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Nightfall | Rating | |
| C | |||
| Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
Imagine a world with not one, not two, but six suns. These suns would logically have different distances from the planet, and thus would have different lengths of "day" for each star. Some days there are two stars in the sky, others there are three. Such a world might conceivably never know darkness, and so would never see the stars. The universe consists of their planet and their six suns.
But what if, every few thousand years, the various orbits of the suns and the other planets in the system actually produced darkness? It would be a time of great wonder. Or perhaps of their fear of the dark would produce a madness great enough to ruin a civilization.
First of all, I rather enjoyed the foreword to this story. The authors say that these are not humans, but to heck with trying to figure out what they call a raincoat. If it's raining out, they won't put on a splorg, they'll be wearing raincoats, dammit. It'll interfere with the alien feel of the world, but will help comprehension. And for the most part I admire them for taking that stance. I personally found it easier to think of it as a world of humans but a "what if" book, rather than try to translate the terms and imagery into alien analogues, which is exactly what the authors said was not the case, but it worked.
I was rather pleased, too, that not everyone lived through the entire book. When the world goes insane, people are going to die. And some characters that readers had been following actually do. Killing off a major character is hard, but it is the best way to show that a situation is truly serious, and the authors are canny enough to realize it.
Lastly, I thought it was very clever how astronomy, archeology, and psychology all come together to help produce evidence of impending doom. The various disciplines rarely have anything to do with each other, but here they do, and it makes sense. The sense of a mystery unfolding, becoming clearer to the characters, is ever present during the first of the three parts the book is divided into.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of problems to offset the parts of the book that I liked. I will leave aside the notion that there might be a six-star system out there, or that all the stellar orbits can be stable. I'll just take it as a given and move on. Similarly, I'm willing to forgive the addition of a life-bearing planet, since without it there's not much of a story to be had. But the means by which the authors create Nightfall is absurd. The creation of an unknown moon with a highly eccentric orbit whose reflected light perfectly matches the color of the sky as seen from the planet's surface, so that it is rendered effectively invisible, is ridiculous. Even worse, such a moon would have to be gigantic in order to cover all the planet with darkness; otherwise the eclipse would only cover portions, as it does when the moon passes over the sun. Why they didn't just have the orbits of the stars make them align every few thousand years I just do not understand. I would have changed the story, sure, but most of the changes could be accommodated well enough, incorporated with little difficulty into the plotlines Asimov and Silverberg ultimately chose to follow. And the mechanics of the upcoming calamity would thus be far more believable.
There are also some bad choices made regarding the writing. The third section, showing society immediately after Nightfall has ended, drags terribly. They all do, in fact, dragging a short story kicking and screaming into novel length, but the last part suffers the worst. It doesn't show any recovery, it just shows people finding one another in the chaos and deciding they need to rebuild. The actual task of it is left for some vague future time.
But what really took the cake was the very end. And to say why I was upset will require a pretty major spoiler, so skip this paragraph if you want to avoid that. The problem was that for the entire book, the antagonist was a religious order who had prophesized exactly this disaster, whom all the main characters considered nutballs on a moral crusade to roll back the ethical open-mindedness that had sprouted in the last century or two. The world is full of sin, these people say, and so it will end, and the only way to prevent the next one is to submit and be righteous. But at the end we find that the leader of this religion is faking it! He knew the end was coming, and knew that a theocracy was the most stable form of government, and set about creating a power base for that time so that he can help civilization get back on its feet! And so the protagonists decide to join their forces with his, no longer enemies or even rivals. This was stunning in its stupidity, because if this is the case then his followers are not in on the ruse, and when they find out they'll throw him out or worse. He just grabbed the tiger by the tail with this ruse. But the authors entirely ignore that notion and essentially declare that it'll work. Which I found very, very hard to believe.
Frankly, I thought this worked better as a short story. There it had a punch, a moment at the end that really makes the reader sit back and say, "Whoa." This lacks that. Further, as far as I'm concerned the story was ended before it was complete. All the restoration work is left for the reader to imagine. And given the ending scenario, I imagine it would go very badly. This isn't a bad book, but I'd recommend finding the short story and reading that instead.
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