I decided to give Arthur C. Clarke another chance, and I’m glad I did. In The City and the Stars, the reader is introduced to the quiet world of Diaspar, a shining city of leisure on a dried up Earth a thousand million years in the future, in which all matter (both living and otherwise) is stored in Computer memory and materialised at will. There is the Mid-Century preoccupation with the survival of Humanity over the eons (and in what form?), the pseudo-scientific references to “de-evolution”, the deus ex machina explanations of speculative History that straighten out too many mysteries that could not be unraveled by the protagonists alone. But against this backdrop there is the tender care for Character that we find all too rarely in the science fiction of this era. From start to finish, The City and the Stars was a marvel.
Next, I took a chance on one of Tchaikovsky’s recent novels, Alien Clay. I knew one minute in that I would read this one ravenously. There is a bitter realness in Tchaikovsky’s portrayal of “revolutionary subcommittees” and their dysfunction that will be familiar to anyone who has found themselves in such circles, the fear of betrayal (by whom, and since when?), and the implosive combination of weakness and overconfidence that shatters nearly every revolutionary conspiracy from the inside. Will it really take something from outside Earth’s biological construct to lock us on to the path that leads away from self-defeat and ruin?