"Before Isaac Asimov's first novel Pebble in the Sky, there was "Grow Old Along with Me," its original version lost in a library vault for nearly 40 years.
Before Sir Arthur C. Clarke's masterpiece The City and the Stars there was Against the Fall of Night. Clarke wrote: "I assumed that new version would completely replace the older novel, but [the original] showed no tendency to fade away; and indeed... some readers preferred it to its successor."
And before the 2002 Year's Best award winning Transcension, there was The Valley of the God of Our Choice, Inc., a rousing adventure of a future culture clash between machine-hating fundamentalists and haughty high-tech urbanites.
For years, this germinal novel was lost in a series of unfortunate events. Now it's been recovered from an old disk, and lets us see two views of the same unfolding future. It's a wildly fun and often funny story of dangerous romance between farmboy Mathewmark and daredevil Amanda (not to mention the buzzing liar bees).
Complete with an informative new Introduction and Afterword by Damien Broderick, this rediscovered gem is also a boon to any writing student who wonders how a complex novel grows and unfolds from a seed.
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