Customer Reviews

STILL RIVER.

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This is a slightly odd book.

Hal Clement has been renowned for writing SF with real science, and his early novel "Mission of Gravity" is a classic of physics and chemistry. If you can appreciate this ultra-scientific approach, with little emotional content, you might really enjoy "Still River".

The plot is fairly straightforward: five students from an advanced interstellar culture are left alone on the small planet Enigma 88 as a practical assignment towards getting their advanced degrees.

Enigma 88 is a weird place. It orbits an O-type supergiant, and stars like that aren't supposed to have planets at all. It also has an atmosphere, despite being small. Although the students are pretty capable, it doesn't take long for some of them to be in physical danger.

I said that there was little emotional content. That's because most of the species of this interstellar culture are extremely reserved by our standards and have strong codes of privacy. There is one human on the expedition, Molly, and we do learn a little more about her feelings. Perhaps deliberately, Clement doesn't give many details about this culture - it adds to the slightly odd, detached, understated tone of the book.

The author succeeds in what he surely set out to do - create a scientific SF adventure puzzle. His aliens have a definite reality about them, perhaps because they do seem to think differently to us.

If you've read anything by Hal Clement, please try this - its my favourite of his novels.

Hal Clement practically defined the sub-genre of super-hard science fiction with his Mission of Gravity in the '50s. This book continues in that tradition. Still River is based on real scientific facts that you can go out and verify in your local high school science lab. It takes Jules Verne's old story of Journey to the Center of the Earth and creates a world where you really can travel to the center of the planet. For this purpose Clement assembles a group of very varied alien beings and one human, students sent on an (ostensible) assignment to the planet Enigma 88 to determine how such a small planet has kept an atmosphere. The story revolves around their various misadventures as the planet keeps upsetting all their assumptions and oversights, and thereby getting them into deeper and deeper trouble. A very good science puzzle story (and it really helps if you have a pretty good knowledge of inorganic chemistry under some fairly extreme conditions). The characters are not very well realized (though better than in some of Clement's works); this is a typical failing of his. But at least the portrayed motivations and modes of thought are logical and consistent for each type of being. Not up to the standards of Mission of Gravity or Needle, but entertaining. Recommended for those who enjoy seeing entire fantastic worlds built upon sound science.

The book has a great story and riviting caracters. My only regret is that it's not an ebook too. That way I could take it with me everywhere.

This novel suffers a similar fate to Hal Clement's 'Half-Life', i.e. it is dialogue driven with tonnes of exposition - for instance, if a character sits down, it says something like, 'There - I'm sitting'. It is this form of writing that makes much of Still River and Half-Life quite difficult to read at times, and consequently it is also easy to lose track of what's going on. Still, if you bear with it, this story has a degree of excitement, which comes through at times like a radio play - i.e. nothing to see but plenty of verbal description from the characters, letting your imagination run wild. Most of the novel takes place in the vast cave system of the planet Enigma (I won't detail the story, as others have already done so) and basically the characters and their little mapping machines, etc, travel through these vast caverns, tunnels, etc, following a river (downstream), effectively looking for its origin and (by association) the origin of life on the planet and possible other answers to many of the riddles that haunt Enigma. Certainly a degree in chemistry would help, but you get the basic gist of what's going on. Ultimately, Clement's story leads to nothing particularly revelatory, and like 'Noise' another one of his later novels, is more a voyage of discovery and observation - a very scientific observation. I recommend this book, but only to those already versed in Clement's expository style of writing. Above all, don't expect Aliens 3 or Starship Troopers - this is a book for hard-sci fi fans only, especially those who can find enjoyment in lengthy descriptions of a planet's habitat and get lost in the minutae of a truly alien world.