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Title: Mission of Gravity (SF Collector's Edition) by Hal Clement ISBN: 0-575-07094-3 Publisher: Orion Publishing Group Pub. Date: 20 April, 2000 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $26.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.3 (10 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: An enjoyable read with a sense of wonder
Comment: PROS: Plausible science, truly interesting world
CONS: Writing style is a bit stiff
BOTTOM LINE: Enjoyable, classic, hard sci-fi.
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Humans enlist the aid of natives to retrieve a lost space probe on the high-gravity world of Mesklin.
The real appeal of MOG is the planet Mesklin. Clement, who has a scientific background, builds an interesting and believable M&M-shaped world where gravity varies from 3g at the "Rim" (equator) up to 700g at the poles. The native Mesklinites, foot-long caterpillar-like creatures with pincers, are equally interesting as they deal with parts of their planet that have been previously unexplored. The story really conveys a sense of wonder.
Don't be put off or misled by the "juvenile" label put on this book by others; it's not one. Clement wrote one juvenile novel as far as I can tell after research - Ranger Boys in Space. Even so, what would be wrong if it was a juvenile? Many of Heinlein's best-loved works were marketed as juvenile novels (for example, Starship Troopers). Just read it and enjoy!
Overall, this hard SF novel was an enjoyable read.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Heavy Trip
Comment: First published in 1953, this book was the progenitor of the modern 'hard' SF sub-genre. Using only the known science of the day, it imagined a world so wildly different from our everyday experience that it dazzles the mind, showing just how wild the universe really can be.
The world is Mesklin, a very large planet that rotates on its axis in just eighteen minutes, leading to gravitational forces of 700 gravities at the poles, and just 3 gees at the equator. But this is just the first of the items that make the world unique: its average temperature is a toasty -160 degrees Celsius; a methane/ammonia atmospheric composition that at these temperatures act much like water on Earth - phasing between solid, liquid, and gaseous forms; a wildly ecliptic orbit and planetary axial tilt that has strange consequences for the weather. Now add an intelligent native life form that is fifteen inches long and just three inches tall, looking very much like an overgrown millipede with pinchers, an Earth probe stranded at one of the poles that Terran scientists would very much like to retrieve for the data it contains about high gravity environments, and you have the ingredients for a great scientific adventure story.
Clement, a high school science teacher for much of his life, writes very much in the mold of a much earlier SF writer, Jules Verne. As such, the emphasis is on the science, the puzzles and oddities extreme conditions can present, rather than on character or thematic messages. Every detail of this world was very carefully worked out, right down to why the native inhabitants would 'see' their world as a hollow flattened bowl, complete with accurate maps, and would reject almost out of hand the idea that the surface they could see was really the outside of a sphere. In fact, a good bit of the charm of this book is the portrayed alien mind-set, showing just how much environment shapes the way people look at things. This also applies to the Earth scientists, who have great trouble at times seeing how the extreme conditions lead to important technological conclusions, such as why a canoe is not a viable shape for an ocean-going vessel at super-high gravities.
The plot is pretty much a series of adventures occasioned by various scientific oddities as the Mesklinite party travels across the world from equator to pole in search of the Earthling's probe, with little in the way of character development or any deeper meanings. There is some severe dating of some of the technology used: slide rules, film recordings, environmental suit mechanical linkages, etc. There is one item here that was quite a bit ahead of its time - the use of a water bed as a method for staying in high-gee environments for extended periods of time (but was Clement aware of Heinlein's description of the water bed in Beyond This Horizon, written in 1941?). But the dating does not seriously detract from the main focus of the novel, which is Mesklin itself, just as timelessly incredible as the day this first saw print. Recommended for those who enjoy the scientific puzzle, those who still see the universe as an incredibly varied, complex, and beautiful composition, where scientific fact really is much stranger than fiction.
--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
Rating: 4
Summary: Flawed But Engaging "Hard" Science-Fiction...
Comment: A REVIEW OF: "Mission Of Gravity" by Hal Clement
ISBN: 0575070943
SYNOPSIS: This story (copyrighted in 1953) takes place on Mesklin, a highly "flattened" planet in an unidentified distant solar system. Mesklin's gravitational pull is hundreds of times that of Earth, but the same high rotational speed which has flattened the planet like a pancake has also made the gravity at the equator a "mere" three G's. To study the subtle effects of high gravity, the scientists have sent a high-tech (and massively expensive) probe down to the surface at the north pole, where the gravity is highest. But the probe has malfunctioned and can neither return to the orbital space station, nor transmit its findings. Fortunately, Mesklin is inhabited by intelligent creatures; so to retrieve this disaster, the Earthlings enlist the assistance of one of the natives, a ocean-going trader named Barlenann. Barlenann, however, has secret plans of his own, and hopes to turn the situation to his profit -- a daring plan indeed for a creature very much resembling an fifteen-inch caterpillar!
COMMENTARY: Hal Clemnt is (or was) very much an adherent of what is called "hard" science-fiction -- that is, science-fiction which is carefully and strictly confined to what is known to be scientifically accurate and technologically possible.
The problem is that Clement, in this book, is rather TOO strict with this "scientific and technological possibility". He is so strict, in fact, that he forgets that in order to travel to a "distant solar system" at all (mind you, when this book was written we wouldn't be reaching even the MOON for over fifteen years!) would take years, or even decades, of space travel, and that therefore his story was necessarily set in the future -- probably in the FAR future. And because he forgets this, this book is a truly astonishing read. Yes, he keeps strictly within the bounds of science and technolgy: but the science and technology whose bounds he keeps within is the science and technology of the 1950's!
The result is one huge, colossal, astonishing, super-deluxe anachronism. In this story we read of scientists orbiting a distant planet who still use slide-rules (Chapter XIII and XV) (!), don't have color video (implied -- no color mentioned where it logically would be -- in Chapter IX) (!!), and who are forced to record a video image on movie film in order to obtain a permanent record of it (Chapter XI). (!!!) Phew!!!
The episode (in Chapter XI) of "filming the video image" is particularly galling because, although videotape did not exist in 1953, audio tape certainly did. Recording a video transmission onto magnetic tape was one of the two big Holy Grails of television of the day (the other of course being color transmission). Neither problem -- color and videotape -- was intrinsically impossible; the difficulties were purely scientific and technological, and with all the money and effort being poured into them were absolutely guaranteed to be solved eventually, and probably within only a few years. There can therefore be NO conceivable excuse for Clement not to have extrapolated the technology of his day and forseen color television and videotape.
Another negative point is the poor way he treats the space station's "scientists" (so-called), who are constantly slapping their foreheads over some overlooked scientific point or other -- generally obvious, high-school type stuff that even your average fourteen-year-old wouldn't overlook.
Fortunately, and all that said, Hal Clement is a very fine writer, who crafts for us a well-told, well-detailed tale which, despite its many faults, engages our imagination from the very beginning and never lets us down. This book is -- and deserves to be -- a cult classic, and is well worth reading. :)
This review was submitted on: Wed., 02-Apr-2003, at 02:56pm EST (-0500 GMT).
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