Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement (1954)

[AE35Unit]

This is a book about a salvage operation on a very unusual planet.
Mesklin is a disc-shaped world, the disk bulging out at the poles, rather like ()
But also there's a strong gravity differential between the rim and the poles. At the world's edge the gravity is about 3 times that of Earth's- tough going but manageable to the human crew. But at the poles it is many hundreds times that of Earth, crushing to any human, literally. The native inhabitants are rather like large centipedes, with flattened bodies and multiple limbs-this helps them to cope with the strong gravity at the poles. These inhabitants are traders, and sail across their world in a ship called the Bree, trading goods with whatever races they happen across. At some point there was a mission from Earth, and one of the crew's rockets, containing expensive cargo and equipment, worth billions, crash landed at one of the poles. Of course the humans are unable to go to the site as they would be crushed, and so they enlist the aliens they find there, whose bodies are designed to withstand the high gravity.

When the book opens the human crew have been at Mesklin for quite some time already and the language barrier has been crossed; the two races communicating via 'vision sets' provided by the humans. The Mesklinites continue with their trading operations, while also helping the humans to find their abandoned ship. The aliens, being so small, have a very low view of the world and have a strong sense of fear of things being above them. Quite understandable really because when at the poles a fall of a few inches could be catastrophic, and anything with any mass falling on them would be fatal. As such their homes have cloth roofs, and they have no concept of flying or even throwing.

The book is definitely hard SF, written by as scientist who makes the reader understand that throwing an object on a world of super high G, let alone flying, would be inconceivable. On such a world a bullet from a gun would arch down to the ground shortly after being fired, and at such a high G place even a pebble, if dropped, would create a huge crater. As such there is no war,no weapons. Also the 'geography' of the planet is quite different. The seas are composed of methane, not water. This is far less dense than water and so the aliens are able to float their ships and travel. For me it made fascinating reading and considering this was written in the 1950s it is quite cutting edge with its strong hard SF elements and, apart from the often wooden dialogue, it appears timeless.
On the whole I found this to be a well laid out exploration of a truly alien world with an interesting collaboration between the humans and the planet's native race and how the barriers are broken down between them.

 

[J-Sun]

Yep, great book and a great review. I'd just note that I believe it's actually an equatorial bulge. This, to me, is what it's all about: change the parameters and get a crazy new game. Wrap your head around some new concepts. Meet some new and very different ways of life. And all in a great adventure-quest structure.

If you like this, I really really recommend Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg (1980).

 

[AE35Unit]

Yea I know but I couldnt figure out a way of representing the correct shape with keyboard symbols . If its any help my avatar shows how it looks.

 

[Vertigo]

Here's my thoughts:

Mesklin is a bizarre, massive, oblate world with levels of gravity at the rim around three times earth normal and many hundreds of times more at the ‘poles,’ making existence impossible for any human anywhere other than the rim and even there only with great difficulty. But contact with a vital scientific probe close to one of those poles has been lost and the only way to retrieve the data from the probe is to employ the assistance of a group of local natives to go and fetch it for them, but their technology level is only around human medieval levels.

Mission of Gravity is a slightly mixed book for me. There were some dreadful plot holes in it but this somehow didn’t distract from a piece of good hard (if dated) science fiction as much as it normally would for me.

First some (possibly) interesting observations on the hard science fictions aspect. Written in 1954 it makes for an intriguing comparison with Robert L Forward’s Dragon’s Egg written much later in 1980, which I also read very recently. Both are hard science fiction based on the current leading edge science of their times, both are set on exceptionally high gravity ‘planets,’ both only really have humans as observers and most of the activity is from the native’s perspective. Forward probably swings a little more towards the hard SF side than Clement but both are very much focused on the science. Inevitably Mission of Gravity suffers more from the dating of its science than does Dragon’s Egg; in particular we have interstellar travel but are still using slide rules, it’s worth noting how back then, and indeed whilst I was still at school, the slide rule was absolutely the symbol of the engineer, for example Nevil Shute (author of On the Beach amongst others) was an aeronautical engineer and he entitled his autobiography ‘Slide Rule,’ and yet it wasn’t really the symbol of the scientist; not sufficiently accurate, I imagine, which brings up a short quote from the book that intrigued me: “Dave, put that slide rule back in your pocket and get to a calculator; get as precise a value of the hydrogen density on that clifftop as physics, chemistry, math, and the gods of good weather men will let you.” No other mention is made of this ‘calculator’; does he perhaps refer to one of those mechanical calculators (a bit like an old shop till) like my father owned? They certainly would have had more significant digits of accuracy than a slide rule but could only do basic arithemtic. Another dated aspect is that, sadly, it is now considered that such a supremely exotic oblate mega high gravity planet is impossible; such high mass only realistically forming gas giants rather than rocky planets.

That aside the gravity and its effect certainly made for a scientifically interesting, if impossible, environment. However what gave me much greater problems were the numerous plot holes. For example:

Spoiler

when they reach the first escarpment and lower the natives down the cliff with great difficulty and personal terror for them, whilst Lackland, the human observer, regretfully decides that he cannot follow because his crawler/tank (why did Clement start calling it one thing and then switch to calling it the other?) is too heavy for any possibility of being lowered. And yet the humans’ space ship has repeatedly delivered and lifted the tanks at the same latitude; it would have been relatively trivial for them to have picked Lackland up and dropped him off again at the bottom of the cliff.

This, however, was my only real complaint. Though this book is very much science forward it is not quite so much so as Dragon’s Egg and the story is a fairly typical and enjoyable example of the kind of adventurous story so common of that era.

On the whole I tend to struggle going back to read science fiction from these early days. If I go right back to Wells and Verne I actually have less issues but post war the so called classics have an awful lot of science fiction that really plays fast with the term speculative; it tends to go so far beyond the known science of the day that much of it is closer to fantasy with an abundance of ray guns and telepathy and other such nonsense. This book specifically does not do any of that nor does it have any of the explicit misogyny of that era, though there is marked absence of any females either human or alien, and as such is probably now one of my favourite reads from that era. However I’m not so sure about reading the two sequels that follow on from this classic.

4/5 stars