A Fall of Moondust

Pat Harris is captain of the Selene, the only boat on the moon. Of course, Luna has no water to sail upon; instead, his small ship cruises a sea of dust, known with poetic aptness as the Sea of Thirst. On the airless moon, the dust is so dry that it makes the sere Sahara sands seem almost damp. Moondust has strange qualities that make this hundred-kilometer dustbowl "neither land nor sea, neither air nor space, but a little of each." And if you drop something into the utterly smooth Sea of Thirst, it sinks without a splash, lost forever.

Captain Pat Harris has no fear that his Dust-Cruiser will sink. The 20-seat Selene is a safe vessel, which is just as he likes it. No doubt that's how his passengers prefer it, too. They're tourists--young people from the various lunar bases, old folks from Earth. And today's four-hour cruise of the Sea of Thirst should see them back in Port Roris right on schedule.

But no matter how many colonists it has, Luna is an alien world, unpredictable, full of surprises. One of those surprises is a moonquake beneath the Sea of Thirst. It sinks the Selene, trapping the Dust-Cruiser beneath unknown meters or fathoms of moondust, which, among its other peculiar qualities, blocks all radio signals. The Selene's sojourners cannot notify anyone in the universe where they are, and no one can contact them. And, because the opaque moondust closes as featurelessly as water when something sinks into it, no one can tell where the Selene sank. It has vanished as thoroughly as if it had never existed.

When the Selene loses contact with the Traffic Control computer, men on the moon and above it attempt to locate the Dust-Cruiser. They are determined and resourceful. But when they cannot see the sunken craft, they erroneously conclude that the moonquake has trapped the Selene beneath a rockslide in a lunar mountain range.

Matters are worsening beneath the surface. The Selene's crew and passengers can't dig their way out. They have a hysteric, a heroin addict and other possible threats in their ranks. Their ship was constructed to hold in the pressure of air, not to hold out the weight of immeasurable tons of dust. They have a limited supply of food and air. And the liquid-oxygen tanks may explode.

The most famous SF writer of all

The late Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) is the best-known SF writer in the world. He wrote "The Sentinel" (1951), the short story that inspired 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), one of the most influential films in history. He co-scripted 2001: A Space Odyssey with its director, Stanley Kubrick, and wrote the novel. Clarke was a CBS TV commentator for the Apollo 11, 12, and 15 lunar missions. He was a presenter on various TV programs, including the 1980s series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World. He received innumerable awards and honors, including the Hugo, the Nebula, the UNESCO Kalinga Prize, the Association of Space Explorers' Special Achievement Award and SFWA's Grand Master Award. He was a prolific and popular nonfiction writer, and, in a 1945 paper, he envisioned the communications satellite. For his many accomplishments, he was knighted.

While Clarke is an exemplar--arguably, the exemplar--of hard SF, he also epitomizes SF's metaphysical impulse. Many of his most famous works--such as "The Nine Billion Names of God" (1953), Childhood's End (1953) and the movie and novel of 2001: A Space Odyssey--explore themes of transcendence. For the reader familiar only with Clarke's transcendental works, his Hugo-nominated novel A Fall of Moondust (1961) will be a surprise. It's a disaster novel set on the moon, with nary a glimmer of the numinous. Its focus is survival. Its hard-SF approach grounds its disaster in the pre-lunar-landing hypothesis that the moon might have seas of dust, into which a ship from Earth could sink without a trace. And every scientific problem that arises from this unique environment, and every solution and rescue that is attempted, is rigorously extrapolated in accordance with the known science of the early 1960s.

What unites all of Clarke's SF, physical and metaphysical, is its rationality and optimism. Of course, this means that anyone familiar with Clarke's work will realize that a disaster novel from his pen is unlikely to end horrifically, or to feature massive quantities of self-destructive irrationality, or to have the high body count of the modern disaster thriller. It's a realization that can undercut the tension in A Fall of Moondust.

Clarke has sometimes been criticized for thin characterizations, and A Fall of Moondust does have two-dimensional characters drawn from obvious stock (the spaceman hero, the competent engineer, the brilliant nerd, the hysterical woman). Too, Clarke doesn't take advantage of the novel's life-or-death situation to plumb the characters' highest hopes and deepest fears. However, he does expand his characters in a direction not expected of a white male SF author in the early 1960s. His admirable characters are not all white, and at least a couple of women have jobs.

Of course, people don't read Clarke primarily for the characters. They read him for his hard-core hard SF, his rigorous extrapolations, his vast imagination and his spiritual concerns. And, while A Fall of Moondust doesn't have the transcendent themes of 2001 or Childhood's End, it is nonetheless transcendent: It transcends the boundaries of Earth to show the beauty and wonder of another world, and of all the universe.