Customer Reviews

The Essential Hal Clement Volume 3: Variations on a Theme by Sir Isaac Newton: The Mesklin stories

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I had to chuckle to read that little snippet in the Booklist review at the top of the page. Here are the classic Mesklin novels, stories, and some essay material under one cover at long last... what, you've never read them? Scroll back up and click the yellow button.

Although I, for one, would argue that Needle is a more important work, Mission of Gravity has to be a close second in Clement's long career as a "hard" SF writer. This novel takes extreme but entirely plausible science (at least, plausible as of the era: not much has changed in physics and chemistry, but we know rather more about computers) and uses it to build one of the most extreme worlds imaginable and then explores it thorougly, from equator to pole.

The aliens are not very alien acting, not withstanding that they look like nothing so much as a catepillar in a lobster suit and have blood of liquid methane, but the byplay between the human scientists and the aliens and the amazing landscape is still pretty nifty forty or more years on.

StarLight and the other Mesklin material is interesting too and this book is the cornerstone on which later writers or works, such as Larry Niven or the Harlan Ellison "Medea" project draw their inspiration. It's still good.