History Literature / TheCityAndTheStars

* SignificantAnagram: 'Diaspar' is a a near-anagram of 'Paradise'. Which, for nearly all of its inhabitants, it is.

''The City and the Stars'' is a novel written by Creator/ArthurCClarke in 1956, based loosely on his earlier work ''Against the Fall of Night''.

* UnbuiltTrope: The first chapter is full of these for video games, which didn't even exist as a genre in the real world yet as the technology for them simply didn't exist (note that this novel was written in the early 1950s). 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.

* GoodParents: Eriston and Ettania are stated to be this - in Diasparan terms. It was their job to watch over Alvin's socialization and it is clear that they care about their Unique 'son' and worry about him and they stand loyally by him when he turns Diaspar upside down.

** Still later a virtual dream is used to cure Diaspar inhabitants of their agoraphobia.

* VirtualRealityInterrogation: Towards the end of the story, the characters need to get some vital information out of a robot that has been sworn to silence until the end of time. The MasterComputer helps by simulating just that.

* UnbuiltTrope: The first chapter is full of these (note that this novel was written in the early 1950s). 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.

* {{Cyberspace}}: One form of entertainment available to Diaspar is the "sagas," which we would recognize as something like virtual-reality [=MMORPGs=].

* TimeAbyss: Diaspar has survived a billion years. Many of its citizens have combined lifespans in the hundreds of thousands at least, though this is broken up by long periods of dormancy in the Halls of Creation.

* CrapsackOnlyByComparison: Diaspar and Lys are two competing visions of utopia: The former a high-tech city of CrystalSpiresAndTogas where death and material need have been abolished, the latter a [[Arcadia pastoral]] realm where PsychicPowers have allowed humans to form deeper and more intimate bonds.

* GodzillaThreshold: [[spoiler:Vanamonde was created to counter and defeat the Mad Mind, on the assumption that the risk of the universe being destroyed in the fallout from their conflict is a chance worth taking on the destruction and misery that the Mad Mind will inflict unopposed.]]

While everyone else in Diaspar is content to live in this splendid isolation, Alvin yearns for adventure. Unlike the other citizens of Diaspar, Alvin is a Unique -- he was "born" as a completely new person, rather than being reincarnated from a preexisting personality stored in the Halls of Eternity. Furthermore, he seems to have none of the psychological blocks that prevent the other residents from even thinking about leaving the city. With the help of Khedron, Diaspar's Jester, Alvin manages to find a way out into the wider world and discovers the land of Lys, another remnant of humanity that has chosen to reject Diaspar's reliance on high technology in favor of a more pastoral lifestyle. Yet even Lys is not quite as idyllic as it may seem at first...

* DataCrystal: Crystals serve as the backbone for all of Diaspar's computer systems, including the Central Computer and the Halls of Eternity.

* TimeAbyss: Diaspar has survived a billion years. Many of its citizens have combined lifespans in the hundreds of thousands at least, though this is broken up by long periods of dormancy in the Halls of Eternity.

* The city of Diaspar is composed of technology that no one living understands any longer; but which is all fully automated and self-repairing. Somewhat subverted in that the computer that maintains the city, including the inhabitants — who are cloned reincarnations of the original population with memories of all their incarnations stored in the computer — could conceivably produce new inhabitants with the requisite memories. The technology necessary for space travel, on the other hand, had been deliberately purged both from the city computer's memory, and the records of the telepathic inhabitants of the pastoral city of Lys; and the populations of both cities had developed a phobia of space travel, with a powerful [[spoiler:and completely wrong]] mythology justifying their fear.