| Title: | Arcana Caelestia |
| Notice: | Directory listings are in topic 2 |
| Moderator: | NETRIX::thomas |
| Created: | Thu Dec 08 1983 |
| Last Modified: | Thu Jun 05 1997 |
| Last Successful Update: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Number of topics: | 1300 |
| Total number of notes: | 18728 |
For all fans of "Against the Fall of Night" and "The City and the
Stars", note the hardbound arrival of Arthur C. Clarke's collaboration
with Gregory Benford on "Beyond the Fall of Night".
As far as I can tell (having read this on a transcontinental flight),
this is a sequel by Benford appended to Clarke's original "Against
the Fall of Night". I haven't done a word by word comparison with
the original, but it sure seemed familiar. There is no explanation to
this effect *at all* on the blurb, and in fact one gets the very strong
(and apparently misleading) impression that this is a real
collaboration between Clarke and Benford, and not just a new novella by
Benford glued to an old one by Clarke, published between the same
covers.
Benford's sequel has its merits, but didn't really add anything to the
story for me. There's a certain amount of "Doc Smith" galactic blood
and thunder, but all the real questions have already been answered
and the sequel has too much of a "riding on the coattails" quality to
it.
Is Clarke no longer able to write anything by himself? Has he
succumbed to the temptation to live off his reputation for easy money?
Another one to wait out for the paperback edition, and then only if you
really must. The best part of this has been available for years.
len.
| T.R | Title | User | Personal Name | Date | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 896.1 | LUGGER::REDFORD | All isms are wasms | Tue Jul 31 1990 18:29 | 9 | |
According to a review I read, the Clarke section really is just a
reprint. The reviewer was also annoyed that this wasn't made
more clear, and thought that Benford should be doing new work
instead of adding unneeded sequels to classics.
Clarke has been guilty of serious share-cropping
recently, what with the Venus Prime books and Rama II. Are his
expenses getting out of hand? What with all the civil unrest in
Sri Lanka, is he spending it all on guards and alarms? :-)
/jlr
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| 896.2 | See also Topic 810 | WRKSYS::KLAES | All the Universe, or nothing! | Wed Aug 01 1990 13:30 | 2 |
Clarke's two original stories are also discussed in Topic 810.
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| 896.3 | Better as an Independent Story | VERGA::STONE | Mon Apr 13 1992 13:35 | 16 | |
After reading both "Against the Fall of Night" and "Beyond the Fall of
Night," I came away disappointed. AtFoN and BtFoN are basically
different stories with nothing in common except a couple of characters
(Alvin, the "hero" of AtFoN makes a cameo appearance in BtFoN.)
The two stories have a very different feel. Much in BtFoN is left
unexplained or has no rationale in the AtFoN universe. Many of the facts
in AtFoN are ignored in BtFoN. For example, the moon was destroyed
millennia in AtFoN's past while it's still quite alive and well in BtFoN.
Basically, Benford would have been better off if he had NOT tied his
story to Clarke's. With a rework of the beginning and of some of the
details around the disembodied intelligence called the Mad Mind,
Benford's BtFoN would have stood quite well on it's own as a totally
independent universe.
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