Book review: The Lion of Comarre and Against the Fall of Night, and Earthlight

Two rather low-grade Arthur C. Clarks. Both have an unfortunate combination of not-terribly-interesting storylines, combined with his rather clunky writing.

The Lion of Comarre is a sort-of very early prequel to The City and the Stars, and Against the Fall of Night is I think effectively an early draft of TCATS (both, at wiki). I didn't read much of ATFON, to tell you the truth. As to TLOC: we're around the year 2600 or perhaps later, but not far-future; the world is somewhat bland and has ceased to advance scientifically (although weirdly at one point a science-y guy says "oh of course in 50 years we'll have an interstellar drive", as though that kind of thing could possibly be predicted, never mind) and Our Hero goes off to find the Mysterious Lost City of Comarre where his near-genetic-equal genius-engineer forebear was last seen. Finding the MLCOC turns out to be trivially easy; he goes in and discovers that everyone is asleep in machine-produced consensual dreams. Being a total clown he attempts to awaken the sleepers, and discovers to his astonishment that the withered old men prefer the world of dreams where they are young and virile again; who could possibly have guessed? Certainly not Our Hero. After that he leaves, having been saved from the Robot Boss's grasp by the aforementioned Lion, who otherwise takes minimal part in the story. And so Our Hero goes back to the world, clutching his forebear's notebook of last projects, fired by enthusiasm to excel, or something.

Earthlight features a lunar observatory, and Our Hero is now a security agent masquerading as an accountant, sent to discover who is leaking info to the Federation (of outer planets) who are not very happy with Earth hogging all the heavy metals. As you would expect, girls put punch cards into the computers while men do all the story. In the end, Earth is mining nearby (why?) and puts its "fortress" in the same place (why?) and when the Federation decide to attack the Earth outposts on the Moon, they inexplicably choose to attack the strongest point, FFS why? There's a dead exciting space battle which wiki tells me is modelled on ("in homage to") E. E. Doc Smith, who did these things better. Clarke arranges that both sides, effectively, lose; they reflect deeply upon this and decide that being nice in the future is a much better idea and disappear off to the stars hand in hand. There's a desperately-exciting space-rescue towards the end which is carefully arranged to need people to breathe vacuum for a bit; I skipped that as I've read it a zillion times elsewhere, but perhaps it was new then.