Harry Clement Stubbs was born May 30, 1922, a century ago, more or less (or exactly, if you’re reading this on May 30th). Readers of a certain age know him as the science fiction author Hal Clement. Younger readers may not know him at all, because Clement died on October 29, 2003, and death often confers obscurity. Which is too bad, because younger readers are missing out on some fine stories. Here are five works by Clement that are well worth reading.
Clement was the hard science fiction author, a man who could not look at a phase diagram without seeing the potential for a thrilling adventure story. Furthermore, Clement delighted in The Game: SF authors do their best to present their readers with worlds rich in verisimilitude, while readers in their loveable way point out errors. Clement took corrections in good spirit, but was better than most at avoiding the need for them.
Modern readers may be surprised that military affairs are very nearly absent from Clement’s works. Although he was a WWII veteran himself, having learned to fly before he learned to drive, Clement preferred to focus on human vs nature conflicts over other varieties. The universe is antagonist enough—or at least it was in his books.
Mission of Gravity (1954)
The planet Mesklin is notable for many things, but two stand out: A) It is an enormous world, sixteen times as massive as Jupiter, and B) its day is absurdly short, just eighteen minutes long. Consequently, Mesklin is visibly oblate, not a near-sphere like Earth, and its surface gravity is unusually variable, from a “mere” three gravities at the equator to hundreds of gravities at the poles.
When a robot probe being tracked by a team of human scientists is lost near one of Mesklin’s poles, it seems irretrievable. Humans may venture with great difficulty to the planet’s equator but to land at a pole is to die. Providentially, however, Mesklin is home to natives who are open to profitable bargains. Barlennan, captain of the trading craft Bree, is quite happy to retrieve the probe in exchange for sufficient payment. It’s just too bad for Barlennan that he does not know Mesklin quite as well as he thinks he does.
Iceworld (1953)
Sallman Ken, a science teacher from the planet Sarr, is recruited to assist law enforcement in tracking down the source of a troublesome new narcotic plaguing galactic civilization. Very little is known about the substance, save that it is highly addictive and it has to be kept under extreme refrigeration until use. Normal room temperature evaporates the substance almost instantly.
His scientific skills having won him entry into the narcotics ring, the Sarrian teacher discovers that the source of the mysterious drug—tobacco—is a bizarre frozen world where the gaseous sulfur that Sarrians breathe is a solid, a world so frigid that H2O exists in liquid state. A world known to some of its peculiar inhabitants as Earth. However, having made these important discoveries, Ken finds that extracting himself from the gang may be impossible. It’s not that they will terminate him—it’s that he’s been exposed to tobacco. Life without tobacco may not kill Ken, but he may pray for death.
Close to Critical (1964)
Humans and aliens have been content to monitor the planet Tenebra from orbit. Almost thirty times as massive as Earth, with surface temperatures almost 400 degrees Celsius and air pressure hundreds of times that of Earth’s, the planet would kill any exposed human instantly. Even an advanced bathyscaphe would only preserve life for a time. This is no theoretical consideration, for young Aminadorneldo, the son of the ambassador from planet Dromm, and his Terran chum Easy Rich have, though a series of misadventures, become marooned on Tenebra’s surface in such a bathyscaphe.
Thanks to an astonishing lack of ethics, all is not lost. Years before, the orbiting researchers took the opportunity to appropriate native eggs. The hatchlings were raised by a robot to serve the orbiting researchers. Perhaps “Nick Chopper” and his clutchmates can locate and repair the bathyscape in time…unless their odd, robot-raised childhood has left them woefully ignorant of vital, need-to-know information about their home world.
Music of Many Spheres (2000)
Clement got his start in an era when magazines dominated—thus his output consists of a comparative handful of novels and a much larger number of short stories. Short lengths are often ideal for hard SF, as the stories are long enough to convince and succinct enough that errors can’t creep in. Hence the excellence of this collection of Clement’s short fiction.
Music of Many Spheres presents seventeen of Clement’s short pieces. Settings range from Earth to the Magellanic Clouds. Characters range from human to extremely alien indeed. Common to all: Clement’s intense belief in the story potential of physics and chemistry, sciences other authors were often content to overlook.
Noise (2003)
Lit by twin red dwarf stars, the close-orbiting worlds Kainui and Kaihapa are home to oceans 2700 kilometres deep. There is no land. No life ever evolved in the twins’ acidic oceans. The dense atmosphere is opaque, frequent thunderstorms jam radio communication, and the solid cores of the planets are highly active. Challenging worlds indeed! But at least the first settlers need not fear being displaced by later waves of colonization.
The Polynesians who settled Kainui brought the tools, in particular wet nanotech known as “pseudolife,” which helps them survive under such challenging conditions. Kainui’s cultures have been content to ignore the rest of the galaxy—and until now, the galaxy returned the favor.
Terran linguist Mike Hoani arrives, determined to document Kainui’s languages. His mission will require him to live as the locals do. Or, if he is foolish or unlucky, to die as the locals do.
***
This is, of course, merely a sampling of Clement’s work. Some of you may have your own favourites, which you can discuss in the comments below. Others who sample the five mentioned above may find them to their taste, in which case I am happy to report that not only is there more Clement out there, a surprising amount of it is still in print.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
It was only with the greatest of effort I didn’t just cover all of his novels, as there aren’t that many. Would have put me well over word count, though.
One of the interesting story elements that turns up in a few of Clement’s novels is “pseudolife”, which to modern eyes is clearly a form of nanotechnology. Clement’s version predates Drexler’s. Drexler’s being arguably more influential in SF than Clements but Clement’s appears more plausible.
“Thanks to an astonishing lack of ethics, all is not lost.”
Thanks for this sentence. I LOLd. This is unfortunately true of many older works.
I’ve been reading SFF since the late 1960s, but I’m pretty sure I never read any Clement. Sounds like I should try some.
Mission of Gravity and Clemet’s YA novel Needle were regular rereads for me when I was a teenager
Clement’s 1950 novel Needle shared certain similarities with the 1987 film The Hidden, starring Kyle McLachlan and Michael Nouri.
I cannot do better than to quote this Question: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/243505/16171
This seems a good place ot mention Medea: Harlan’s World. A set of Sf writers designed a world in stages — Clement invented the solar system and the basic geology of the planet. When the designing was done, those writers and a couple of others. Clement’s story, “Seasoning”, is one of the best in the book.
Thanks for the great article, James. I’m just about to read Mission of Gravity for the third time, and appreciate your reviews of other works.
I was lucky enough to have spent some time with him as his gopher at a local con. He was a lovely gentleman. A group of us had a fun chat about science fiction romances and created a Love Planet. We also inserted some romance into his published novels. Those caterpillar guys in MISSION OF GRAVITY probably stopped at a girl caterpillar brothel, for example. When I took him to the airport, I insisted on carrying his suitcase. He demurred since I was a small female, but I told him I lifted weights. He grinned, said, “Here,” and gave me his suitcase.
@8 I was fortunate enough to be on a couple of panels with Hal, and one of my favorite possessions is a photo of Hal with my then-toddler son.
I was happy to see Hal Clement at Mile High Con in Denver in 2003. He was on a number of panels, and was friendly and charming. At one point during the convention, I was sitting in the hotel atrium between events, just people watching. Clement came in and sat alone at a table across the room, also just people watching. It seemed a perfect time to go speak with him, no one was bothering him. But I’ve always been a little shy, especially in approaching the people I admire, so I let it be, and did not bother him. After the convention was over, Mr. Clement returned to his home in New York, and died the next day.
I think Iceworld is my favourite from this lot – its main weakness (like a lot of Clement) is that the aliens think too much like humans, but in this case they’re an advanced technological civilisation so it makes a bit more sense. The gradual discovery that about 90% of what they think they know about Earth is dead wrong is a lot of fun. Mission is fun as a pure adventure story. Really not a fan of Close to Critical – largely because of the ethical issues – and I don’t think I ever read Noise, I found his later work a bit wooden and formulaic. Probably worth mentioning that there are other Clement anthologies out there, mostly covering his earlier work, e.g. The Best of Hal Clement.
Clement said that he wrote possible interesting events caused by the physics, and then built a plot around them.
I think I saw a Clement novel that included a phase change diagram for ammonia and water. Did this actually exist? If so, what was it?
An early SF convention in Ottawa had, if i recall correctly, Hal Clement, Harry Clement Stubbs, and George Richard as, respectively, Author Guest of Honor, Fan GoH, and Artist GoH.
The ammonia-water phase-diagram book was “Star Light” from 1971.
Iceworld starts out with a portrait of 1950’s sex roles that may put off newer readers — but that’s when it’s set (unlike most of his SF, which is still in our future). And it’s a wonderful reversal of the classic Campbell trope “Let’s go to some strange place and marvel at how different it is”; Earth is just is bizarre to Ken (who knows of H20 only from theory — it has never been found) and his fellows as Mesklin, Dhrawn, et al. are to us. And Ken is a wonderful character: an ordinary type (a chemistry teacher like Clement) who gets drafted — not a bold explorer driving the expedition — who keeps his wits about him and copes.
@8 Hal Clement was the first pro I met at the first con I ever attended (Lunacon 1977, the last one held in Manhattan). I picked up my registration, got on the elevator, and he got on at the same time. I remember he was wearing a lot of anti-smoking buttons, including one that said, “Even Klingons Don’t Smoke on Elevators.” He spoke on a panel about technology and “magic” and how to investigate claims of the paranormal.
When Lunacon eventually moved to a hotel in suburban Westchester County, he’d take groups out into the parking lot for stargazing, pointing out planets and stars and telling us all about them.
I remember that the day he died coincided with some of the largest solar flares ever recorded, and all I could think of was:
“When beggars die, there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes”
Robert L. Forward’s Flight of the Dragonfly contains a pressure vs temperature graph of the various ices water mixed with ammonia can form; it is very complicated. Forward may have been consciously trying to emulate Clement.
I made anti-smoking buttons for him.
I have a stack of books signed by him (mostly Ballantine paperbacks). He would signed both with his real name and the pen name. He was a real gentleman.
Another title to mention is Cycle of Fire. A planet driven by a very strange lifecycle with a stranded human who thinks he can break the cycle. Sorry, buddy. Nature is more powerful.
I recently read Noise – very imaginative! I must look up some works of his, especially Mission of Gravity.
He did believe in exercizing the mind: the reader’s, and his own.
I appreciated his work, but my only close encounter with Hal Clement came during a Readercon in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the mid-1990s. We fell into conversation in the lobby.
He mentioned a memory-strengthening exercise he’d taken up: memorizing song lyrics. And then sang something I loved from the movie Empire of the Sun: that lovely air “Suo Gan.”
In Welsh, of course. Well.