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Mission of Gravity
Apr. 20th, 2005 10:27 pmI recently filled a gap in my classic-science-fiction education and got around to reading Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, one of the seminal works in the specialized subgenre of hard science fiction. (It's currently back in print, with some related short stories and essays and the novel-length sequel Star Light, in an omnibus volume called Heavy Planet.)
Mission of Gravity, from the fifties, is his most famous novel, obviously a major inspiration for other writers such as Robert Forward, Larry Niven and Vernor Vinge. It takes place on the planet Mesklin, an enormous, rapidly spinning world shaped like a discus, whose gravity is three times Earth normal at the equator and 700 times Earth's at the poles, and which orbits its primary in a long cometary ellipse (Clement was inspired by claims of evidence of an unseen body in the 61 Cygni system). The day is minutes long; the atmosphere is hydrogen, with rains and oceans of methane. The intelligent Mesklinites are small, incredibly tough, centipede-like creatures at a roughly medieval level of technology. Psychologically, they are very humanlike beings, though they have some unusual attitudes resulting from their high-gravity environment (the polar Mesklinites have never heard of thrown weapons and won't readily get under any solid object). In a storytelling device that Clement would use over and over throughout his career, the story revolves around the mostly friendly cooperation between a band of adventuring Mesklinite sailors and a group of humans, who send them on an errand to recover a malfunctioning scientific lander at the pole.
Clement makes no attempt to be a prose stylist; he was a high-school science teacher, the careful imagination of Mesklin's bizarre environment is the story's central jewel, and his writing is simple and declarative, with long didactic passages betraying a particular fascination for chemistry and geology. I found it strangely comforting, though I doubt it will be to everyone's taste. In the early parts of the book, a heavily-armored human actually travels with the sailors near the equator of Mesklin, and there are frequent point-of-view shifts that are not always handled well. Once they part company and the story follows the Mesklinites on their danger-filled odyssey back toward the pole, Clement's storytelling becomes considerably more graceful and absorbing, and while his characters never entirely become three-dimensional, his Mesklinite trader-captain and some of his crew are portrayed with considerable affection. The end of the book surprised me: the alien captain delivers a speech to the faraway humans that is profoundly moving in a way that perhaps only a high-school science teacher could manage.
Even the most imaginative of science-fiction authors usually dream up imaginary planets that are not too far off from what's available in our solar system. Clement was not like that. His planets, in these and his other stories (such as the novels Close to Critical and Iceworld, which I'd read earlier), were usually profoundly physically different from anything we've got here, and in this he was prescient; it's increasingly clear that our solar system is not all that typical, and extremely weird planets are common. I'm glad that Clement lived just long enough to see the beginning of the modern spate of extrasolar planet discoveries (and write some stories inspired by them). We now know that the universe is full of Hal Clement planets.
Mission of Gravity, from the fifties, is his most famous novel, obviously a major inspiration for other writers such as Robert Forward, Larry Niven and Vernor Vinge. It takes place on the planet Mesklin, an enormous, rapidly spinning world shaped like a discus, whose gravity is three times Earth normal at the equator and 700 times Earth's at the poles, and which orbits its primary in a long cometary ellipse (Clement was inspired by claims of evidence of an unseen body in the 61 Cygni system). The day is minutes long; the atmosphere is hydrogen, with rains and oceans of methane. The intelligent Mesklinites are small, incredibly tough, centipede-like creatures at a roughly medieval level of technology. Psychologically, they are very humanlike beings, though they have some unusual attitudes resulting from their high-gravity environment (the polar Mesklinites have never heard of thrown weapons and won't readily get under any solid object). In a storytelling device that Clement would use over and over throughout his career, the story revolves around the mostly friendly cooperation between a band of adventuring Mesklinite sailors and a group of humans, who send them on an errand to recover a malfunctioning scientific lander at the pole.
Clement makes no attempt to be a prose stylist; he was a high-school science teacher, the careful imagination of Mesklin's bizarre environment is the story's central jewel, and his writing is simple and declarative, with long didactic passages betraying a particular fascination for chemistry and geology. I found it strangely comforting, though I doubt it will be to everyone's taste. In the early parts of the book, a heavily-armored human actually travels with the sailors near the equator of Mesklin, and there are frequent point-of-view shifts that are not always handled well. Once they part company and the story follows the Mesklinites on their danger-filled odyssey back toward the pole, Clement's storytelling becomes considerably more graceful and absorbing, and while his characters never entirely become three-dimensional, his Mesklinite trader-captain and some of his crew are portrayed with considerable affection. The end of the book surprised me: the alien captain delivers a speech to the faraway humans that is profoundly moving in a way that perhaps only a high-school science teacher could manage.
Even the most imaginative of science-fiction authors usually dream up imaginary planets that are not too far off from what's available in our solar system. Clement was not like that. His planets, in these and his other stories (such as the novels Close to Critical and Iceworld, which I'd read earlier), were usually profoundly physically different from anything we've got here, and in this he was prescient; it's increasingly clear that our solar system is not all that typical, and extremely weird planets are common. I'm glad that Clement lived just long enough to see the beginning of the modern spate of extrasolar planet discoveries (and write some stories inspired by them). We now know that the universe is full of Hal Clement planets.