Cycle of Fire

© 1957 by Hal Clement


Grade: B

For aficionados of written science fiction, Hal Clement has the reputation of being the hardest of the hard SF writers. Titanium hard. That means not only do we get a fantastic story set in some future, we get it with lots and lots and lots of technical detail. Technical detail that is, as a rule, true science, hard science, as opposed to, I suppose, the author making up his facts as he goes along (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing).

Now, Clement’s 1954 novel Mission of Gravity is renowned for being his crown jewel of hard SF. That’s been on my list to scope out for many years. However, I ran across his 1999 novel Half Life down in a used book shop in South Carolina seven or eight years ago. I bought it and eagerly jumped into it – and was immediately disappointed. I hated the book, and I don’t hate many books. One dimensional inconsequential characters, boring plot paced at an insufferably slow speed, people talking about lots of stuff without doing lots of stuff. I quit sixty or seventy pages in and filed Clement and his work away under “meh.”

So, I found Cycle of Fire a couple of months ago and bought it, primarily due to its relatively short length (185 pages) and one fact revealed on the back cover: the alien protagonist knows the exact day, date, and hour of his death – and finds his human companion’s uncertainty of his appointed time unacceptable.

I finished the novel in five or six hours. It’s a fairly schizophrenic work. The first two-thirds are firmly in the Robinson Crusoe tradition, two stranded castaways (a man and an alien in this case) exploring their world, fighting to survive in a harsh climate. Then, for the final third of the novel, mankind swoops down and puts the entire situation – planet, people, and plot – under the microscope.

If you’re into Science and have a head for it, I’d recommend this book. What’ll Clement and his characters expound upon?

First off, orbital mechanics. The story’s planet, Abyormen, orbits a dual-sun system in the Pleiades cluster. There’s red giant Theer and smaller, blue Arren. The complexities of this result in a planet whose climate changes every 850 years or so – it becomes completely inhospitably hot to the indigenous intelligent population. Days, seasons, and even the definition of “year” is called into question. It’s initially quite confusing, but over the pages Clement chisels out the dynamics of this strange world.

There’s planetary geology. The story begins in the desert and moves towards the shore of a great ocean. There are volcanoes, some natural, and others, strangely and wonderfully, artificial. And we also travel to the ice-locked polar caps.

There are lots of facts and discussion of gliders – the main source of transportation on Abyormen. The technology’s described, as is flight dynamics. I found this interesting, and though Clement’s writing is generally dry, our protagonists’ glider flight was easy and fun to visualize, maybe as exciting as Clement gets.

There’s plenty of archaeology in the discovery and exploration of a vast, abandoned alien city. It’s partially submerged in the creeping ocean, yet somehow has rudimentary electricity running inside the buildings. And what, exactly, are those inverted star-shaped depressions set into the floor of all the rooms in all the buildings?

Biology. Ultimately, the meat of the novel. Abyormen is home to two symbiotic intelligent species. Symbiotic both physiologically as well as psychologically. This is where most of the surprises come from, and what that final third of the story focuses on. There is a discovery that is simultaneously delicious and repulsive that makes the whole thing worth reading, in my opinion. And that discovery comes only after oodles of detail concerning the biologies and cultures of both societies have been brought to light.

Despite the clinical nature of his writing, there is a touching moment in the final pages that has to do with that back page blurb that made me first purchase the book. I found it touching, which, I expect, may be unusual in a Clement book. But I’ll have to seek out that Mission of Gravity novel now, just to make sure.