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A review by mayoroffailure
A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke
2.0
As I’ve spoken about in other reviews, Mr. Clarke is certainly a writer that I would consider to be on the Mount Rushmore of classic science fiction writers, and it's not often that I’m let down by writers who I would consider to be on the rock face. My interactions with Mr. Clarke’s writing to this point have been completely positive and so when I noticed this book on Amazon and was intrigued by the proposed storyline, I bought it without hesitation. I would never have guessed that it would end up being the most boring thing that I would read in 2018.
What I find to be the strangest thing about this book is that all of the pieces are in place for an absolutely thrilling story about survival. You would think that writing a story about people trapped inside a vehicle where they will eventually suffocate would be an excellent table with which to lay all sorts of suspense, paranoia, and betrayal upon, but Mr. Clarke didn’t take this route. Instead, Mr. Clarke decided to use the situation to examine how engineers would potentially rescue the people trapped, and it’s an incredibly arduous read.
I’d like to take a moment to discuss why it is that you need to have some sort of conflict in your story beyond the basic igniting incident. In A Fall of Moondust the igniting incident is the sinking of the boat that our characters are on, this is the primary reason for all the story that is to follow. We find the characters in a situation where they have limited air and so the engineers have to race against the clock to find a solution that will either pull the boat up from beneath the dust or get the passengers out of the craft. Now, this would ordinarily provide all the suspense that you would need, but only if the reader is directly experiencing the events at hand, but when the reader can put the book down at any time or remove themselves from the story then the suspense of the initial conflict loses its potency.
So how do you keep a reader invested? You introduce more conflict into the story. Now, Mr. Clarke, credit where it’s due, did try to do a little of this. As the story progresses the engineers encounter issues with their plans and things don’t always go as they intended, but the fatal error in the writing here was that Mr. Clarke never introduced any conflict into the scenes where we see the people on the boat dealing with their life or death situation. Up until the last thirty pages or so, the people trapped on the vessel are completely calm, they don’t panic, they play cards and read books, and it's incredibly boring. When you marry that with the continuous technical talking of the engineering scenes A Fall of Moondust becomes a book that reads more like a fictitious training scenario for future safety engineers than anything else.
A comparison between this book and The Martian seems fairly apt in my opinion. Both of these books are hard science fiction that focuses on the real scientific implications of their situation, both involve a person or people stranded in a situation where rescue is needed, and both books contain two storylines that involve the stranded and their perspective rescuers. While I criticized some of the quality of the writing in my review of The Martian I think that it excels where A Fall of Moondust fails. As Mark Watney and his helpers continue to work towards his rescue on the Martian surface, they encounter issue after issue that keeps the tension high, raises the stakes, and keeps the reader continually invested in seeing him survive.
There is none of that in A Fall of Moondust as the people trapped in the sunken vessel would appear to be the calmest and compliant people, I think I’ve ever seen in a novel, and it almost becomes unrealistic to me. As things continually get worse for the people stuck inside the craft, they never get more upset or turn on each other or even argue. I can’t claim to be an expert on situations like the one presented in the book but I would find it hard to believe that there wouldn’t be even a small amount of conflict between people trapped in their situation.
A book like A Fall of Moondust just proves that we can’t always expect the same standard of excellence that we get from a writer in the greatest of their works. While the writing in this novel is clear and well presented, its content leaves much to be desired. Hard science fiction can be the most difficult in the genre to write because the author has to balance technical details with writing an engaging story, and while Mr. Clarke may have failed on this go around my confidence in his face being on the Rushmore of science fiction is unchanged.
What I find to be the strangest thing about this book is that all of the pieces are in place for an absolutely thrilling story about survival. You would think that writing a story about people trapped inside a vehicle where they will eventually suffocate would be an excellent table with which to lay all sorts of suspense, paranoia, and betrayal upon, but Mr. Clarke didn’t take this route. Instead, Mr. Clarke decided to use the situation to examine how engineers would potentially rescue the people trapped, and it’s an incredibly arduous read.
I’d like to take a moment to discuss why it is that you need to have some sort of conflict in your story beyond the basic igniting incident. In A Fall of Moondust the igniting incident is the sinking of the boat that our characters are on, this is the primary reason for all the story that is to follow. We find the characters in a situation where they have limited air and so the engineers have to race against the clock to find a solution that will either pull the boat up from beneath the dust or get the passengers out of the craft. Now, this would ordinarily provide all the suspense that you would need, but only if the reader is directly experiencing the events at hand, but when the reader can put the book down at any time or remove themselves from the story then the suspense of the initial conflict loses its potency.
So how do you keep a reader invested? You introduce more conflict into the story. Now, Mr. Clarke, credit where it’s due, did try to do a little of this. As the story progresses the engineers encounter issues with their plans and things don’t always go as they intended, but the fatal error in the writing here was that Mr. Clarke never introduced any conflict into the scenes where we see the people on the boat dealing with their life or death situation. Up until the last thirty pages or so, the people trapped on the vessel are completely calm, they don’t panic, they play cards and read books, and it's incredibly boring. When you marry that with the continuous technical talking of the engineering scenes A Fall of Moondust becomes a book that reads more like a fictitious training scenario for future safety engineers than anything else.
A comparison between this book and The Martian seems fairly apt in my opinion. Both of these books are hard science fiction that focuses on the real scientific implications of their situation, both involve a person or people stranded in a situation where rescue is needed, and both books contain two storylines that involve the stranded and their perspective rescuers. While I criticized some of the quality of the writing in my review of The Martian I think that it excels where A Fall of Moondust fails. As Mark Watney and his helpers continue to work towards his rescue on the Martian surface, they encounter issue after issue that keeps the tension high, raises the stakes, and keeps the reader continually invested in seeing him survive.
There is none of that in A Fall of Moondust as the people trapped in the sunken vessel would appear to be the calmest and compliant people, I think I’ve ever seen in a novel, and it almost becomes unrealistic to me. As things continually get worse for the people stuck inside the craft, they never get more upset or turn on each other or even argue. I can’t claim to be an expert on situations like the one presented in the book but I would find it hard to believe that there wouldn’t be even a small amount of conflict between people trapped in their situation.
A book like A Fall of Moondust just proves that we can’t always expect the same standard of excellence that we get from a writer in the greatest of their works. While the writing in this novel is clear and well presented, its content leaves much to be desired. Hard science fiction can be the most difficult in the genre to write because the author has to balance technical details with writing an engaging story, and while Mr. Clarke may have failed on this go around my confidence in his face being on the Rushmore of science fiction is unchanged.