Beyond the Fall of Night
To Mark Martin and David Brin
For tangy ideas, zesty talk, warm friendship
G.B.
F O R E W O R D
P R O L O G U E
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F O R E W O R D
It is now more than half a century since Against the Fall of Night was born, yet the moment of conception is still clear in my memory. Out of nowhere, it seems, the opening image of the novel suddenly appeared to me. It was so vivid that I wrote it down at once, though at the time I had no idea that I would ever develop it any further.
That would have been in 1936, plus or minus a year, and I had written several drafts by late 1940, when I was evacuated with my colleagues in His Majesty's Exchequer and Audit Department to the small North Wales town of Colwyn Bay. Here I finished a 15,000-word version, but for the next five years was somewhat preoccupied with other matters (see Glide Path). I started work on-it again in August 1945: whether before or after Hiroshima changed the world, I do not now recall.
The first complete draft was finished by January 1946, and promptly sent to John Campbell at Astounding Stories. He took three months to reject it, and I rewrote the ending in July 1946, submitting it again to Campbell. He took another three months to reject the second version.
After that, I sent it to my new agent, Scott Meredith, who sold it to Startling Stories, where it appeared in November 1948. It was accepted by Gnome Press for hardcover pubhcation in September 1949, and was pubhshed in a handsome edition with a jacket by promising new artist, one Kelly Freas (it must have been one of Kelly's earliest commissions; I only hope that he was paid for it!).
Because it was my firstborn, Against the Fall of Night always had a special place in my affections, yet I was never completely satisfied with it. The opportunity to make a complete revision came during a long sea voyage from England to Australia, when I joined forces with Mike Wilson and set off on an underwater expedition to the Great Barrier Reef (see The Coast of Coral). The much longer and drastically revised novel, The City and the Stars, was completed in Queensland between excursions to the Reef and the Torres Strait pearling grounds. It was published by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1956, and has remained in print ever since.
At the time, I assumed that new version would completely replace the older novel, but Against the Fall of Night showed no tendency to fade away; indeed, to my slight chagrin, some readers preferred it to its successor, and it has now been reissued several times in paperback (Pyramid Books, 1960: Jove, 1978) as well as in the volume The Lion of Comarre and Against the Fall of Night (Harcourt, Brace & World; Victor GoUancz, 1970). One day I would like to conduct a poll to discover which is the more popular version; I have long ago given up trying to decide which is the better one.
The search for a title took almost as long as the writing of the book. I found it at last in a poem of A. E. Housman's, which also inspired the short story Transience:
What shall I do or write Against the fall of night?
The name of my protagonist, Alvin, also gave me many headaches, and I cannot remember when—or why—I decided on it. I did not realize that, at least to American readers, it was faintly humorous, being redolent of a well-known comic strip. However, many years later, the name had two enormously important associations for me. The deep submersible Alvin took Ballard and his associates to the wreck of the Titanic when it was discovered in 1986. That tragedy, though it occurred five years before I was born (that dates me, doesn't it?) has haunted me all my life. It was the basis of the very first story I ever wrote, a luckily long-lost epic called—wait for it—"Icebergs of Space." I also incorporated it into the novel Imperial Earth (1975) and it is the subject of a book that has now occupied me for several years.
Perhaps still stranger, the name Alvin is derived from that of Allyn C. Vine, its principal engineer. And was one of the authors of the famous letter in Science {151 682-683; 1966) which proposed the construction of the Space Elevator—the subject of my novel The Fountains of Paradise (1979). So the name Alvin had more power than I could possibly have imagined in the late 1930s, and I am happy to salute it.
When the suggestion was made that Gregory Benford should write a sequel continuing the story, I was immediately taken by the idea, because I had long admired Greg's writing—especially his remarkable Great Sky River. As it happened, I'd also just met him at NASA headquarters; as Professor of Astrophysics at the University of California, Irvine, he is one of NASA's technical advisers.
I have now read his sequel with great enjoyment, because to me—as it will be to you—it was a voyage of discovery. I had no idea how he would develop the themes and characters I had abandoned so long ago. It's particularly interesting to see how some of the concepts of this half-century-old story are now in the forefront of modern science: I am especially fond of the "Black Sun," which is an obvious description of the now extremely popular Black Holes.
I will say no more about Greg's version—or my own. I'll leave you to enjoy both.
One other aside, though. By a strange coincidence, while almost simultaneously we had the proposal to write the sequel to Against the Fall of Night, the excellent Australian science fiction writer Damien Broderick ("The Dreaming Dragons") wrote asking if he could write a sequel to The City and the Stars ! In view of Greg's project, I reluctantly turned it down—but perhaps in another decade. . . .
Arthur C. Clarke Colombo, Sri Lanka May 29, 1989
P R O L O G U E
Not once in a generation did the voice of the city change as it was changing now. Day and night, age after age, it had never faltered. To myriads of men it had been the first and the last sound they had ever heard. It was part of the city: when it ceased the city would be dead and the desert sands would be settling in the great streets of Diaspar.
Even here, half a mile above the ground, the sudden hush brought Convar out to the balcony. Far below, the moving ways were still sweeping between the great buildings, but now they were thronged with silent crowds. Something had drawn the languid people of the city from their homes: in their thousands they were drifting slowly between the cliffs of colored metal. And then Convar saw that all those myriads of faces were turned toward the sky.
For a moment fear crept into his soul—fear lest after all these ages the Invaders had come again to Earth. Then he too was staring at the sky, entranced by a wonder he had never hoped to see again. He watched for many minutes before he went to fetch his infant son.
The child Alvin was frightened at first. The soaring spires of the city, the moving specks two thousand feet below—these were part of his world, but the thing in the sky was beyond all his experience. It was larger than any of the city's buildings, and its whiteness was so dazzling that it hurt the eye. Though it seemed to be solid, the restless winds were changing its outlines even as he watched.