Clarke is deservedly considered one of the giants of science fiction. In recent years, for some reason, he has been producing many collaborations, and in every one of them, Clarke's genius trips over the banality of his collaborators. Why anyone thought one of my favorite books, The City and the Stars, needed to be reworked, I'll never understand. How bad is the pollution of Clarke's original? At one point in BTFoN the characters travel to earth's moon. But in TCATS, we learned that the moon was destroyed millions of years ago! It was a major plot point when the protagonist discovered the reason that the moon was destroyed. Did Benford even read the original? Does Clarke not remember it? Was the editor asleep? This is quite simply a bad book.