Against the Fall of Night and its progeny

When I was young I read a lot of Arthur C. Clarke’s books. With one of them, I remember having a strong sense of deja vu. It seemed like I knew the story already, sort of. It was very familiar, yet surprising in many details. I don’t remember which one I read first, Against the Fall of Night or The City and the Stars. I just remember that strong feeling of familiarity with whichever one was second. Eventually I learned the reason for it, that The City and the Stars is a rewrite of the earlier Against the Fall of Night, although both books remain in print.

Against the Fall of Night was Clarke’s first novel (really a long novella) which he wrote between 1936 and 1948. In it, Diaspar is the last city on Earth billions of years in the future. It’s a paradise with humans serviced by a vast army of robots and other technology. Only desert appears to exist outside the city. The citizens are described as immortal, although in the course of the story it’s implied they live very long but finite lives, tens of thousands of years at least. Alvin is the first child to be born in Diaspar in several thousand years. He has an intense desire to do something the other citizens find incomprehensible, to leave the city and explore.

The City and the Stars, published in 1956, takes the same concept and makes it more posthuman. In the new book, the citizens of Diaspar are immortal, but only a small fraction of them are instantiated at a time, typically for thousand-year long spans. The rest are stored in the city’s memory banks. In each life they walk out of the “Hall of Creation” mostly fully formed, but don’t remember their past lives until their new body is twenty years old. Alvin is an extremely rare “unique”, someone who has no past lives to remember. And he wants to leave the city, something the other citizens seem to have a built in aversion to even contemplating.

In both versions, Alvin eventually gets out of the city and makes a number of discoveries about his world and its history, culminating in an interstellar journey. Both books were hailed for breaking new ground, although Clarke cited Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men from 1930 as a major inspiration.

Not having read the stories in decades, I’d forgotten a great deal. Some of Clarke’s early books were much more speculative than his later diamond hard science fiction. This is one of the few stories where he posits faster than light travel. And telepathy and the idea of a “pure mentality” play a significant role. Clarke was reportedly interested in paranormal phenomena early in his career before later becoming a thorough skeptic. (Childhood’s End, published in 1953, is also heavy on the paranormal, and one of the few Clarke books I outright dislike.)

Reading Against today, I can see why Clarke wanted to rewrite it. He was still learning the craft of storytelling when he wrote it. There’s very little conflict. And we get lots of telling and little showing. We only hear about life in Diaspar in a distant abstract sense. In The City Clarke works in more characters to flesh out daily life in the city, and we get more conflict to make the scenes more interesting.

However the overall amount of conflict remains limited, even in the rewritten version. And Clarke throughout his career always worked in a lot of information via exposition, which I historically liked. 2001: A Space Odyssey was one of my favorite stories as a boy, but I’m pretty sure that was because I came across Clarke’s version first, with all its explanations. If my first exposure had been Stanley Kubrick’s inscrutable film, I might have felt very different.

Anyway, I was spurred to reread these stories after noticing that there was a sequel to the first version, authorized by Clarke, but written by Gregory Benford, called Beyond the Fall of Night. The book, published in 1990, includes the original story as part one, and Benford’s sequel as the second part.

Benford takes up the story centuries later, and switches the point of view to a new character named Cley. Cley is an “ur-human.” Her species was brought back by the “supras”, the versions of humanity we met in the first story, including Alvin. Alvin and other characters are still around, but we see them from the perspective of an outsider, one that makes clear just how strange they are by our standards. Not that Cley is exactly like us. She’s just closer to the original baseline human, but still with enhancements from a long line of genetic engineering. Telepathy is retconned as one of those enhancements.

Cley finds herself hunted by an entity that is only briefly mentioned in the original story. She’s aided by an intelligent racoon named Seeker After Patterns, who seems to know its way around. The story makes clear that Alvin and the supras have brought back a wide array of life, and that evolution has moved forward to an astounding degree. We also end up seeing more of the solar system, which has been radically altered over the eons. And we learn that it has been moved closer to the galactic center.

Benford’s story is richly imaginative, evoking a blizzard of concepts in a short time. But it’s controversial. Clarke turns out to be a tough act to follow. We go from his writing, which seems effortless to parse, showing one of the reasons he was one of the legendary “Big Three” of science fiction, to Benford’s denser more elaborate prose. And there are aspects which don’t look congruent with the original story, not to mention seeming contradictions inside the sequel itself.

But I think what turns off a lot of readers is Benford’s decision to switch the view from Alvin, and make him unfamiliar and less sympathetic, along with the direction the story takes. I understand what he’s trying to do, and actually like the idea of a perspective change. But most readers are character focused, and the sequel feels callous toward their connection with Alvin.

Interestingly, Benford later did his own rewrite, expanding Beyond the Fall of Night into its own full fledged novel, Beyond Infinity. I haven’t read it, but based on the description, it sounds like he breaks away from Clarke’s tale to tell his own story. I’m glad I read his sequel, but have to wonder if an independent story wouldn’t have been the better move from the beginning, allowing readers to assess it on its own merits rather than in comparison with Clarke’s tale.

Of course, the same thing could be said about Clarke, that maybe he should have moved forward with new stories rather than tinkering with his first book. Although I do think The City and the Stars is a better story. If you were only going to read one of these, it’s the one I’d recommend.

Have you read these stories? If so, what did you think? Any recommendations on similar books?