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The Essential Hal Clement #2
Music of Many Spheres
This volume contains seventeen of Hal Clement's stories. They range from near-future earth to the distant Magellanic Cloud. Their protagonists are tachyonic aliens and teen-aged humans, retired explorers and beings so vast and slow that they don't even notice mankind, criminals, pirates and teachers. Hal Clement's stories, like his novels, show that the natural world contains wonders and possibilities which hardly require any additional invention-yet he supplies it, creating stories which turn on scientific puzzles or which lead us to look at old notions in a new light.
Cold front
Proof
Raindrop
Longline
Planetfall
Sun spot
The mechanic
Attitude
Halo
Impediment
Technical error
Bulge
Probability Zero: avenue of escape
Status symbol
The logical life
Stuck with it
Uncommon sense
Cold front
Proof
Raindrop
Longline
Planetfall
Sun spot
The mechanic
Attitude
Halo
Impediment
Technical error
Bulge
Probability Zero: avenue of escape
Status symbol
The logical life
Stuck with it
Uncommon sense
506 pages, Hardcover
First published February 18, 2000
2 people are currently reading
54 people want to read
About the author
Hal Clement
178 books115 followersHarry Clement Stubbs better known by the pen name
Hal Clement
, was an American science fiction writer and a leader of the hard science fiction subgenre.
Further details at Wikipedia.
Further details at Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 8, 2019
This review is for the 1943 SF novella Attitude, currently nominated for a Retro Hugo award, which appears in this collection. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature (along with several other reviews for Retro Hugo-nominated short fiction, if you're interested):
Dr. Little wakes up abruptly. The last thing he remembers is being in his room on the spaceship Gomeisa; now he’s alone, locked in a strange, weightless room, with nothing to eat but a green, translucent sphere of lime juice (because of reasons) that’s injected into his room every few hours, which gets old fast. When the huge ship in which Little is imprisoned finally lands on a desolate alien world, Little finally sees his captors, eight-foot-wide starfish-shaped aliens, and is allowed to rejoin his crewmates from the Gomeisa.
The starfish aliens have also imprisoned a group of Vegans, which appear to be large, furry caterpillar-shaped beings. A Vegan interpreter tells the humans that their captors have treated them reasonably well and allow them a fair amount of freedom as well as access to their supplies, but keep them under observation at all times and whisk away anything that looks like it will be used for a weapon. The Vegans and humans (most of them, at least) can’t understand the motives of their mystifying starfish captors. Why are they treating their captives so oddly, and what can be done to escape?
Hal Clement’s Attitude is fairly typical of Golden Age hard science fiction: a straightforward tale of valiant men solving a knotty problem on an alien world. (No women appear in the pages of this novella.) The characterization is superficial and the human characters largely forgettable; Clement’s focus is on the plot and the details of the science and technology that Doc Little and his crewmates hope will allow them to escape. On an intellectual level it’s a fairly engaging puzzle story that’s reasonably well told for its era, but nothing in Attitude marked it as particularly outstanding or memorable science fiction from my point of view.
Dr. Little wakes up abruptly. The last thing he remembers is being in his room on the spaceship Gomeisa; now he’s alone, locked in a strange, weightless room, with nothing to eat but a green, translucent sphere of lime juice (because of reasons) that’s injected into his room every few hours, which gets old fast. When the huge ship in which Little is imprisoned finally lands on a desolate alien world, Little finally sees his captors, eight-foot-wide starfish-shaped aliens, and is allowed to rejoin his crewmates from the Gomeisa.
The starfish aliens have also imprisoned a group of Vegans, which appear to be large, furry caterpillar-shaped beings. A Vegan interpreter tells the humans that their captors have treated them reasonably well and allow them a fair amount of freedom as well as access to their supplies, but keep them under observation at all times and whisk away anything that looks like it will be used for a weapon. The Vegans and humans (most of them, at least) can’t understand the motives of their mystifying starfish captors. Why are they treating their captives so oddly, and what can be done to escape?
Hal Clement’s Attitude is fairly typical of Golden Age hard science fiction: a straightforward tale of valiant men solving a knotty problem on an alien world. (No women appear in the pages of this novella.) The characterization is superficial and the human characters largely forgettable; Clement’s focus is on the plot and the details of the science and technology that Doc Little and his crewmates hope will allow them to escape. On an intellectual level it’s a fairly engaging puzzle story that’s reasonably well told for its era, but nothing in Attitude marked it as particularly outstanding or memorable science fiction from my point of view.
borrowed
April 6, 20191944 Retro Hugo Award Finalist for Best Novella
> “Attitude,” by Hal Clement (Astounding Science-Fiction, September 1943)
> “Attitude,” by Hal Clement (Astounding Science-Fiction, September 1943)
August 10, 2011
I am afraid that the few rave reviews had duped me in buying this collection of fairly tedious science-lectures told in the shape of stories. A book by Michio Kaku, or the non-fiction compilations of Arthur C Clarke is much-much more entertaining, educative, and thought-evoking compared to this collection.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews