My beef with The Star has always been the superficiality of it - Clarke sucks at humans to begin with but he particularly sucks at grappling with a crisis of faith within a clergyman faced with the ultimate indifference of an uncaring God. It's the quintessential example of gimmick sci fi - "I've got a twist ending and the only way to present it is to put you through a crapton of boredom." I think it gets bandied about a lot because gimmick sci fi is the only sort of sci fi most people will tolerate; it doesn't explore new ideas, it doesn't act as a parable or metaphor for something else, and it requires the audience to stretch their intellects not one iota. World of Tomorrow is a reductio ad absurdum take on the futility of life and the death of innocence. I enjoyed it - it's funny - and the ending was poignant. The part where the kid got left in the snow, but then didn't, was perfect. It's also pretty much a Hawkwind song, here covered by Banco de Gaia because i like them better than Hawkwind.