Clark's original "Against the Fall of Night" novella: 4 stars.
Benford's sequel "Part 2" story: 2.5 stars. ( )

Another book I have kept out of sentiment. Read Against the Fall of Night. Greg Benford is a remarkable writer. He's wasted here. ( )

Some reactions to reading this work in 1991. Spoilers follow.

My reactions follow three veins.

Comparing Part 1, Clarke’s “Against the Fall of Night” with the expanded version The City and the Stars, Benford’s sequel to Clarke’s novella in its own right, and the combination as a whole.

As an alternative to The City and the Stars, I liked the latter better than “Against the Fall of Night”. The novel gave full rein to Clarke’s mournful vistas of an ancient Earth where man huddles fearfully. The novella has the same feel but Clarke simply doesn’t have as much space to portray these emotions. Also the novel had many interesting details, notions, and speculations: the psychological and social effects of no new births in Diaspar -- just recycling of personalities with undesired memories edited out -- and immortality, the instant creation of desired forms of matter (for role-playing games and much else), the sex games of Diaspar’s inhabitants and their evolved state, the mysterious Jester and the more mysterious matter of Alvin actually being born not recanted, the creation of the Mad Mind and Vanamonde (dealt with here but not in as great detail), and the religion of the Master and the enforced silence of his robot servant to spare him embarassment. Also, as I said, the mere length of the novella lessens the tone and emotion that goes so far in making the novel a classic.

I’m not sure if Benford’s addition really stands alone but I liked it. From what I’ve heard of his novels, this story has his characteristic concern with man’s evolution and his place in the vaster evolution of life and intelligence. The vistas of millennia are reminiscent of Olaf Stapledon I suppose but this part reminded me most of the bizarre future of Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse. Benford’s life forms are just as bizarre, even more rationalized (particularly the creatures whose consciousness exist in the magnetic fields of the galaxy), but less well described. Which is just as well. Benford’s creatures are too vast, too alien to be minutely described like Aldiss’. They can just be suggested. Benford also has a rare gift in writers who deal with evolution and man’s place in present and future ecologies: he’s utterly convincing, utterly sincere. By that I mean, one gets the sense that most sf writers just play with the idea of man’s place in evolution. Benford really ponders it, believes in it, “internalizes” the emotions, the implications of humanity evolving. He also has a spendid gift of metaphor, my favorites are: “They all lived as ants in the shadow of mountains of millennia, and time’s sheer mass shaded every word. ... so talk darted among somber chasms of ignorance and upjuts of painful memory as old as continents, softening tongues into ambiguity and guile.” and his comparing man’s place in the new ecologies of strange, vast, stellar intelligences to yeast’s in beer -- the yeast goes about its business of making beer unaware it serves a vaster being. Benford also has a knack for using landscape, real and symbolic, as metaphor.

But how do the two parts mesh? Well, the two parts are, at first glance, jarringly different. “Against the Fall of NIght” has one on-stage death -- the disciple of the Master -- while Benford’s section begins with the image of a dead human and much death is seen throughout. Man, robots, and the artificial minds are the sole sentients in Clarke’s secions; Benford’s section is chokeful of different types of sentience. Alvin is relegated to a side figure, a distant, short-sighted figure clearly not in touch with the larger picture of life. The wonderful Seeker After Patterns is a great character: humourous, wise, enigmatic, alien, perhaps God). Cley, the Ur-Human (more advanced than us, though), is our running hero (Alvin pushes outward into the cosmos, Cley flees into the arms of a vast mind). She is a pastoral creature unlike urban Alvin. Yet both are limited, as Seeker points out, in their intelligence by the form they take. Alvin, unlike Cley, does not first know he is a “local intelligence”. Ultimately, thematically, the clash of styles and concerns work: Alvin discovers a larger universe, Cley discovers a larger ecology and man’s place in it. (Interestingly, the robots eliminated most life as untidy -- an analog to Diaspar’s sterility is culture and birth.) Alvin is physical man isolated from life; Cley is spiritual man united with the universe. One odd mistake in this collaboration (perhaps I didn’t read carefully enough, it’s such a blatant mistake for a professional like Benford to make) is Benford’s mention of a spectacularly terraformed moon. In “Against the Fall of Night”, Clarke specifically says the moon’s destruction gave rise to the legend of the Battle of Shalmirane. ( )

Two books in one, Clarke's classic "The Fall of Night" and the 'sequel', Gregory Benford's "Beyond the Fall of Night" are 'Chalk and Cheese, really. Clarke's smooth, seamless episodic tale, is awkwardly followed by the baroque, organic fantasy of Benford. The connecting link is Alvin, the first child in 4000 years, the unique boy of Dispar in Clarke and enfant terrible of Lys in Bedford are hardly compatible consistent. Alvin in Bedford's hands is a colorless and distracted character. It is a jarring juxtaposition and, frankly, I could hardly wait to get to the end of Benford. The concepts were intriguing, strung along as they were, but the prose was purple.and the plot as tangled and impenetrable as any tropical jungle floor.

This is described by Clarke in the foreword as a sequel to his marvelous novella, "Against the Fall of Night", about an Earth millions of years in the future which has been reduced to two quite different cities, each unaware of the others, at the twilight of man's long sojourn through the cosmos. From what I can glean, this book contains Clarke's earlier novella, perhaps revised, with the second part being Benford's sequel. The sequel works well as a continuation of a fine story - but I'm sure I've read it somewhere, and I had thought that the second part was Clarke's writing also. Guess not. Anyway, a fine partnership at work here, and the character of "Seeker" in the second part, a wise and recombinant raccoon, is particularly engaging. ( )