Although Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust was nominated for the Hugo Award in 1963 (losing out to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle), and was the first science fiction book to be featured by Reader’s Digest in their “condensed novels” series, it is not one of this author’s most widely ready books. Yet Clarke’s lunar disaster story ranks among his tightest and most smartly constructed novels. Here he displays his knack for adding a new “turn of the screw” every few chapters, so that the crisis scenario he is unfolding gets deeper and deeper—bother literally and metaphorically.
For his main characters are caught in a sea of dust when their lunar tourist expedition gets caught up in “dry tsunami.” Their vehicle — a cross between a bus and a boat — is trapped below the surface, and rescue efforts can find no visible trace of where or how they disappeared. Imagine a story that combines the most distressful elements of a “lost at sea” tale, a “mining disaster” story, and a “astronaut running out of oxygen” adventure, and you will get some idea of the scenario Clarke has contrived.
Clarke is usually at his weakest when it comes to developing characters. He is better at creating scenarios than protagonists, and usually the plot drives the characters in his books, rather than the other way around. But in A Fall of Moondust, he needs to build dramatic scenes from the interactions of the trapped crew and passengers, and the result is a storyline that is far more personality-driven than one typically finds with this author. His eccentric and contentious characters create a tableau that is more like Murder on the Orient Express than 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The occupants of the Selene, his "lost at sea" tourist craft, include a retired space travel hero, an Australian aboriginal physicist, a crank who is obsessed with UFOs, a lawyer and his wife, a retired “dancer,” and other lively characters. They are not handled in a completely realistic manner — but, for that matter, neither are the figures in Dickens or Proust — but Clarke does show how he can create drama, tension and humor in set pieces that are not much different from the scenes other authors place in drawing rooms and hunting lodges.
Article comments