![]() ![]() When Alvin is summoned to the Council of Diaspar and tell them what he has discovered, he is treated with suspicion and the offer of meeting with the government of Lys declined. The old man tells of being the follower of ‘The Master’, a person who arrived on Earth after the invasion.Īlvin persuades the old man to allow him to have control over a robot, and despite the protestations of the governors of Lys, returns to Disapar with the robot in tow. Alvin attempts to discover the mysterious background of the robot, as it seems that they date back to the time millions of centuries ago of The Invaders. With his new friend Theon, Alvin meets an old man who is looked after by three strange robots. Lys has been aware of Diaspar’s existence, but has wanted no connection to it for thousands of years. With his friend Rorden, who is the Keeper of the Records, Alvin’s explorations lead him to find an underground transport system that links Diaspar to the city of Lys. Alvin is a young man who lives there and yearns to discover what the world was once like and explore. It is the last remaining city on the planet, so the residents believe, and is surrounded by encroaching desert. Original Startling Stories versionĭiaspar is a city on Earth, but a planet not thousands but thousands of millions of years in the future from now. Nevertheless, I have girded my literary loins and dived in. The shorter novella version I read as one of The Collected Stories, and (again, from what I can remember) that elegiac mood seemed strong there as well. However, with the passage of time, all that I remember of it now is the vast length of time the book covers, as it is set thousands of years in Earth’s future, and the fact that it was sad. I was just beginning to read Science Fiction and was grabbing any Clarke I could get my hands on. When I first found this, about 40 years ago, I was immediately impressed. However, this 1948 edition is the version I first read. It is probably worth pointing out that the book was revised again into a novel called The City and the Stars in 1956, and this is the longest and probably the best-known version today. It was a work Arthur would keep coming back to, however. The version I am reviewing is the one where the novella of 1948 was first expanded into a novel and published in 1953. This year I’ve gone for an older work – Against the Fall of Night was his first novel, first published as a story in 1948. Last year it was The Hammer of God, one of his last novels. It has, without prior planning, become a tradition here to read something of his around his birthday (December 16 th). Housman – the inspiration for Clarke’s title)Īs we get to December I begin to feel, once again, the now yearly desire to read old Arthur C Clarke. ‘Here on the level sand, between the sea and land, what shall I do or write against the fall of night?’ (A. ![]()
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