Favorite Books Update

[athelind]

Wow. People have guessed Seven out of Eight of My Favorite Books -- and mavjop has guessed five of those.

I don't even know who mavjop is.

I will be very, very surprised if anyone gets #6, and very impressed, as well.

Comments

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

? Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement?

::B::

[athelind.livejournal.com]

We have a winner!

Though if you consulted Google on it, I will be very very disappointed. =(

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

I wrote an essay about it for A&E which appeared in the March 2004 submission. I've cut and pasted it below (two parts because of LJ's restriction).

::B::


Vintage Book Recommendation :
Hal Clement’s “Mission of Gravity”

While I was away in BC, I picked up a used paperback copy of “Mission of Gravity”, a book I have heard vaguely good things about but have never read before. The cover, which showed some bug-like things crawling over an artificial structure was one I had seen often before and had, well, always turned me off. For some reason, when I picked this up this time and opened to the first page, I read it, then the second, and before I knew it, I had finished the first chapter. I bought it, took it home, and had a thoroughly good time reading this work of SF penned fifty years earlier, in 1953, where it was serialized in an SF magazine.

The book is set on the planet Mesklin, a giant world shaped somewhat like a fried egg yolk, whose gravity is so massive that even at the extremely rapidly moving equator (the world rotates in about 15 minutes!), gravity is 3 Gs, and at the poles, it’s many hundreds of Gs! The world is also ringed at the edges, with several moons (see vintage cover image below, a much better piece of cover art than the paperback I have). Life in this world is based on hydrogen and methane, and must adapt to the incredible extremes of gravity found of the surface of their unusual planet. Despite these extremes, intelligent life has managed to develop on Mesklin.

Human’s visiting the solar system containing this oddball world have lost an important technological instrument package that had landed at one the poles in order to study the nature of gravity in such extreme conditions (700+ Gs!) and have no way of getting the valuable information back, except my making friends with one of the native Mesklinites and convince them to help them get it. Who they encounter is a roguish merchant ship’s captain named Barlennan who with is crew is exploring the near “weightless” (3G) regions of the rim of their world in search of trade. Oh yes, Barlennan, was one of those bug-like creatures on the cover of the paperback book that had always inexplicably turned me off.

The plot is quite simple; the humans are willing to bargain with Barlennan and his crew of the Bree, his trading ship to get their probe back from the pole on the far side of the world. The very tough bodies of the Mesklinites (they 15 cm long caterpillar or centipede like beings with pincers and claws) can easily stand the incredible G-forces that would squash humans like a bug on the planetary surface. Their ship, the Bree, is a collection of flat rafts that allow them to float and sail on seas of liquid methane gas as they seek trade and adventure, and more importantly, profit.

The humans promise to help Barlennan and his ship traverse to the ocean on the other half of their lens-shaped world and to provide them some valuable trade goods, if they travel to the world’s pole and retrieve the information for the humans who are orbiting the world far above. Barlennan agrees to the human’s plans, but has hidden motives of his own…

Throughout this adventurous SF story, Barlennan and his crew face many marvels and strangeness as they explore this other half of their world in there quest for the pole. They meet strange wild creatures, encounter hostile natives and have first contact with other strange civilizations. Barlennan, a kind of Marco Polo and Henry Hudson combined, has to convince his crew to follow him to the ends of the earth at the advice of the strange humans, and has to use his own wits and ingenuity to survive as the humans watch on via their two-way communicator device.

[end of part 1/2]

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

In Mission of Gravity the Mesklinites often come across as more sympathetic than the humans, who often seem to care more about their instrumentation data than with keeping their promises to Barlennan and his people. The final chapter has an interesting, if not entirely unexpected twist that I won’t give away here.

As a vintage work of SF, and perhaps one of the earliest works of hard SF, Mission of Gravity excels at both the depiction of the world of Meslkin, as well as the details of the alien Mesklinites, in particular, the trader and ship captain, Barlennan.

There are a few drawbacks to this work of fiction. Characterization is pretty thin, and parts of the book are extremely dated (the humans are still using slide rules!). However, other parts of the book are well done and more than compensate for these deficiencies, such as Hal Clement’s detailing of an ecology that would match this intricately thought out world. The depiction of the alien mind-set is fairly well done as well, especially Clement’s explanation for their hard-wired agoraphobia. The book even contains an extensive appendix written by Hal Clement about this very strange Whirlygig World that explains some of the very complicated physics and chemistry that underlies some of the plot complications in this highly entertaining book.

For all fans of SF I highly recommend Mission of Gravity, and I’ve already tracked down a sequel written 20 years later called “Starlight”.

[end of part 2/2]