pessimist about things, so reading Clarke is like opening a door to beautiful, reassuring world that I usually don't tap into by myself.
The City and the Stars is basically a coming-of-age tale. You have a boy named Alvin, who is the personification of youthful rebellion against the decadence and stale traditions that hamper humanity from achieving its true potential. Here, as in many of his novels, this potential is expressed mostly as the courage and power to expand the horizon beyond the stars. Space exploration and the necessary knowledge to do so. This is all told almost like a fable. This novel is not at all like the technical, hard science fiction he would write later on. The story is straightforward, and the characters are simple but effective. Each city represents a facet of human behavior or potential, and the characters are very much one-note, being the expression of single aspects of the emotional spectrum, lik
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