Against The Fall of Night

I found a pack of Arthur C. Clarke’s books under the SF Masterworks brand on Amazon for a good price and added them to my science fiction shelf at home. The pack contained both The City and the Stars and its precursor novella, so I thought I would try them both and see how the story developed.

The City and the Stars has always been one of my favourite books since I first read it in my early teens. I still think it holds up perfectly well today as a vision of the far future, despite being written in the 1960s.

Indeed I am even more impressed finding that Against the Fall of Night is even earlier, with a genesis in the mind of the author when he was just 19, and is in all essentials the same story.

The “changes” (more “expansions” really) to the later novel were all worthwhile improvements. Things are rather too easy for Alvin in the novella. He makes one attempt to leave, is directed to the keeper of records who then figures out everything else for him. At Shalmirane the old man information dumps (and then, after thousands of years, happens to die a few days later). Then they go to the central suns, are “found” by Vanamonde who has all the answers and is eager to share.

All of these sections are substantially rewritten in the novel, giving Alvin much more agency and elevating him from being simply a participant. The twist that the central computer used to remove the blocks from the masters robot were also more cleverly done.

In summary, the novella is a great story, but the subsequent revisions for the novel make it a true masterpiece.