No Morning After: A Warning Across the Stars

Across five hundred light-years, the scientists of Thaar discover that Earth is running out of time. They have a way to save humanity, but first they must find someone who can hear their telepathic warning. Against astonishing odds, they make contact with Dr. William Cross, a gifted rocket engineer who has just been reprimanded at work, abandoned by the woman he loves, and is well on his way to finishing a bottle of whiskey.

Unfortunately for the aliens, Cross assumes the voice in his head is nothing more than an unusually elaborate drunken hallucination. Arthur C. Clarke turns an impending cosmic catastrophe into a wonderfully dark and surprisingly funny encounter between desperate extraterrestrials and perhaps the worst possible man on Earth to receive their message. No Morning After is vintage Clarke: clever, economical, and driven by an increasingly absurd conversation in which the aliens cannot understand why their offer of rescue isn’t being taken seriously.

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) was born in Minehead, England, and became one of the defining science fiction writers of the twentieth century. In 1945, he published a landmark technical paper describing the practical use of geostationary satellites for worldwide communications. His fiction included Childhood’s End, The City and the Stars, A Fall of Moondust, Rendezvous with Rama, and the short story The Sentinel.

Clarke later worked with filmmaker Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey, developing the novel and film from ideas that grew partly from The Sentinel. Known for combining plausible science with enormous ideas, Clarke could also be sharply funny, and No Morning After shows that side of his writing particularly well: the fate of an entire planet collides with one man’s spectacularly bad evening.