The City and The Stars - A Comparison of The Two Books

A Comparison of The Two Books

Clarke had assumed that the new version would simply supplant the earlier, but in fact a large number of readers preferred the earlier novel, and thus, rather unusually, both versions of the novel are in circulation with approximately equal popularity.

Against the Fall of Night opens with a fragment, apparently originally written in isolation in 1935, in which all Diaspar has fallen silent and Alvin is called out by his father to see something in the sky. Alvin's father says he has only ever seen one other. It is a cloud. This scene dramatises the "desert at the end of time" setting, but is not quite consistent with the detail that we are later told that Rorden had never seen the stars until Alvin shows him the outside.

In Against the Fall of Night Alvin is the only child to be born in Diaspar for seven thousand years, and the people of Diaspar are described as immortal, but their lives appear to be simply extremely extended—the point is not very clear. In The City and the Stars the people of Diaspar live an endless sequence of limited lives, being reissued bodies from the Hall of Creation and between lives spending long ages frozen in the Memory Banks. In both, Lys's rejection of "the false dream" of immortality is key to its break with Diaspar. In The City and the Stars Alvin is a "Unique", a person who, anomalously, has apparently never lived before. Only a handful of previous cases are known.

In Against the Fall of Night Alvin is assisted in his search to leave Diaspar by Rorden, the Keeper of the Records. In The City and the Stars Rorden is replaced by Khedron the Jester, whose duty it is in Diaspar to introduce calculated amounts of disorder from time to time and consequently has access to unusual places. But Alvin's success is really made possible by the tacit consent of the Central Computer. This had no real equivalent in Against the Fall of Night, showing the new possibilities created by computers in the post-war years. In the earlier novel, there are master robots, but they are multiple and do not seem to have the active supervisory role of the Central Computer. The Central Computer is not a single machine but the primary sentient Artificial Intelligence that oversees all the computing power in Diaspar. The Central Computer in Against the Fall of Night is merely a functioning computer demonstrating no self-awareness whatsoever. In The City and the Stars it talks and has a definite personality.

There are a few differences in the plot concerning the robot. In the earlier novel, the Master's follower was human, and he had three robots, of which one was lent to Alvin, whereas in the later novel the follower is extraterrestrial and has only the one robot. As was noted above, in The City and the Stars the block in the robot is overcome by an illusion of the apocalypse. In Against the Fall of Night a duplicate of the robot is created which is identical except for the block.

In The City and the Stars, there is somewhat more circumstantial detail about the life of Diaspar. For example, there are "sagas", total-immersion virtual reality entertainments where you apparently lose your outside knowledge. Alvin has a female lover, Alystra, whom he abandons (sex and even a degree of romantic love continue in Diaspar although unconnected with reproduction or family life). When citizens re-emerge from the Hall of Creation they are assigned "parents" who look after their social education, and a tutor. Though new citizens emerge as physically formed adults they do not remember their past lives until about the age of twenty, and apparently it is not mentioned to them until they have a sort of "facts of life" talk. At any rate it was not mentioned to Alvin. Little of this appears in Against the Fall of Night.

In Against the Fall of Night, Alvin is apparently a literal child, the first for 7,000 years. There is no explanation of whether this interval is normal or whether children are expected at all.

In The City and the Stars, the city of Diaspar was apparently planned as a closed community, and its true past deliberately obliterated. The Uniques, it seems, were a device added by the original planners, who thought that a safety device should be left, to test periodically for what lay outside the city. This makes the role of Alvin somewhat less independent: whereas in Against the Fall of Night he was an adventurer, albeit "the first to be lucky", in The City and the Stars it seems at the end that he may have been a pawn. The escape route from Diaspar involves the "Tomb of Yarlan Zey" in both books; in The City and the Stars Yarlan Zey was apparently a leading figure in the planners of Diaspar, but may also have been one of those secretly planting the Uniques.

At the end, when leaders from Diaspar travel to Lys, in Against the Fall of Night they are apparently able simply to master their fears, whereas in The City and the Stars powerful psychology is necessary, and Alvin's tutor Jeserac experiences a "saga" in which Yarlan Zey explains how Diaspar was founded and releases him from his fears.

There is a slight difference in the way the two books treat the "Master" and the "Great Ones". In Against the Fall of Night it is eventually revealed that the Great Ones were the people of the Empire who had left the galaxy. The Master is presented as a wise man, a philosopher, whose teaching was misunderstood and made a religion by superstitious followers. In The City and the Stars, however, he is a religious leader who uses trickery to advance his goals; the block on the robot was imposed in order to keep his secrets safe (although he did teach much that was wise and noble). In the later novel the "Great Ones" are not identified at the end of the novel as they are in the earlier version.

In general, in Against the Fall of Night the false history and the dystopic society seem to have grown up more organically; whereas in The City and the Stars they seem to have been more deliberate creations. While it is unproblematic for Diaspar, it is less clear why Lys should then have the same doctored history.