I distinctly remember reading Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" the year that "Marka" came out. It's almost certainly a false memory, but I remember listening to the record or having the sleeve in my eyeseight as I read. I was 15, repressing a lot of anxieties about the world I was growing up in and it was a fucking terrifying read. I didn't read any science fiction for years after that, for fear of being faced with another end of the world story that I could not emotionally deal with.

I should have known from the blurb of "A Fall of Moondust" that it was going to be shit:

The setting is the Moon in the 21st century and it is depicted with brilliant imagination. But the vital core of the novel is this: will the crew and passengers of the Dust-cruiser Selene, buried fifteen metres down in the Sea of Thirst, be rescued before half a dozen possible catastrophes overcome them?

Still, I was hopeful because it was Clarkey boy. I shouldn't have been. This reads like an action movie, and it is fucking infuriating. There is a literal fucking countdown at the end of the novel. It is littered with annoying premonitions along the lines of "But the Moon had one more surprise left in store for them". FUCK OFF! I hate this sort of story telling. It feels patronising, like the author knows that the only reason I will keep reading is because I want to know how the protagonists will survive (not so much if - I was never in any serious doubt).

Action and tension are fine, as long as they are not central to the novel, but they are here. The glimpses we get into how humanity has evolved are boring and unimaginative. There seems to be some sort of unity among nations who are now working together to colonise space, but not much is said about this. The investigations into what life would be like on the Moon are also dull. Mostly its just comments on how the low gravity affects regular activities, like climbing a ladder. There are a couple of pages on colonialism which were interesting only insofar as they reveal the author's opinion on civilisation and progress. It ends with someone with Australian aboriginal ancestry saying the following:

My ancestors were fine people and I'm not ashamed of them, but geography had trapped them in a dead-end. After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilisation. In the long run, it was a good thing that the white settlers arrived, despite their charming habit of selling us poisoned flour when they wanted our land.

Awesome opinion, I'm sure you think you're fair and balanced but please keep it to yourself.

The only interest I could muster for this novel was how it reflects the attitude of a male science fiction author in the 1960s, and, like a child with only a couple of coins to play games at a fair, I soon ran out of tosses to give. There's only so much casual sexism and plain lack of imagination that I can take before it gets boring as fuck. After reading Ursula K. Le Guin, I know that it doesn't have to be this way and I don't want to waste my time. How on earth it was nominated for a Hugo award is beyond me.

Conclusion: shit, don't read.

Previous Post