OK...some answers ...
I wiki'd RwR and read the plot line. It was/is now vaguely familiar.
What is more than just vaguely familiar is, as you put it, the single sentence stinger (teaser?) at the end.
Once brought to the fore of memory I recognized it immediately.
The article said Clarke did not envision a sequel as he was not doing sequels at that time.
However, the accuracy of Wikipedia is, as you know, always suspect, so who really knows what Clarke planned?...
Read the other works I mentioned and one collection of short stories. IIRC that collection was titled
Tales of Ten Worlds.
Also, forgot to mention (novella)
The Lion of Comarre. It was paired with
Against the Fall of Night in a SFBC edition.
This is exactly the
book I received in 1968 (I was in 7th grade)and immediately immersed myself in it.
But I remember nothing of TLoC.
I did read
The City and the Stars (1956) much later but did not know that it was an expansion of AtFoN until the first few pages started to sound familiar.
Then I went back and read the Forward. Oh,... Ok (I thought). Well, I'll read it anyway.
btw
Beyond the Fall of Night (1990) by Gregory Benford and ACC was a sequel to
Against the Fall of Night.
Interesting that ACC got second billing. Maybe he was more advisor than co-author.
But I have never read it.
All that remains of my collection of ACC works is the SFBC edition of
2001, which I read every few years.
Unlike you (and even being a few years older than you ...maybe 10?) I am not adverse to re-reading books, despite having well over a hundred yet unread books on my shelves.
I thoroughly enjoy revisiting my old friends courtesy of Jane Austen, Conan Doyle, Thackery, Stoker, Ann Radcliff, Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, JRRT, Homer, Willie Shakespeare (
Macbeth is still my favorite), Lewis Carroll, Dickens, Hawthorne, Poe, Stevenson, Orwell, Shirley Jackson, Golding, George Eliot, Wilde, CS Lewis, and a host of lesser known fiction writers (and no, not Anne Rice
), not to mention works of non-fiction, mostly history.
Prominent on the re-read list are scary short stories (and a few scary novels). I have 5 volumes of scary short stories, most of which date from the early 19th C. to the mid 20th C. They are outright horror stories (Dracula) to psychological thrillers (The Haunting of Hill House) and everything in between. Sometime check out H.H. Munro (aka Saki), Algernon Blackwood (JRRT probably read his story about the willow trees), Sheridan Le Faun, M.R. James, Guy de Maupassant . Not a few of these stories have been made into pretty decent scary/horror movies (not talking Freddy Kruger type stuff.)
A really terrifying short story:
"By One, By Two and By Three" by Adrian Ross (real name: Arthur Reed Ropes {1859-1933}, and at one time attributed to Stephen Hall).
And soon I will re-read
Dune.
Of course, being retired, I have more leisure time.
(Sorry for the digression.....actually, no, I'm not....talking about books is near and dear to my heart
)