Book Review

A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke

   Imagine what would happen if a group of tourists on the moon suddenly found themselves stuck in a dangerous situation that they might never escape from. That is the scenario that Arthur C. Clarke tackles in A Fall of Moondust. Despite their precarious situation, the story is one that depicts optimism about both technology and human nature.

     Since A Fall of Moondust was published in the early 1960s, hundreds, if not thousands, of Hollywood movies have used a similar dilemma for action, suspense, and disaster films. A busload of tourists on the moon gets buried under a ton of the semi-liquid and semi-solid dust that forms seas all over the surface. These seas are made of a silty substance somewhat like mercury and somewhat like quicksand; the tourist bus sinks into an empty pocket and can not escape. They have a limited amount of time before the vessel collapses under the weight of the moondust and their oxygen and food run out; a team of engineers set out to save them before it is too late. It sounds like a typical action story line but Clarke’s unique imagination and high-quality writing style make this short novel a good read.

There are three main strands to the narrative. The first is the story of the tourists who get trapped. The driver, named Pat, teams up with an experienced astronaut named Hansteen to manage the situation and keep the other tourists safe. Pat takes control over the physical aspects of the bus and Hansteen realizes the importance of maintaining psychological comfort for the passengers. Boredom, fear, and despair could destroy the their lives just as easily as being buried alive so Hansteen does what he can to keep the people busy and sane. Luckily, the passengers are all educated, intelligent, and socially extroverted enough to keep each other company with a minimal amount of conflict. The passengers are multi-racial and mutli-ethnic; this is a theme in the book that Arthur C. Clarke can be given a lot of credit for. Many people have said that the Star Trek tv show was a pioneering work of utopian science-fiction because the crew was multi-racial but Clarke apparently envisioned outer space as a place where humanity’s social problems could be overcome at about the same time, possibly even before that program was first broadcast. But the larger theme involving the passengers is that they are all individual humans. The victims in these types of stories are often one dimensional characters, just people who need to be saved. But Clarke gives each tourist a voice in this story; each one is portrayed as a unique human with their own life, their own history, their own problems, and their own merits. The way they coexist and cooperate with each other in the face of possible death is one of the ways that humanizing these characters makes this a unique novel.

     The second important plot element of A Fall of Moondust is the engineers who set out to save the tourists trapped in the Sea of Thirst, as that area has been named. The Chief Engineer Lawrence has to assemble a team to first locate the missing bus and then find a way to dig it out of the dust. The pressure is on heavily since time is limited and a rescue operation like this had never happened before on the moon. They have to act quickly but carefully since a wrong move could endanger the victims and easily destroy them. The scientists and engineers are sufficiently humanized like the tourists but the focus of this thread is a problem solving motif that occurs in many of the better science-fiction stories. While the scenes inside the trapped bus are mostly about the people, the scenes on the moon’s surface are mostly about the technology that people create to make life better. One character in the book says that there are no problems that can not be solved if they are thought of in the right way. From there we see how these people engineer a rescue mission using what tools they have available to them. While professional physicists may debate the veracity of the science used to solve this problem, the lay reader can still get the point that a proper combination of human ingenuity and technology can be enormously beneficial to humanity.

     The third, and probably least important strand of the story is about the media’s reporting on the rescue mission. The news anchor Spenser waits in a spaceship with a cameraman on a nearby mountain; this is the first rescue of tourists on the moon and history and he wants to make a name for himself by broadcasting it to the world. There is nothing remarkable about this and it actually is one thing that makes this novel look a little dated. At the time of publication, television was still a fairly new technology and the use of satellite relays for the transmission of communications was hardly understood by most people. What we take for granted now must have looked futuristic to people in 1961. This is a fundamental problem of depicting technology in art but also what makes retro-futurism a never ending source of interest.

     Even though the ideas of Arthur C. Clarke did not exactly come true, A Fall of Moondust is still very much worth reading. The scientific details he portrayed may be sketchy and inaccurate, the social problem of racism is still with us, and moon colonies and moon tourism are not a reality. But the narrative threads are effectively woven together, the characters are well drawn, and, most importantly, the optimism about both humanity and technology is strong without being overblown or sentimental. The adversary in the book is not a person or even a hostile space monster; the adversary is a tough situation and it is one that can be overcome with effort and intelligence. That optimism is refreshing in our times even if A Fall of Moondust is an old novel. 

Clarke, Arthur C. A Fall of Moondust. Dell Books, New York: 1963.