A Fall of Moondust

Arthur C. Clarke was in his early 40's when he wrote A Fall Of Moondust. It was one of his first novels. I've never found Clarke's prose particularly elegant, but it certainly became more nuanced over time. Earlier work, like Moondust, is more mechanical and workman-like. It's got a raw quality to it. This is perhaps most evident when he tries to illustrate characters with detail, always seemingly written with a perfunctory attitude. The text is also riddled with the sexism of a middle aged white man in the 1960's, but Clarke tries to be as progressive as he can. Where the book really shines is in the technical rumination of the rescue effort.

Clarke was a game-changer with his early books, being one of the first to bring “real science” into science-fiction. Though the soviets had landed an object on the moon a couple years prior, it would be a further 8 years before the first human beings walked on the moon - so data was scarce. This is evidenced by the imagining of “seas” of dust. While there was plenty of fine regolith covering the moon, it didn't accumulate more than a few inches, or behave exactly as Clarke had surmised. Still, when his writing in Moondust focuses on the applied physics of the sunken Serene, it's highly engaging and entertaining in the same way Andy Weir's “The Martian” was. The reader might not be an engineer or a physicist, but most of us will understand the basic principles put forth by the writer, and that attention to technical detail mixed with the overarching survival story is what drives this book to greatness, and got it nominated for the Hugo award.

A bunch of ordinary people stuck in a tin can below the surface of the moon, battling one catastrophe after another, what is not to love? This is one of my favourite books and I can read it time and again, as indeed I have. So it seems a little dated? That is ok, after all it was written 53 years ago. If you ask me, it has stood the test of time pretty well. I read a review in which the reviewer considered it to be sexist - well, I don't agree. Put it in the context of the time it was written, it is remarkably forward thinking. There may not be any female scientists in the story but I can live with that, there still aren't as many as there should be in real life today. There are no aliens, monsters or zombies - just fine dust, trying to overcome them at every corner. Great fun.