BEYOND (not AGAINST - think we can get this right Chaverim from Shvoong?) the Fall of Night by UC Irvine Astrophysicist Gregory Benford is an authorized SEQUEL of Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night. Benford has the intellectual heft to write this novel and his artful and competent use of scientific terminology is refreshing. However, Against the Fall of Night ends: “In this Universe the night was falling: the shadows were lengthening toward an east that would never know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered, and along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again.” Very apropos given the zeitgeist of Clarke’s younger days. Yet through accident or design, Dr. Benford, generally following the original, utterly avoids this paramount sentiment except perhaps with Alvin's climactic demise. Clarke at some literary level taps into the complex ancient Occidental belief that per mortem ad iuventutem aeternum. What is “around the curve of the cosmos” if not an Elysian metaphor.
The plot of Beyond the Fall of Night is scattershot because Benford has imbued it with the sense of the quirky, non-linear courses different interweaving strands of life take as they go forth randomly, and yet not so. Alvin and Seranis ("Supra" humans), after hundreds of years have resurrected a vast genetic library and are repopulating the Earth with ancient organisms, among them a human named Cley, an Ur-Human (CroMagnon). Cley is matriarch and sole survivor of a tribe of Ur humans. She is rescued by a large highly intelligent, loquacious rodent called “Seeker”. Alvin takes her to the library largely destroyed by the Mad Mind.
Cley is helping the Supras recover remnants of the library when the Mad Mind attacks again. Seeker and Cley flee enter the forest and hide in a hollow tree that is grabbed up by an immense living pinwheel and wheeled up into space. They board a Jonah, a huge organism composed of smaller plant and animal components functioning like cells in a body. The Jonah delivers them to Leviathan (a much larger Jonah). Leviathan's consciousness demands Cley leave, fearing the Mad Mind, but Cley and Seeker refuse and ride Leviathan to Jupiter.
They find Alvin who Seeker had been expecting to encounter at Jupiter. There they battle the Mad Mind using the telepaths of Lys, the resources of interstellar plasma beings and solar biome and Cley (The Mad Mind has Ur-Human world view) with Ur-humans cloned from her (her flight, unbeknownst to her, but knownst to Seeker and Alvin, was partly a ruse to distract the Mad Mind from the maturing Ur-human clones) as a “tuner”. The Mad Mind dies, Cley reunites with her kin, Alvin dies heroically accomplishing his life-long challenge of resuscitating moribund humanity, and humans better comprehend the biome organism, now solar system wide, existing likewise around other stars and evolving into interstellar life, a process initiated by humans but long neglected and by them no longer controlled or entirely understood.
Benford evokes the Gaia hypothesis (Earthlife organisms collectively constitute a planet-wide super-organism) and like his fellow travelers appears rather eager to anthropomorphize and impart consciousness to such organisms. He tries commendably (as do other Green fantasy fiction writers) to make the consciousness strikingly non-human, but that has yet to be credibly achieved in the doubtless unsuitable literary form of the novel. There is some SF camp: p. 155 the first line "The naked woman seemed to be dead." p. 256 Leviathan “Reason can never tell you deep things.”, p. 276 Leviathan “I despise all such human inventions”, p. 283 Seeker to Cley “Humans have difficulty in understanding that Earth is not important now”, and p. 326 Cley “Yes, Thank God” Seeker “Your Welcome” (Read “The Jesus Incident” have we?). I am just waiting for Ming the Merciless to appear and intone “You earthlings are all alike…” and Benford to campily go where Clarke has never gone before.
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