Storyline: 3/5 
 Characters: 1/5 
 Writing Style: 3/5 
 World: 4/5 
 When I started reading this book I, for some reason, had thought it was written by Isaac Asimov and was one of the Foundation prequels. I continued with this misconception for a few nights, and the whole time I was having tremendous difficulty linking this with Asimov's notoriously millenia-spanning series. One of the first qualities I found remarkable was that Asimov's (which was, in fact, Clarke's) writing had tremendously improved since the last novel of his (Pebble in the Sky) that I had read. I also noticed that the writing was much more focused - in a positive way - on scenery and that there was real enjoyment in exploring the terrain and area being portrayed. Dialogue, unlike in the Foundation books, was not the prime means of informing the reader or of moving the plot. The pacing was also much slower and the suspense was more subtle. All of these should have been clear evidence that I was mistaken in the authorship of the book and as to its provenance. I continued bumbling through the book trying to figure out why I couldn't connect anything to Foundation history. I finally got online and started searching for characters out of the earlier written Foundation books to see if I had been overlooking a common surname or some other indicator of how this was supposed to connect. When I looked to a publishing chronology to find out where A Fall of Moondust fit into Asimov's bibliography, I finally realized that it didn't fit at all! All the blurry and fuzzy ideas then congealed and focused, and I was able to appreciate A Fall of Moondust and Arthur C. Clarke on their own terms. 
 This is really a simple disaster relief story. Clarke makes it his own by setting it in a space science fiction world and really focusing on the science available at the time. Something is definitely lost in reading this fifty-five years later: Clarke was prescient in his vision of how technology would develop, and he had great instincts as to how media and bureaucracy would function in the futuristic world. Some of his attempts to capture (or predict) social situations and mores fell flat, however, and I suspect they were as ridiculous in the 1960s as they are today. Overall, this was a pleasant read, the novelty of it somewhat subdued because both his foresight and more contemporary adaptations. It belongs in the science fiction canon more as a homage to its significance to a specific era than as a timeless classic. 
 Reminds me of (view spoiler)[ Andy Weir's The Martian. In fact, I was a bit perturbed at how structurally similar the two were and that I had given Weir the credit for originality. Comparing the two, I think Weir tidied up Clarke's book and gave it a cleaner, sharper focus while making it more contemporary. Credit for the plot and drama, though, belong to Clarke. (hide spoiler)]