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Title: Beyond the Fall of Night by Gregory Benford, Arthur Charles Clarke ISBN: 0-399-13499-9 Publisher: Putnam Pub Group Pub. Date: July, 1990 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95

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Average Customer Rating: 1.88 (16 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: Buy only if you don't already own Against the Fall of Night
Comment: How do you rate a book like this? First of all, it's not a novel, despite its 339 pages. It's two novellas, the first by Clarke (four stars, pp 3-155) and the second by Benford (one star, pp 159-339). Second, the styles and subject matter are quite dissimilar. Benford makes no pretense of continuing Clarke's story or paying homage to the master in any way; this is simply a novella inspired by Clarke's novella.

That's fine if you're a fan of Benford's writing, which can be maddeningly uneven. Sometimes he uses whole pages of terse, deliberately elliptical dialogue; other times he seems to simply forsake dialogue altogether for rich, speculative, but often precious prose. But if you like the style of Arthur C. Clarke, you will dislike Benford's half of the book. Someone wrote of Clarke that he "can forge poetry from an engineer's blueprint." As Roger Ebert might say in reverse, Benford can forge a blueprint from someone's poem.

Worse, Benford does not demonstrate a familiarity with the events in Clarke's novella. For instance, he speaks of visiting the moon, which fell to earth long before the events in Clarke's novella. Benford implies that it is difficult for the "ur-humans" to communicate with Vanamonde, then quotes history that the ur-humans learned FROM VANAMONDE in Clarke's novella. This is one of several times Benford contradicts not just Clarke, but himself.

Clarke writes in the foreword that shortly after Benford asked to write a sequel to Against the Fall of Night, Damien Broderick asked to write a sequel to The City and the Stars! Oh, if only Broderick's letter had arrived sooner!

Recommendation: Buy this book ONLY if you do not already own Against the Fall of Night.

-- Peter C.S. Adam

Rating: 1
Summary: A botched extension of a great short novel
Comment: Having read some of Gregory Benford's work, I was greatly disapointed by "Beyond the Fall Of Night." His attempt to spin an addition on Clarke's short novel was a blunder. It's astonishing that he didn't pick up on an essential point of Clarke's original story, and proceeded to write himself into the ground, like an aircraft with no Glide Path. More surprising was that Clarke allowed this to be published. I wondered if he even reviewed works like this.

Rating: 1
Summary: Beyond the Fall of NIght
Comment: Both Against the Fall of Night and The City and the Stars are wonderful stories, beautifully written

Gregory Benford's "sequel" is incoherent mishmash. I kept jumping paragraphs hoping the story would get clearer. It didn't.

Forget this book entirely and get the original Arthur C Clarke story (Against the Fall of Night) combined with The Lion of Comarre.

I've never read a Gregory Benford story before and this turned me off so much I don't plan to read another.