Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02

 
          
 
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

 
          
 
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.