In the story ‘The City & the Stars’ the writer Arthur C Clarke proposes a definition of the ideal machine: that “no machine may contain any moving parts”. The central character - Alvin - is different from his contemporaries because this is his first life and in some ways he is responsible for the renewal of human civilisation to come. But Alvin has a passion, to get outside of the city
and explore, an almost infectious obsession that drives his every action. Eventually, he is helped by what can only be described as a deliberate and mischievous anomaly in the computer program (called Khedron) that shows him the way. There is a fundamental paradox in the story. The city of Diaspar is a perfect place, but the world outside is not. After a long period of galactic war the city of Diaspar is the last resting place of humanity, protected from any would-be invaders by a large domed shield.
Humanity was once a star-fairing species but has been forced to adopt an insular existence. Diaspra is also a form of dystopia, offering its inhabitants all they could ever want including immortality, but inhibiting their freedom to explore the world outside.
Outside the city is the human settlement of Lys, an apparently technologically less advanced place with no interest in space travel, consisting of mortal people who have perfected mental telepathy. In Lys, Alvin meets a companion called Hilvar and together they explore the planet. Eventually they meet an ancient extraterrestrial creature and his fellow robot that were loyal to their masters
- 'The Great Ones'. Their journey leads them to the discovery of a spaceship and they are able to leave Earth and travel to meet a powerful but child-like being of pure intellect called Vanamonde, who can travel through space instantaneously. They establish a telepathic communication with the being. From this encounter they learn the truth of what happened to the rest of the human race and the terrible deeds of the insane being known as 'The Mad Mind', a form of mentality which had been imprisoned inside a black star.
Like much of Clarke’s writing, this story contains a powerful blend of credible science fiction and large ideas which border on the metaphysical. Clarke maintains a perfect balance between these two limits and demonstrates, as he does with many of his other books that he is a corking good writer, as C. S. Lewis once described him. The ‘City & the Stars’ is one of my favourite science fiction novels by Clarke. I left the book wanting to know more, about where Alvin travelled to next.
Like much of science fiction literature, there are stories which contain real parables about our actual society and in particular the two characters Alvin and Khedron are interesting. Alvin is the adventurous one, always wanted to explore what is around that next corner, over that next hill, or to climb that highest mountain. He represents the curiosity in the human species that has helped us
to migrate across the vast lands of Africa, into Europe and Asia and beyond. They don't need to have reason for their adventures, but are just inspired by the call to adventure. Khedron is the mischievous one, the person that likes to play. He represents the contrarians and the mavericks and the awkward people in our societies that just won't play ball with the normal rules. Any attempt to contain them just makes them worse.
An example of a scientist that stood out like Alvin was the American physicist Richard Feynman, who just loved to play with science for the pleasure of finding things out. He had an infectious curiosity that also made him a great scientist. An example of a scientist that was like Khedron who would act as a contrarian to the established view was the British born physicist Freeman Dyson; a man who expressed many controversial views, but also come up with many creative ideas. Another is the British scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock, celebrated for his ‘Gaia’ theory of Earth as a self-regulating system, but demonised by many in the environmental movement for his views on nuclear energy. No person is perfect, but these particular attributes of their characters have more value to society than any flaws in their personalities pointed out by others.
As we seek to develop human society towards a more perfect model, for sure we need a sense of conservatism in our actions to ensure that our civilisation is stable and able to function. But it is the characters of Alvin and Khedron that takes us to the next level. It is a bit like the ancient Chinese philosophy of yin and yang in that a stable system needs the seeds of creativity to ensure it does not stagnate, and an unstable system needs the seeds of order to ensure it does not develop into full blown anarchy. Yet, our educational systems have been developed to reward the conformist and by definition to punish those that do not. What we see as bad behaviour, may actually be a necessary component of our society playing out in that they too have a role to play in ensuring that our societies continue to evolve towards new horizons.
A key factor which protects the contrarians and the mavericks among us is the ability to conduct free speech, but this is something that has come under considerable threat even in the Western World in recent years. In particular, scientists are no longer free to express their opinions without consequences and there is always a political angle to consider in their deliberations. If they say
something that goes against the majority they may face being ostracised, banishment or the ending of their career. This is amazing considering the inquisition experience that Galileo Galilei went through at the hands of the Catholic Church in the 1600s when he pushed the view that the Earth rotated around the Sun; we appear to have learned nothing. Whilst it is true that those mavericks may express opinions which can cause offence, it is better to have an open society where such views are publicly debated. The preservation of free speech at the risk of offence has a far greater benefit to contemporaneous society than does the policy of shutting that free opinion down. Science is really the pursuit of knowledge and higher truths, and our capacity to attain that knowledge is only facilitated by the maintenance of scientific objectivity in our various societal discussions.
In the construction of a starship society what sort of a culture do we want to develop? We certainly don't want authoritarianism but neither do we want anarchy, yet some degree of both order and chaos seems essential to our progress. We have over the centuries experimented with many governance models within the different nation states of Earth, but none of them have been shown to
be perfect. The only way we will tend towards a more perfect model is to continue the tradition of free speech and allow models to play out. This would appear to be an essential social-experiment before we can put people onto a starship and have confidence that it would make the journey.
Story telling has more to tell us than just entertainment. They play out scenarios about our own civilisation and where we are going which can teach us so much about ourselves. Clarke's ‘The City & the Stars’ was a wonderful book like so many of his other books and those of other science fiction
authors. Yet, in thinking about building a city in the stars, it would seem apparent that we firstly need to figure out how to properly build our own cities on Earth. This is not to say that we must perfect those Earth based cities before we can make the attempt at an interstellar journey since often
more is learned about something in the act of making the attempt. But it would seem that by paying more attention to how we govern ourselves and take care of our citizens, this would increase the probability that any future mission into deep space carrying human crews would be successful.