Re: Arthur C. Clarke question

In article <Xns9A608BF29ECFCgenewardsmithsbcglob@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Gene Ward Smith  <gene@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Sean O'Hara <seanohara@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in news:63thsgF292gujU1
>@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>> "Against the Fall of Night" was the first novel Clarke wrote, and he 
>> was unhappy with how it turned out, so when he felt he'd learned 
>> enough of the craft, he went back to rewrite and expand it into "The 
>> City and the Stars".
>> 
>
>Of course, he forgot he was supposed to improve it.

My, we are in a grumpy mood this year, aren't we?

I don't think there is any clear concensus about which is the better
version. Most people seem to prefer the one they read first. That's
true for me, and it was tCatS. I didn't read AtFoN until many years
later, and found the differences interesting, but I'm fairly sure 
that it wouldn't have made the impression[*] on me that tCatS did,
if only because Diaspar's Central Computer was a big hit with me
and is much less developed as an entity in the earlier work.

[*] I've said before that tCatS was the turning point for me as
regards reading SF. Of course, it was the Golden Age [OK, plus a
couple of years - I must have been a late developer]. Little did
I know that I would still be reading the stuff forty-mumble years
later ...

-- 
Chris Thompson
Email: cet1 [at] cam.ac.uk