Beyond the Fall of Night (Book Review)
I'll just tell you up front, I'm not a big fan of sequels. Don't get me wrong; I love multiple-part stories like the Rama series, the Star Wars saga, and the annual TV drama cliffhanger. Even Soap kept me strung along from week to week. What I don't like are sequels made just because the first book, movie, or TV show was successful. (Can anyone say Blair Witch 2? Free Willy 3?) I'm also not really fond of sequels written by someone other than the original author.
So it was with some trepidation that I forged ahead into the second half of this collection and read Beyond the Fall of Night, Gregory Benford's sequel to Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night (which I reviewed previously). I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I very much enjoyed Clarke's original, and was curious to see where the future would take these characters—something the book jacket promised would be revealed.
Well, revealed it was, though I'm not quite sure what to make of it. One of the problems with sequels is that the reader or viewer goes in with certain expectations based on what happened in the first story. The characters become close to us and we expect them to behave in a certain way, to do certain things. What if they made a sequel to Titanic in which Jack walked around quoting ancient Greek proverbs and playing harp while wearing a toga? Something just wouldn't feel right, would it?
By the time I reached the end of Against the Fall of Night, I had come to know the characteristics of the protagonist, Alvin, and had formed a good idea of how he might behave in a given situation. The Alvin that is found in Benford's sequel has obviously killed the one from Clarke's story and is playing the role of the imposter, complete with Mission:Impossible mask.
Not that we get to know this imposter very well, anyway. Most of our time is spent with a more primitive step on the evolutionary ladder—an "Ur-human" named Cley—and some kind of racoon-like creature called Seeker who is smarter than Stephen Hawking and has way too much methane built up in his system.
Benford centers his story around the "Mad Mind" concept that was previously
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