Finished Arthur C. Clarke's
A Fall of Moondust. I have two quibbles: there's a brief digression on the past regarding Australian aborigines that is irrelevant in the context of the book and broke the mood and a longer digression on saucer nuts that is both irrelevant and misplaced. Cut those elements and it would tighten the pace and streamline the story. but the other 200-some pages of the 215 page novel were damned near perfect. This should have beaten either of
Stranger in a Strange Land (1961 copyright, like
Fall) or
The Man in the High Castle (what won, the year
Fall was actually nominated). (And that's not to knock those works.) Prior to reading it and during much of it I was thinking this was an awfully thin story for a novel-length work and wondering how he'd pull it off but I was happy all but those two steps of the way and it worked.
A sort of tourist bus falls in a sort of sinkhole in the moon and various engineers spend a few days trying to rescue the 22 trapped passengers.
That's it.
But it was great! His moon is not our moon and his future is not our future (more's the pity) but it's an absolutely convincing and riveting tale of life and death struggle set against a not-quite-utopian but plausible and invitingly optimistic future. This was a blast to read now but not without a sense of loss for what hasn't come to be - on release it must have been read with unalloyed pleasure when it would have seemed like a future that had to happen. A lot of it can be read almost like a mystery and he presents scientific and engineering problems and solutions and lets the reader have time to figure them out for themselves. But, lest anyone be put off by what might sound like an abstract engineering puzzle, there's also an array of characters, from the likeable to unlikeable, sane and crazy, brave and timid. These are the people who are trying to do the saving and being saved, after all. Also, one of my few complaints about Clarke might be that his general style or more specifically his sense of humor (if present) can be a bit dry but this was a reasonably warm book with several bits of outright humor - there are a couple of pieces of embedded metafiction that are quite interesting (real Westerns and imaginary (I hope!) romances) and the "romance novel" concerning Isaac Newton was very funny. ("'Call me Ike,' said the sage huskily".)
Anyway -
A Fall of Moondust is definitive "this is what I read it for" science fiction.
It's just really dismaying to me that it's likely my last new Clarke novel - or at least the last new Clarke novel I particularly looked forward to. I have a few stories to read from
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke now that it's replaced my other collections but no more novels aside from the non-SF
Glide Path, the YA
Dolphin Island, and the late (in a range of lesser novels) and unappealingly "topical"
The Ghost from the Grand Banks and
The Hammer of God. But I guess it's okay - it's way past time to start in on re-reading
Rendezvous with Rama and many more.
