Moondust to the Max

My friend and once-a-month drinking companion who chooses to go by the name of Bookzombie is off to Wiscon, where one of the panels he will be on is:

Revisiting the Wow: Books That Changed Everything (Reading, Viewing, and Critiquing SF&F)
Saturday, 8:30-9:45 a.m.
Remember that early work you experienced, the one that twisted off the top of your head and let new ideas in? Rereading breakthrough works can be a mixed blessing: insight into their power, disappointment with the writing or the concepts, embarrassment or bewilderment at what was so intriguing the first time around. Revisit one of your sparkplug works and come to share the experience.

Not been to Wiscon, don’t know if I ever will. Got me to thinking, though: what would be my breakthrough works? Leaving out the entire range of Target Dr Who novelisations up to about 1978, The Time Machine and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (read ’em both by the time I was 11-12, but more as groundwork than for the wow! factor), the Foundation trilogy and Dune (didn’t read them until my later teens) ...

Actually it’s not too hard. Both of these were in the school library; both were read over and over and over and over and over when I was 13-14ish; and I haven’t read either in years, partly because I suspect they will not have aged at all well.

1. Arthur C. Clarke: A Fall of Moondust. Published years before Armstrong’s one small step but based pretty well on what was then known about the Moon, Clarke imagines a crater that has filled up over the millions of years with microdust so smooth and fine it’s like a liquid. Which means, you can get boattrips on the Moon. Which means rides for the tourists. All well and good until a moonquake beneath the dust sea causes one of the dustcruisers to be swallowed up, and the tourists are trapped with air and power running out.

In short, it’s a suspense novel, a race against the clock, with (being Clarke) top of the form extrapolation of what probably would happen. The rescuers must improvise all their equipment – this kind of thing has never happened before – and it’s described in loving, realistic detail. Also, any novel or story of Clarke’s set on the Moon makes you want to go there now with its images of vacuum-parched, razorsharp mountains and sweeping plains beneath a sky of purest night. He pays attention meanwhile to the human angle and I still remember some of the pastimes the passengers think up to keep themselves occupied. One of which is a public reading from a porn novel.

And that’s where I think the datedness would start to show. Clarke’s idea of what constitutes racy has always lagged behind the rest of the world, and back in the early sixties he was out by a few decades. He must have been writing this at much the same time as the Lady Chatterley trial was going on but he hadn’t twigged the impact. Also, from memory, the female characters are frumps, ice maidens or in just one case – the chief stewardess, the capn’s bird – just right, and the scene where she and the captain finally join the 30-Feet-Under Club in the ship’s galley is (I suspect) just plain embarrassing.

2. Robert Heinlein: Starman Jones. This was the kind of thing Heinlein wrote in his glory days, before the right-wing diatribes and polemics in favour of plenty of underage sex to guarantee psychological wellbeing. Maybe he believed all that back then, he just didn’t write it. His teenage heroes were decent lads – honest, straightforward, bright, courageous – and Max Jones is no exception. His uncle was an astrogator – i.e. space navigator – on a space liner, and when Max’s widowed stepmother remarries an abusive git he runs away to get into space himself. Sadly his family connections don’t work and he has to smuggle himself onto a starship as a deckhand. And when a hyperspace jump goes horribly wrong and the ship is stranded deep in unknown space, Max is the only one who can get them out of trouble.

Y’see (and this is where the datedness creeps in) astrogators calculate their hyperspace jumps on a sliderule which gives them numbers to look up in massive volumes of tables, which convert the numbers into binary so that they can be fed into a computer. Max has an eidetic memory and has memorised the tables that belonged to his uncle. That’s right. Numbers are worked out by sliderule and looked up in a printed book to be converted into binary for input into a computer ... if you can’t see why that might date, you’re reading the wrong blog.

But Heinlein isn’t doing scientific extrapolation – he sets up the rules that make the story work and sticks to them, like any good science fiction. I liked Max then and I think I’d like him now. En route in his adventures he falls in with a Wise Old Guy who befriends him and ultimately lays down his life heroically; for various reasons he ends up as captain (pro tem) of the ship; he gets captured by aliens along with a beautiful rich young gel from among the passengers; and he is just gauche enough with her to guarantee that they will always be just good friends and she still goes off and marries her rich fiancé. In short it’s about heroism and coming of age and life and all that, without off-putting squishy stuff.

So, for sensawunda, A Fall of Moondust. For good intelligent adventure, Starman Jones. And now I think about it, I’m pretty certain I’d be able to read the latter still without squirming.

A few years later I read The Number of the Beast, published 30 years after Max’s adventures, by which time Heinlein had ricocheted off into the distant realms of lunacy and I couldn’t believe it was the same author. Read David Langford’s spot-on review and doff your heart at the passing of genius.