Clarke was one of my favourite sci-fi writers when I was a wee lad, and reading this recommendation from Llew has reminded me why I enjoyed his books so much.
This novella is two stories back to back, and they pose a strange contrast while also presenting a very similar theme.
The Lion of Comarre is a strangely naive story about a young man who defies convention and journeys in search of a lost city, Comarre, and befriending a lion along the way. Meanwhile, Against the Fall of Night is a story of incredible depth that also features a young man striking out past convention to discover something off limits.
The theme of a humanity that has reached an impasse and refuses to collectively develop is an interesting one, and all the more surprising considering that Clarke is writing in 1946! What’s fascinating for instance is Clarke writing about super-minds and hyper-intelligent machines when computers were still top-secret devices held in military laboratories…
Clarke has always been an object of fascination for me, because his writing is both clear, concise and alarmingly imaginative. While many contemporary scifi writers struggle to generate dramatically new ideas, Clarke seems to have a gift for extrapolation of contemporary ideas into genuinely unknown territory.
Both novella and novel in this one volume speak loudly to the human desire for constant progress, a subject that many writers seem to take for granted. This creates a tension between the need for security many people routinely express, and the want for exploration that seems to be such an ingrained facet of human nature.
Against the Fall of Night in particular is a great read that, while suffering a peculiar brevity, is extremely rich in imagination and foresight.
A recommended read for buffs of historical scifi writers. Just skip Clarke’s atrocious later books like 3001 (a turgid waste of paper), and go straight back to this old classic.
7 July, 2007 at 4:08 pm
The very first short story I can remember reading was Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Walk in the Dark”. really put the whammy into me when i was eleven, I tell you. My favorite book by Clarke is still CHILDHOOD’S END. Well worth picking up and a good introduction to his body of work.
9 July, 2007 at 10:23 am
What struck me when I read these, was the similarity in one of them to Logan’s Run. Later, when the Matrix appeared, I remembered the people plugged into dream machines who didn’t want to wake up (if I’m thinking of the wrong books, it’s been a while…)
I liked Childhood’s End too – and Rendezvous with Rama too, but didn’t catch the sequel.
9 July, 2007 at 11:06 am
Clarke worked on the development of radar during WWII, so he would have been better placed that most to be down wit da computa scene… such as it was. Still a visionary. He predicted the use of the geostationary orbit, too. Come to think of it, “Islands in the sky” might have been the first of his books that I read.
1 May, 2008 at 1:37 am
One of the things that impressed me about “Lion of Comarre” is (if memory serves, since I don’t have my copy of his Collected Stories right now) the way Clarke describes a state of machine-induced consciousness. This was before the term “virtual reality” was coined and predates by years or even decades the works of authors like Philip K. Dick and Daniel F. Galouye (author of “Simularcron-3″).
27 August, 2012 at 11:37 am
Give my regards to the Keeper of the Records.