Teaser

Mesklin is a planet like no other – an almost flat world where gravity is not constant. Travelling across Mesklin is no easy feat, and uncovering its secrets is more difficult still . . .

Review

If there’s two things I love, it’s hard science fiction, and books that introduce me to new ideas. Frequently, the two go hand-in-hand. We can see this in the works of Stephen Baxter, or Cixin Liu, or Alastair Reynolds. Indeed, when the average person thinks of science fiction, they likely think of a book all about adherence to science and a sense of wonder. And with good reason. These principles are among the foundations of science fiction as a genre. I dare say no book embodies these principles better than Mission of Gravity. Yet while it has a strong claim to being the first hard SF novel, it’s a long way short of being my favourite.

The edition I read included an article by Clement entitled ‘Whirligig World,’ and I’m going to break with reviewer tradition by addressing this additional material first. You see, in this essay, Clement goes into rigorous detail, analysing, explaining, and justifying every scientific choice made during the writing of the novel. It’s a brilliant insight into the mind of an early science fiction writer, but perhaps most striking is that in this short essay, Clement effectively recaps the entire novel from a non-fiction perspective. This is the risk with hard SF. Build a book around scientific questions, and it’s very easy to get the answers without worrying about the plot getting in the way. ‘Whirligig World’ is just better than Mission of Gravity, which is a real problem when one is ten times longer than the other.

Another thing I enjoyed about ‘Whirligig World’ is the glimpse of Clement’s philosophy as a writer. For one thing, he actively encourages readers to create their own stories in his world, so long as they abide by the scientific rules already laid out. More interesting still is his approach to hard SF (a term he may very well have been the first to employ, though I’m happy to be debated on that point). Clement argues that hard SF is effectively a game between writer and readership, with the writer attempting to make everything sound plausible, and the readership encouraged to poke at the science and uncover any holes. I don’t personally agree with this somewhat combative outlook on the genre, but his arguments have merit, and certainly help make sense of the early days of the genre. Science fiction has always had a strong relationship between writers and readers, so it’s fascinating to see early attempts at codifying that dynamic.

Returning to Mission of Gravity itself, I find the experience lacklustre, to say the least. the science on display is clear from the outset. This is a book where the plot and characters serve as a vehicle to explore the worldbuilding. Not a bad thing in and of itself, but aside from astronomy and geography, the worldbuilding doesn’t hold up to closer inspection. I would happily have read a hundred pages about the various cultures of Mesklin, but instead we have the same material found in the later essay, only more obscurely related.

A lot of the problem stems from the fact that Clement, while a great researcher, is not a particularly good writer. I’m not just talking about poor pacing or flat characters, but on a sentence by sentence level, Mission of Gravity was a slog. A two hundred page book that felt at least twice that long. Clement wants us to imagine this vast and alien world, but his descriptive passages fail to illuminate his creation. It took far too long for me to realise what the protagonist looked like, and even now I have only the vaguest impressions of the Mesklinite form.

Mission of Gravity is a very important novel in the history of science fiction, especially hard SF, but it’s not a book I’d recommend to any non-historian of the genre. If you really want to know about Mesklin, read the essay ‘Whirligig World’ instead.

Book Stats

• Mesklin Series #1
• First published in 1953
• 215 pages