Артур Кларк - Город и звёзды 01 - текст песни, слова, перевод, видео

Genres/subgenres: Science Fiction (Humanitarian (“soft”) SF)

novel, 1956;

Annotation:

The novel “The City and the Stars” describes the measured life of a city that is hundreds of thousands of years old. People live in it, entangled in fear, afraid to go beyond its boundaries. But, having taken the first step, they find themselves on the path of confrontation with the Wild Mind, which is breaking out of its imprisonment somewhere on the outskirts of the Universe.

The City and the Stars was completed in its final form around the same time, in 1956. It is based on an even earlier book, Against the Fall of Night (1948), which some readers even prefer to the later version. This novel is decidedly different from Childhood's End. There, the path of people ends in just a few centuries - here Man establishes himself with his deeds throughout the Galaxy, leaves it in the end - and again begins his path from Earth. And all this - a billion (or even two billion) years after us. It is unlikely that any other science fiction writer has dared to look so far into the future. It is difficult to find another book that is equally optimistic and paints such majestic prospects.

The novel is written in a manner very characteristic of Clark, where a dry presentation of scientific and philosophical ideas turns into descriptions of amazing places and exciting adventures, interspersed with ironic comments, somewhat ponderous humor, and in places the style becomes pompously pathetic and sentimental at the same time. All this gives the text a peculiar mannerism, typical of almost all of Clarke’s best works.

Despite the considerable time that has passed since the book appeared, it is not at all outdated. It is enough to mention colorful and, as it turns out, quite close to reality pictures of space flight and the view of the Earth from space, or a remarkable insightful description of artificial intelligence and the role that computers will play in people's lives (remember what computers were like fifty years ago !). But the main thing in the novel is not this at all, but an amazingly deep and colorful story about what is commonly called a conceptual breakthrough - and even about several revolutions in consciousness caused by the exciting prospects that opened up behind the rubble of collapsed walls. This is what makes The City and the Stars one of the masterpieces of social and philosophical fiction. Even if you can find certain roughness in the book, the conventionality of some images, the shortcomings only highlight its merits.

Performer: Lebedeva Elena