As usual, Clarke weaves a lot of science around his account, even more here than is typically the case in his novels. I am still amazed by how many surprises and new scientific angles he can extract from dust. He works every possible trick you can imagine from this mundane starting-point—almost as if Iron Chef had baking soda as the main ingredient in one of their competitions. In a genre that typically reaches for larger than life effects, Clarke pulls off the old switcheroo and goes small for a change. Very small.
He also extracts some fine landscape writing from the dust. “The boat’s wake became longer and more disturbed as the spinning fans bit fiercely in the dust. Now the dust itself was being tossed up on either side in great ghostly plumes; from a distance, Selene would have looked like a snowplough driving its way across a winter landscape, beneath a frosty moon... When Harris swung Selene into a tight turn, so that she orbited in a circle, the boat almost overtook the falling veils of powder her fans had hurled into the sky. It seemed altogether wrong that this impalpable dust should rise and fall in such clean-cut curves, utterly unaffected by air resistance....”
And this passage (from page ten) is just the start of Clarke’s love-hate relationship with dust, demonstrated at length in this work. Give that man a Swiffer mop and a space suit! And where does it all end? I would love to fill you in on all the details, but I still hate plot spoilers. Sorry, Professor Robinson!
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