The City And The Stars

Arthur C. Clarke's 1956 novel is set two and a half billion years or more from now in Diaspar, a sealed city its people believe to be the last on an Earth that has lost its oceans. A Central Computer runs the city, makes bodies for its citizens and stores their minds between lives. Nobody has entered or left within living memory, held back by a legend of invaders who drove humanity from the stars. Alvin is one of the rare Uniques, with no past lives and an urge to leave rather than a fear of the outside. Clarke wrote the novel as a complete rewrite of his first, Against the Fall of Night.

Ryan Holiday, who says he has never really been a science fiction fan, put it on his list of the very best books he read in 2017 and found it beautiful and moving.