I remembered this book as an exciting technical story about a rescue on the moon, and my goodness that’s what it still is. A Fall of Moondust (1961) has not been visited by the suck fairy in the decades it’s been sitting quietly on the shelf—it remains an edge-of-the-seat exciting technical story of a rescue on the moon. It’s the 2050s. The solar system is being colonised. On the moon, they want to make some money from tourism. They have a boat that skims over the dust in the “Sea of Thirst,” just a tour bus, really, out there to give the tourists a show—until the day when there’s a moonquake and the boat slips down into the dust. The rest of the book is the story of the passengers and crew trapped under the dust, and the attempts of the people on the surface to rescue them. It’s as unputdownable today as when I was twelve.
I never get tired of laughing at computers in old SF. The computers here are ballistic calculators! They don’t have screens and are huge and aren’t connected together! People dictate memos and then correct printouts! On the other hand, before I laugh too much, where is my moonbase? (You wait until you’re uploaded into cyberimmortality, the first thing you’ll hear there will be “This is what you call the future? Where’s my flying car already?”)
There’s one lovely bit which is entirely dictated by this weirdness of tech level. When they try to pool their entertainment options under the dust they have only two novels and no games. Imagine the options a group of twenty people would be able to offer today… at least until their batteries ran down. They make cards from 52 pieces of notepaper and play poker, and read aloud from their fiction. What they have is magnificent—the classic Western Shane, in a university press edition with footnotes, and a current bestseller, The Orange and the Apple, the romance between Isaac Newton and Nell Gwynne. (Neil Stephenson should write it.) The humour of this is done lightly but wonderfully. The thing that makes it even funnier now is that I wouldn’t be at all surprised by a university press Shane, even though Clarke’s joking.
The other very old fashioned thing is the gender politics, which can best be summed up as “awful.” Hello, sexism fairy! The main characters are all men—the pilot, the guy in charge of the rescue, the grumpy astronomer, the reporter. The women who do exist—the ones on the ship—don’t have jobs if they are married. (This is particularly notable because there’s a comment that Earth educates everyone because they have so many technical jobs they can’t afford to waste men… Quite.) There’s a stewardess who is the nominal love interest—and I thought this romance was perfunctory even when I was a kid. There’s a female journalist who’s a shrew and who is said to suffer from “impacted virginity.” This is well over the line into offensive. There’s a fat wife who used to be a dancer. (She is said to have lost “a couple of kilogrammes” in two days on short rations. I think this is Clarke trying to use scientific units while not being comfortable with them. One kilo, or a couple of pounds, sure.) She’s a caricature but generally as characterised as most of the passengers. Apart from that there are no women appearing in this novel—all the engineers, pilots, astronomers, etc are male. Women get to be support staff and naughty dancers and wives. It’s this sort of thing you have to measure “Delilah and the Space Rigger” against.
Before I put all of that firmly behind me in the box marked “it was 1961” I shall also mention that hotels on the moon all have stairs because you don’t need elevators at that gravity—with the unwritten corrolary that nobody would ever be in a wheelchair or have a baby in a stroller, or have trouble with stairs even in low gravity. Race politics does slightly better. There is a wholly admirable engineer called McKenzie who is 100% Australian Aborigine, and 100% culturally assimilated. This isn’t the level of multi-culturalism one would want today, but for 1961 it’s really good. (I wonder if Clarke once met a memorably cool black engineer called McKenzie, because that’s also the name of the family in Imperial Earth, with a slightly different spelling.)
The characters are all fairly lightly sketched, but it doesn’t matter because the dilemma and the lunar landscape are the real characters here, and they’re utterly three dimensional. The tension never lets up. The ship goes under the surface, and time is ticking and heat is rising and oxygen is running out and more things keep happening—it’s riveting. You can never forget you’re on the moon. In the worst shipwreck on Earth there was at least air to breathe! Earth here is a distant crescent hanging in the sky. The furthest away help comes is from L2. All Earth can do is watch. Some of the passengers are comic relief, but the vast majority of the characters in this book are competent men doing their jobs. Even the grumpy astronomer is a competent man doing his job with a bit of sarcasm.
This is the future that didn’t happen, the future where the boffins of the 1950s rose up and colonized the solar system with slide rules and general co-operative intellectual competence. This moon was first reached in 1967 by the Soviets—and this was published after Kennedy announced the space race, so Clarke was putting his money on the other side. The hotels have notices in English, Russian, and Chinese, but there’s no indication that the Cold War is still a problem.
A Fall of Moondust is a classic of science fiction—a man against nature story, at one sixth gravity and in a sea of dust that’s half-way to being a liquid. The characters are thin, but the prose is full of the poetry of science. We have come a long way since 1961, but this is readable, exciting, and chock full of sense of wonder.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
One thing I found humorous was the UFO nut who got trapped in that bus.
Unfortunately, the selenology has become as dated as the gender attitudes, but this is still a very good book. It could probably be turned into a heck of a movie, too. Mix up the genders a bit, update the stereotypes of the passengers, it could be a real edge-of-the-seat film.
Oh, and looking, I see that BBC did a radio drama in 1981.
Suffers from “impacted virginity”?
Is this some strange way of suggesting that an adult professional woman might chose to be sexually active? And that’s something you suffer from? (Just what sort of men are they sending to the moon?) Or is this some strange medical condition? The gynecological equivalent of an impacted tooth?
Ursula: It’s meant to be a joke — that the woman has chosen not to be sexually active and therefore doesn’t want anybody else to be either. It’s just horrible. It’s not as bad as the thing about leading apes in Hell (what kind of God would send apes to Hell?) but it’s in the same peculiar direction.
This was one of my favorite books when I was a teen ages ago, and I read it several times. I think people optioned it for a movie for a while, but obviously it never got made.
I googled “impacted virginity” to see if it had some earlier currency or meaning, but this blog post is the only hit I saw.
Impacted Virginity would be an interesting band name.
I think it was meant to be a humorous reference to a spinster whose spinsterhood has soured her on the whole business, whether or not it was an entirely voluntary choice. It should be noted that there were a lot of spinsters in Britain between the wars, since so many young men were killed in WWI. Dorothy Sayers dealt with the spinster problem during the period between the wars in Unnatural Death. It would have impacted the culture Clarke grew up in and these sorts of jokes were probably quite common.
I like to think of this novel taking place in an alternate universe where moon tectonics and topology is different and we didn’t wimp out on space exploration and Jupiter’s just exploded.
Not my favourite Clarke and not re-read it but remember quite enjoying the dramatising of engineering problems that he was so good at (or is that just me?).
I seem to remember reading an interview where Clarke stated that a film was in pre-production and that they had solved the problem of the lack of dust lakes on the moon.
While picking this up at my local library, I also grabbed Sands of Mars, another Clarke classic, with Mars taking its turn at the starring landscape. Back in 1951, when the book was published, the idea of a famous, best-selling SF writer, like his protagonist, was probably the most science-fictional aspect of the book. (Plus Squeak is one of my favorite alien critters!)
Sayers’ GAUDY NIGHT is about the then-current idea that spinsterhood produced mental and emotional aberrations.
I refuse to believe that Clarke would have been uncomfortable or unfamiliar with kilos (or kilogrammes, as he would probably have thought of them), or – for that matter – have seen them as a particularly “scientific” unit. As a scientist and engineer he would certainly have worked with both SI and imperial units. A futuristic unit, yes, for his audience at least.
As for “impacted virginity”, I agree that it’s offensive, and an example of the pervasive sexism of the book, but on the other hand it’s quite an apposite term for a condition which I recognise in a few of my acquaintances (both male and female).
Much as I love Clarke, I’ve long thought that plotting was not his strong suit, not at novel length anyway. Most of his books are closer to travelogues than they are to thrillers.
But in A Fall of Moondust Clarke uses straight-ahead disaster plot that works very well to show off his strengths.
A small technical error, the novel was written in 1960, prior to JFKs announcement. Soviet astronautics was, as far as the space race was concerned, clocking up first ahead of the USA until the mid 1960s.