The City and the Stars and the Sands of Mars - By Arthur C. Clarke

INTRODUCTION

It is a matter of great satisfaction to me that The City and the Stars has been continuously in print ever since its first publication in 1956. Its precursor, Against the Fall of Night, is also still in print. Some years ago, this fact caused much confusion to a psychiatrist friend of mine.

She was examining a patient who also happened to be one of my readers. (This was not, she assured me, part of his problem.) They started discussing the plotline of the last novel they’d read and quickly found themselves in complete disagreement over details. In fact, the patient gave such a lucid and coherent account of the story he remembered that the doctor— who was convinced that everything happened quite differently— began to wonder which of them was in need of treatment.

It turned out, of course, that the psychiatrist had read The City and the Stars, the patient Against the Fall of Night— and neither knew that the other novel existed. As such a situation could lead to tragic results, I have now been careful to insert cross-references in both books.

Though this story is set more than a billion years in the future, computer technology has already almost caught up with me. Anyone who has played interactive video games will feel right at home in “The Cave of the White Worms.” Not for the first time, I feel that I am involved in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But there is another “prophecy,” on the very last page of the story, whose truth or falsehood neither I nor any other man will ever know:

One day the energies of the Black Sun would fail and it would release its prisoner. And then, at the end of the Universe, as Time itself was faltering to a stop, Vanamonde and the Mad Mind must meet each other among the corpses of the stars.

I can still remember— half a lifetime later!— feeling that something outside of me was dictating those words, and even now they raise the hairs on the back of my neck.

For I appear to have anticipated, by about twenty years, one of the most unexpected results of modern cosmology. My “Black Sun” is obviously a Black Hole (the term did not come into use until the 1960s), and in 1974 Stephen Hawking made the stunning discovery that Black Holes are not permanent but can “die,” just as I suggested. (To be technical, they “evaporate” by quantum tunneling.) And then they can become informational white noise sources, shooting out (if you wait long enough) anything you care to specify. Including Mad Minds….

I cannot help wondering if I have also anticipated— and even explained— another creature in the cosmic zoo. The Universe of today’s astronomers is a far more violent and exotic place than it was believed to be only a generation ago. Among its most surprising features are tightly focused beams of energy, jetting from the hearts of galaxies and extending out across thousands of light years.

“Star Wars”? Let us hope not. See Chapter 24 for an alternative.

For many years, and for many reasons, The City and the Stars was my best-loved book; now it has a new lease on life, both in text, and in music. To my delight and surprise, it is the basis of an oratorio by the British composer David Bedford, which should have had its premiere in London’s Royal Festival Hall by the time this edition is published.

Colombo, Sri Lanka

September 2000

PREFACE

For the benefit of those who have read my first novel, Against the Fall of Night, and will recognize some of the material in the present work, a few words of explanation are in order.

Against the Fall of Night was begun in 1937 and, after four or five drafts, was completed in 1946, though for various reasons beyond the author’s control book publication was delayed until some years later. Although this work was well received, it had most of the defects of a first novel, and my initial dissatisfaction with it increased steadily over the years. Moreover, the progress of science during the two decades since the story was first conceived made many of the original ideas naïve, and opened up vistas and possibilities quite unimagined when the book was originally planned. In particular, certain developments in information theory suggested revolutions in the human way of life even more profound than those which atomic energy is already introducing, and I wished to incorporate these into the book I had attempted, but so far failed, to write.

A sea voyage from