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BEYOND

                                        August 1, 1992

_Beyond the Fall of Night_          (Benford's sequel to
is perhaps not a great book,        Clark's first novel.)
but I'm not as hostile toward
it as the rec.arts.sf.written
crowd.


The packaging was certainly confusing.  Nothing, including
the long introduction by Clarke, made it clear that the text
of the original book was included in this volume.  I had to
start reading it to figure it out.  I kept wondering if I
might be reading still a third version of Alvin's life, as
re-written by Benford.

The main trouble with the sequel as
a novel: the viewpoint character is        "Female Protagonist Syndrome"
almost completely passive, just
along for the ride.                            Bruce Sterling's
                                               _Islands in the Net_
                                               suffers from the same
                                               problem.

                                               A Rudy Rucker review of
                                               _The Difference Engine_
                                               (from memory):

                                                 "Ah, what would it be like
                                                  to be a machine?  What
                                                  would it be like to be
                                                  a female character in a
                                                  Gibson and Sterling novel?
                                                  What's the difference?"



The problem with the
sequel as a sequel:                   SPOILERS warning,
                                      though I doubt
                                      it matters





The problem facing the union
of Lys and Diaspar (as originally
laid out by Clarke) is that in
Lys, a choice has been made
to keep the human life span
short, but in Diaspar it is
indefinitely extended.

The tradeoff is that Diaspar
maintains a fixed population
by having no births, no
children, and hence no new
minds: they stagnate.

In Lys, on the other hand, lives
may be shorter but they get to
experience the "joys" of raising         (I'm a little
children.                                dubious of
                                         this myself,
                                         but that's how
                                         Clarke laid it
                                         out).


All this may work in theory as long
as both cultures are ignorant of
each other, but how are the people
in Lys going to feel about friends
and relatives dying when the              That's the
technology clearly exists to save         problem that
them?                                     seems to be
                                          set up by
                                          Clarke at the
                                          close of his
                                          the book.


So, how does Benford deal with it?

He changes the rules of the game.
The fact that the people in Lys are
telepaths is no coincidence: the
capability involves picking up and
broadcasting EM signals with
magnetite in their brain cells,
which puts stress on their systems
over time, and eventually results
in an early death.  So now, the
tradeoff is between immortality and
the joys of telepathic social
communion.



But what really does work in the
Benford half of the book: it's a
bewildering travelog of strange
life forms, all showing off some
odd ideas about evolution.

There's a fair amount of
interesting stuff here, though it's
not the first Benford book I'd
recommend.



                       An observation worthy of an
                       essay of it's own:

                       A recurring element in Benford's
                       thought is a vision of a kind of
                       frozen, crystalline eternity,
                       a paradoxically lifeless immortality.     Platonic
                       Forms in stasis, that will always         forms ex
                       persist, but never evolve.                machina?

                       In _Beyond_, there are the machines
                       of Diaspar that preserve images of
                       everything permanently.

                          This also resonates with endings of
                             _If the Stars are Gods_
                             _Against Infinity_




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