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* FalseProphet: The Master, a human religious evangelist who came in exile to Earth not long before Diaspar was transformed into its current form and the spaceport closed. Apparently he formed a religion surrounding alleged higher beings known only as the Great Ones. He used science to fake miracles (which must have been quite impressive given how advanced technology was in his time). He knew that he was a fraud and so he relied on his robot companion as a sympathetic ear. He also programmed it to never reveal his secrets until the end of time. The Central Computer obligingly provides this to the robot to unlock its memories.
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* RagnarokProofing: Diaspar was intentionally designed to endure and is actively maintained by an extremely advanced computerized network.
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* RagnarokProofing: Diaspar was intentionally designed to endure and is actively maintained by an extremely advanced computerized network. Humans prior to the sealing of Diaspar understood how to create "Eternity Circuits" that could preserve anything indefinitely. The Master's starship was buried in the old spaceport outside of Diaspar for a billion years, yet it remained fully-functional when Alvin reactivated it.
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* BellyButtonless: The Diaspar residents, due to the nature of their creation -- their bodies are artificially cloned from existing DNA samples rather than born in the traditional way, and their minds have been backed up onto computers and later downloaded into a cloned body so they can live again.
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* NoNavelNovelBirth: The Diaspar residents lack navels due to the nature of their creation -- their bodies are artificially cloned from existing DNA samples rather than born in the traditional way, and their minds have been backed up onto computers and later downloaded into a cloned body so they can live again.
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* BellyButtonless: The Diaspar residents.
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* BellyButtonless: The Diaspar residents.residents, due to the nature of their creation -- their bodies are artificially cloned from existing DNA samples rather than born in the traditional way, and their minds have been backed up onto computers and later downloaded into a cloned body so they can live again.
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* RevealingContinuityLapse: Alvin comes to the realization that [[spoiler:there is something wrong with the whole story of the Invaders forcing humanity to live inside of Diaspar because there are absolutely ''no'' records describing the Invaders or the specific terms of the agreement that they made with humanity. It turns out that this is because the Invaders are nothing more than an intentional myth.]]
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* TheBeforetimes: The so-called "Dawn Ages" which encompass all of human history prior to the coming of the Invaders a billion years before the story is set. Alvin muses that this must result in truly primitive pre-spaceflight times being lumped together with the Galactic Empire that preceded the current version of Diaspar. Because records of this time are mostly lost (or deliberately erased), nobody knows how long the Dawn Ages actually lasted.
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* AlwaysSomeoneBetter: Alvin feels this way about [[spoiler: Hilvar]], although it is downplayed. [[spoiler: Especially while exploring the planets of the Seven Stars, Alvin somewhat grudgingly notes that Hilvar, being both telepathic as well as better educated in applied science, has a somewhat more capable mind than his own.]] He does not allow it to bother him too much beyond an initial bit of jealousy.
* ClarkesThirdLaw: Not surprising given that the author is the TropeNamer. Because the story is set an unknown distance into the future (Diaspar alone has existed in its current form for a billion years), the technology depicted simply ''is.'' Little effort is made to provide {{Technobabble}} explaining how any of it works because it is the product of Transhuman engineering and simply so advanced that even the Diasparans have only a general idea of what makes it possible for them to, for example, conjure up furniture by mental command.
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* MatterReplicator: The technology upon which Diaspar is based. From calling up one's favorite chair via mental command to the periodic re-creation of Diasparan citizens in the Halls of Creation. A typical living space is basically an empty room just waiting for somebody to start shaping it to conform to their desires. [[spoiler: At the end of the novel, Alvin makes the intellectual leap that the people of Diaspar and Lys will be able to use this technology to recreate Earth's lost oceans and a terraform the planet back to how it was before modern Diaspar was built.]]
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* MatterReplicator: The technology upon which Diaspar is based. From calling up one's favorite chair via mental command to the periodic re-creation of Diasparan citizens in the Halls of Creation. A typical living space is basically an empty room just waiting for somebody to start shaping it to conform to their desires. [[spoiler: At the end of the novel, Alvin makes the intellectual leap that the people of Diaspar and Lys will be able to use this technology to recreate Earth's lost oceans and a terraform the planet back to how it was before modern Diaspar was built.]]
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* UnbuiltTrope: The first chapter is full of these for video games, which didn't even exist as a medium in the real world yet as the technology for them simply didn't exist (note that this novel was written in TheFifties). Alvin and his friends are playing a virtual reality game which contains a QuestArrow. His friends get angry when he breaks the game by attempting to take it OffTheRails, and they mention many times in the past when he screwed the game up by SequenceBreaking. It's interesting to note that he's doing this out of a genuine sense of curiosity, and is not [[{{Griefer}} griefing]] his friends.
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* UnbuiltTrope: The first chapter is full of these for video games, which didn't even exist as a medium in the real world yet as the technology for them simply didn't exist (note that this novel was written in TheFifties). Alvin and his friends are playing a virtual reality game which contains a QuestArrow.Quest Arrow. His friends get angry when he breaks the game by attempting to take it OffTheRails, and they mention many times in the past when he screwed the game up by SequenceBreaking. It's interesting to note that he's doing this out of a genuine sense of curiosity, and is not [[{{Griefer}} griefing]] his friends.
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* MatterReplicator: The technology upon which Diaspar is based. From calling up one's favorite chair via mental command to the periodic re-creation of Diasparan citizens in the Halls of Creation. A typical living space is basically an empty room just waiting for somebody to start shaping it to conform to their desires. [[spoiler: At the end of the novel, Alvin makes the intellectual leap that the people of Diaspar and Lys will be able to use this technology to recreate Earth's lost oceans and a terraform the planet back to how it was before modern Diaspar was built.]]
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* SignificantAnagram: 'Diaspar' is a a near-anagram of 'Paradise'. Which, for nearly all of its inhabitants, it is. It is also a near-anagram of 'Despair'. Take your pick.
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* SignificantAnagram: 'Diaspar' is a a near-anagram of 'Paradise'. Which, for nearly all of its inhabitants, it is. It is also a near-anagram of 'Despair'. Take your pick. [[spoiler: Alternatively, it may simply be linguistic drift from "diaspora", as the city used to be Earth's major spaceport before the current sealed arcology was built.]]
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* TheReveal: [[spoiler: The Invaders that Earth's remaining inhabitants believe imposed their isolation on Earth never existed. No war was fought that humanity lost. It was the long-forgotten experimental Mad Mind that devastated the galactic empire once shared by humans and aliens. Earth's remaining population simply consisted of very conservative people who did not want to join the rest of humanity in leaving the galaxy to explore the universe after the Mad Mind's imprisonment.]]
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* MasterComputer: Subverted in that the Central Computer of Diaspar is benevolently disposed towards the humans under its care. But it does control the entire city of Diaspar down to the atomic level and maintains its largely unchanging state.
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* PopulationControl: A variation since the people of Diaspar no longer practice biological reproduction. The actual population of the city at any given time is only a fraction of the stored minds in the memory banks. Thus the city is never fully populated, even though unused areas are as perfectly maintained as the ones that the current population lives in.
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* {{Telepathy}}: One of many enhancements that humanity engineered into themselves after discovering that their natural capabilities were vastly inferior to the first spacefaring aliens which they encountered in prehistory. The Diasparans know that humanity once possessed this ability, although they themselves have since lost the knowledge of how it works. The people of Lys retain the ability and use it to communicate and share knowledge. They can also potentially control others and alter memories.
