It's been a whole month!

I swear, I plan on making these posts more frequent.

The first of these works, Against the Fall of Night (AtFoN) is fairly short (more like a draft of the second), so I thought I'd also take notes on what got expanded, left out or added to The City and the Stars (TCatS). Overall, I really enjoyed this story. It felt simple and straightforward, and makes for pretty cozy reading.

Spoilers ahead!

More familiar ground

I've been reading through a list of speculative science fiction works, and as I've been going in chronological order, I feel like Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night and The City and the Stars are the first entries that fall into a more familiar sort of sci-fi, where religion is regarded as being out of place in an advanced society, a tool of manipulation and fear, something to be wary of. The religion-planting, mythos-designing Bene Geserit of the Dune series is one probable culmination of this sentiment.

The spooked populace

The first example of this is the people in the city of Diaspar, where Alvin (the main character) lives. They believe themselves to be the last bastion of humanity on Earth. Their isolation is explained through the threat of the Invaders, beings from outer space that robbed mankind of its galactic empire a billion years prior. This fear is myth in the sense that it does not correspond to any verifiable historical event. The technology that controls and preserves the city might as well be magic, since it's been ages since anyone understood how it works. The knowlege of its designers has been entirely lost to time.

The last remnants of mankind are refuged in a magical bubble (since no one understands how the city operates) against a mythical, demonic force (since no one actually remembers, and there are no historical records of, the Invaders). Thus, what was once the greatest scientific achievement of the race has degraded into a society of religious fear, a hyper-futuristic Dark Age.

Shalmirane

The keeper of Shalmirane, a mountain fortress said to have been the last line of defense against the Invaders at the Dawn of History (before Diaspar was closed to the world) is the last member of a cult led by a man know as The Master, who came to Earth shortly before the shuttering of Diaspar, amassing a following by preaching his faith and performing miracles. He was accompanied by a robot, who survives to meet Alvin. Both believer and robot are waiting for the “Great Ones”, whose return to Earth the Master prophesied before he died.

Alvin regards this belief as nonsense, since there is no proof that the Great Ones exist, and he pities these last two believers for the time they've wasted. He is the spirit of inquisitiveness in a world rendered barren by faith and tradition. He sneers in the face of myth and legend. Such is the role of science in this more modern science fiction.

Pre-cluttered

This novel shares one of the aspects that I really liked when reading The Book of the New Sun, and that motivated me to go through these earlier works: the clutter. Or rather, pre-clutter, things that by their obscurity now stand precariously on the edge of oblivion. As no one understands them anymore, no one could preserve or repair them if the need arose, and their purpose would be forgotten.

No one in Diaspar understands how the moving ways that convey its citizens work, or the manipulation of gravity that enables them to travel vertically without their passengers falling to their deaths. The same goes for telepathy, which is still used by people to communicate with machines. Telepathy between people (as opposed to the telepathic ordering about of machines) fell victim to this forgetfulness of the race, as Alvin discovers, upon venturing out of the city, that the inhabitants of nearby Lys have preserved this ability, and are all the more cohesive for it.

Only the governing Central Computer of Diaspar understands how the city is kept imperishable through the aeons, and even (in TCatS) how its inhabitants are disintegrated at the end of their long lives to emerge again, re-synthesized, thousands of years into the future. The day any of these systems stops working would mark the beginning of the city's end. It is not far-fetched to imagine that after this point, the ignorance of the populace about the technology that surrounds them would increase even further, until the very nature of their gadgets eludes them, like the sun dials (satellite antennas) in the Atrium of Time in The Book of the New Sun. They would then become proper clutter in the background of life.

Changes to the narrative

Of reproduction in Diaspar

People in Diaspar are immortal, with no need for sexual reproduction, as the population of any given moment could last indefinitely. However, people were occasionally born, as Alvin's father is seen to hold up his little son to see the cloud in the prologue to AtFoN. This changes in TCatS, where it is established that people are definitely sterile, and that while technically immortal, they decide to cut their own lives short by returning to the Hall of Creation, where their minds are reintegrated into the city's memory banks, and their bodies destroyed. The machines then spit them back out, after millennia, with newly synthesized bodies in their late teens. Thus, everyone in Diaspar has already had several dozen lives, each lasting about a thousand years.

This is where Alvin differs from the rest of Diaspar, in that he is the first person to have been born there for millions of years. Originally this meant natural birth, but in TCatS, where natural birth is no longer an option, it means he has never lived before. He is a freshly created personality. Whether he lay dormant in the city's memory banks since their construction, or whether he was created just before his body was synthesized, is anyone's guess.

What sets Alvin apart from the rest of the Diasparites is much more profound in the novel, since being a Unique, as they call the rare occurrence, means that he will never recall any past life, something that his peers start to do within a few years of walking out of the Hall of Creation. This also adds depth to his lack of fear towards the Outside. In the novella, this simply means that by genetic accident he is undaunted by the idea of leaving the city, whereas in the novel it is implied that his designers deliberately left this essential fear out of him.

From Keeper of the Records to Jester

The person who helps Alvin find the way out of Diaspar was originally a man called Rorden, who was in charge of the city's public records. He was replaced by the trickster Khedron, the city's Jester, whose periodic incarnations serve as a way of introducing variety into the otherwise stagnating life of the city. Where the Record Keepers of old had repeatedly helped those like Alvin escape the city, it was the first time Khedron did such a thing.

Holograms are more fun.

While Rorden simply asks the city's computer for help and receives a print-out with clues to how Alvin could escape, Khedron the Jester takes Alvin to a room where he can generate a hologram of the entire city at any point in time. By scanning through time to the earlist renditions of the city, they ultimately discover the old transport system under the tomb of Yarlan Zey, the city's chief architect.

The old man and the polyp

The last guardian of Shalmirane was originally an old man, the first that Alvin saw of such apparent age. In TCatS, he is replaced by an extraterrestrial polyp. In AtFoN, only the robots (there is only one robot in TCatS) were alive when The Master walked the Earth, but in TCatS the polyp had also accompanied the Master in his travels, or had at least followed him to Earth from the polyp's home planet. The polyp lived eternally by periodic disintegration into his constituent parts. His mind would release its hold on the little jellyfish-like creatures that formed his body, and he would cease to exist, only to come back together again by some mysterious force of nature, with his identity and memories intact.

Is that you, Yarlan Zey?

The fact that Alvin may have been dormant in the city's memory banks in TCatS allows for the possibility that he is in fact a copy of Yarlan Zey.

The taciturn robot

Alvin succeeds in taking a robot from Shalmirane back to Diaspar, in order to ask the Central Computer to make it talk to him, as his mind is locked by the Master's command. The Computer originally makes a copy of the robot without the lock, and that was that. In TCatS, a much more interesting approach was taken. The robot's command from the Master had been not to talk to anyone until the return of the “Great Ones”, so the Central Computer interfaced with the robot in such a way that it could generate a simulation of what the robot thought the return of the “Great Ones” would look like, thus bypassing the lock and freeing the robot's memories.

You're only tough in your small town

Human beings are impervious to disease in both works, but in TCatS it is suggested that this may only apply to terrestrial pathogens, as we see Hilvar (called Theon in AtFoN) explaining the concepts of bacteria, fungi, and viruses as he advises Alvin not to venture out onto a planet that's particularly rife with strange plant life.

Planet-hopping

The pure consciousness, Vanamonde, originally finds Alvin and his companion from Lys on the first planet that they land on when they reach the constellation of the Seven Suns, whereas in TCatS they try several planets before being overtaken by this being with no anchorage in time and space.

Things that were added in The City and the Stars

A love [dis]interest

Alystra has been Alvin's lover for some time at the point the story takes place. Alvin, however, shows a strange disinterest, as he feels nothing for her. It is expected of the youths in Diaspar to pursue sexual relationships with various partners, but that doesn't quite do it for Alvin. Later on, upon encountering children in Lys, he realizes that what's missing from relationships in Diaspar is love and the prospect of reproduction, once the ultimate goal of sex, and that Diaspar doesn't realize the price it has paid to achieve immortality.

You can open your own door, sweetheart.

The author makes it a point that, since true equality between the sexes had been achieved in Diaspar, there was no more need for chivalry or any preferential treatment towards either sex. When Alvin gives Alystra his coat in the air vent at the Tower of Loranne, it is out of pure sympathy, and she would have done the same, had the roles been reversed.

No sleep till Brooklyn

The citizens of Diaspar never sleep. It is suggested that this may actually depend on a sedentary lifestyle, since Alvin does sleep after trekking through the forests of Lys.

No teeth?

Being born artificially, people in Diaspar have deviated a bit from Nature's original. Some changes include internally stored genitals that emerge only when needed, and apparently a lack of teeth, nails, the navel, and any body hair from the neck down. This makes for a weird visual, especially the absence of teeth and nails, since people in Diaspar do eat, and I would imagine that being able to scratch any surface would still be convenient in day-to-day life.

Not-so-eternal sunshine

Diaspar remains forever sunlit, naturally by day and artificially by night, except for a “rare and unpredictable obscuration” that is sometimes observed over its central park. This is perhaps suggesting that there is in fact moisture in the air outside the city, and that clouds for occasionally over its dome.

The Sagas

Entertainment in Diaspar had to be well planned for, in order to keeps its millions of citizens occupied for the rest of eternity, so the designers of the city created the Sagas, a series of perfectly immersive simulations that function as videogames for the youths of Diaspar.

Fake it till you make it!

In the end it is through the Sagas that the agoraphobia of the Diasparites is cured. We see Jeserac, Alvin's old teacher, being put through a simulation where he is accompanied out of the city by its designer, Yarlan Zey. Zey reasons through the motives of the city's founders in implanting the fear of the outside in the population, hoping that by understanding his fears, Jeserac will be able to exist outside of Diaspar. The experiment succeeds, and Jeserac wakes up to find himself in Lys, unafraid.

We'll blast you into the next millennium, boy!

Although there is no violence or crime in Diaspar, the need for punishment does arise from time to time, in which cases, the culprit is submitted to “the only penalty that Diaspar could impose—that of being banished into the future before their current incarnation had ended”. Imagine pissing people off to the point where they decide to feed you back into the machine and deal with you whenever it decides to spit you back out.

Are you really here?

The people of Diaspar often meet each other through holographic projections so life-like that it is considered rude for first meetings, as one party might be completely unaware that the other is not there in person.

BtrFS really is the future.

Diaspar's memory banks are said to exist in triplicate, so that if a portion of the data becomes corrupted in one unit, the other two enable the system to correct it. This is reminiscent of modern-day self-healing file systems.