Tuesday 19 February 2013

BRIAN STABLEFORD: THE CITY OF THE SUN

Hamlyn SF paperback, 1980. Illustration by Tim White.

"It was a circular city - like the City of the Sun, a perfect community dreamed up by the seventeenth-century philosopher Campanella. 
Many utopian groups had emigrated into space to found their ideal settlements. And it was on one such colony world - appropriately called Arcadia - that the recontact starship Daedalus made its fourth planetfall. There in all its splendour stood the fulfilment of Campanella's dream - the real seven-circled City of the Sun. 
But the city was too ordered, the inhabitants too perfect, the world too Arcadian ... and very soon the Daedalus's scientists realized that in this particular utopia the idealists had unleashed a force that could undermine all human culture on other planets."

1 comment:

ninthcouncil said...

4th in the quite decent "Daedalus" series: The Florians, Critical Threshold, Wildeblood's Empire, City of the Sun, Balance of Power, The Paradox of the Sets. I seem to have lost my copy of this one, though.