by Hal Clement
THE BEST OF
HAL CLEMENT
Edited and with an Introduction by
LESTER DEL REY
COPYRIGHT
The Best of Hal Clement by Hal Clement. Copyright © 1979 by Hal Clement. Introduction: Hal Clement: Rationalist, Copyright © 1979 by Lester del Rey All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Impediment,” copyright © 1942 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, August 1942.
“Technical Error,” copyright © 1943 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, January 1944.
“Uncommon Sense,” copyright © 1945 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, September 1945.
“Assumption Unjustified,” copyright © 1946 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, October 1946.
“Answer,” copyright © 1947 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, April 1947.
“Dust Rag,” copyright © 1956 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, September 1956.
“Bulge,” copyright © 1968 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation for Worlds of If, September 1968.
“Mistaken for Granted,” copyright © 1974 by UPD Publishing Corporation for Worlds of If, February 1974.
“A Question of Guilt,” copyright © 1976 by DAW Books.
“Stuck with It,” copyright 1976 by Random House, Inc.
DEDICATION
To Mary
Who has never been a science-fiction fan, didn’t really know what she was getting into when she married one, and has put up with it well enough to deserve this title—The Best of Hal Clement
CONTENTS
Introduction: Hal Clement: Rationalist by Lester del Rey
Impediment
Technical Error
Uncommon Sense
Assumption Unjustified
Answer
Dust Rag
Bulge
Mistaken For Granted
A Question of Guilt
Stuck with It
Author’s Afterword
Introduction—Hal Clement: Rationalist
From the beginning, there have been two main divisions of science fiction. One of these is what has come to be called “hard” science fiction. No one has come up with an accepted name for the other division, which covers anything not found in the first. Perhaps it should be called “soft” science fiction, but nobody really likes that label.
Hard science fiction is that branch which tries to stick rigorously to the known facts of the physical sciences. For example, lacking air or friction in space, rockets couldn’t twist and turn like World War I airplanes. And since every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, Superman couldn’t leap from a roof to a height of one mile without demolishing the building from which he jumped. And so on.
When Hugo Gernsback started the first science-fiction magazine, back in 1926, he didn’t refer to hard science fiction; but he did claim that his stories were scientifically accurate. And soon the term was being applied to almost any story which used a number of scientific facts or theories to justify the wonders produced.
One of the favorite type of story was that which created strange new worlds, as different as possible from Earth, with odd aliens inhabiting it. Most writers, at one time or another, built up such worlds and peopled them with assorted bizarre life-forms.
But it wasn’t until 1953 that magazine readers discovered what hard science fiction world-building was all about. All that had gone before wasn’t even prolog—it was simply misdirection.
That story was Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement. It was about a planet that was both logically constructed and wilder than any of the prior dreams of what a world could be. Mesklin was a huge planet that rotated so fast that centrifugal force during its formation had enlarged its equator until it resembled a flat pancake more than a sphere. Gravity on the surface of a planet is inversely proportional to the distance from the center of the planet. Hence, while gravity at the equator was merely three times that on Earth, it rose to 1600 times Earth’s gravity at the poles. The inhabitants had to be adjusted to take that tremendous variation, and they accepted far different apparent facts about their world from those accepted by human beings.
Those weren’t the only differences from the world and people we know, that Clement blended into a first-rate adventure story. But the important fact—and the thing which made the readers so totally enthusiastic about the story—was that everything was worked out with severe logic. This was a world which didn’t need to have the laws of physics and chemistry dodged, but which worked within them.
Hal Clement, whose real name is Harry Clement Stubbs, had written hard science fiction before. His Iceworld used Earth as an alien planet—but viewed by intelligent beings who existed comfortably in an atmosphere of sulfur vapor. (Or, he would probably correct me, of sulfur in its gaseous state.) And a number of his shorter works had already proved that adherence to known facts didn’t necessarily prevent the creation of fine stories of the imagination. But world-building really requires a novel for fullest enjoyment, and much of his reputation came from his longer works.
Close to Critical gave us a world with an atmosphere which used a wealth of facts about both chemistry and physics to make it work. That again required aliens carefully tailored to fit the strange environment in which they lived. But this time, Clement had his aliens divorced from their traditions and brought up by a robot—appropriately named Fagin—from Earth. While attempting to rescue a crashed spaceship, they were also forced to learn the facts of their world from scratch.
Cycle of Fire dealt with biology as Clement’s other books had dealt with physics or chemistry, and the alien biology was again a breakthrough in the use of known facts to further imaginative fiction. I personally consider this novel one of his best, though it has often been overlooked.
By now, Clement is generally recognized as the master of hard science fiction. He has done the se
emingly impossible by creating a major body of speculative fiction while maintaining complete reliance on rationality. In fact, the only failure of rationality—as he has pointed out—is the acceptance of faster-than-light travel; that’s necessary to bring humans to his worlds, but otherwise plays no important part in most of his stories.
Clement’s respect for the rationality of science in his fiction is merely an aspect of his attitude toward science in his life. Born in 1922, he discovered science fiction early in the beginnings of the magazines. At about the same time, he discovered astronomy, with which he has always maintained something of a love affair. After serving as a pilot in World War II, he returned to take his degree in science, after which he accepted a position as science teacher. Since then, he has been happily busy passing on his love for science and the logic of its methods to the young people who are lucky enough to attend his classes. For many years, he has also been a frequent speaker at science-fiction conferences, where he makes the wonders of real science and real space exploration seem even more interesting than the stories the audiences have read.
His first story was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1942 when he was just 20 years old. Thus he has been a writer for nearly 40 years. During most of that time, Hal Clement has been considered one of the major writers in the field by all except one person.
The exception is Harry Stubbs. He doesn’t call himself a writer, much less a major one. He considers himself merely a rather fortunate fan. Most writers who go to conventions seek out other writers to talk shop when they go out for food or drink. To find Clement-Stubbs, it’s necessary to look for him in the center of some group of fans.
“Look,” he explained it all to me once. “A writer is a man who makes his living writing. I make my living teaching. So I’m not a writer.”
That’s probably logical enough. It’s a rational way of finding the category into which he feels he should be classified. And the fact that nobody agrees with him doesn’t seem to bother him at all. He can’t accept any idea for his own use unless it’s rational.
As a writer of science fiction, Clement has probably been greatly limited by his insistence on rationality. Certainly the quality of his work has not suffered—it may have gained, in fact; but the quantity has been greatly restricted by his insistence that an idea must be logical in all ways before he will write it up as a story. Of course, his writing has occupied only his spare time. But other writers with regular jobs have turned out far more fiction in the same span of time. Few of them enjoy the same reputation, however, for the excellence of their work.
Aside from the hard-science story, the only fiction I can think of that claimed to be totally logical was the older mystery story—the type that had a notice near the end, stating: “Now you have all the facts for the solution. Can you deduce the name of the man who committed the murder?” A few such stories really were logically constructed, though many only claimed to be.
It shouldn’t be too surprising, therefore, that many of Clement’s shorter works bear a strong similarity in basic construction. Most of them are problem stories. Clement lays out the background and gives the scientific facts—all the facts needed to provide the possibility of a solution. In the end, his characters assemble these facts and solve the problem. And at a certain point in many of the stories, a clever reader could probably also solve it—if he had the need and the time, and if he weren’t so fascinated in following the tale to its end that he won’t stop.
Perhaps the finest example of that type of story included here is “Dust Rag,” in which we have two men on the Moon, faced with the problem of fine dust that has a static charge. It clings to their transparent faceplates, threatening to cut off all vision. Obviously, they try to wipe it off. But wiping only creates more static. By this point in the story, all the facts are given—and they are simple, honest facts of basic physics. So how do they solve it by using the same facts that have created the problem? Well, read the story! And since it’s a Clement story, you can be sure that the solution is fair and logical.
Again, a Clement story may be designed to point out some fact that is obvious in hindsight but which was long overlooked in science fiction.
Early in the development of science fiction, telepathy became a necessary ingredient. For story purposes, men meeting aliens could not take the months or years of hard work needed to decipher and learn the aliens’ language. So they speeded the plot up by finding that the aliens were telepaths. As a necessary convention, it was accepted. Then writers began to play around with the possibility of telepathy. For instance, a telepathic race that could impose their orders directly on men’s minds could easily take over Earth—right?
Clement considered that concept logically, looking at the whole set of factors involved. The result was “Impediment,” the second story he sold. It remains a classic of its type and should be must-reading for anyone planning to use telepathy in a story of conquest.
Or consider how the brain works, even without telepathy. Men have been studying the workings of the human brain for several decades now, with the aid of the science of cybernetics and new instruments. The ultimate hope, of course, is to learn exactly how the brain operates on every level. Back in 1947, Clement had given considerable thought to this, and it seemed to him that a small problem was being overlooked—the result was “Answer.” (The problem is apparently still being overlooked by researchers, incidentally.)
None of this should give the impression that Clement’s imagination works like the integration of a computer. Among his stories will be found ones that place civilized creatures on the surface of the Sun or deep within the solid crust of the Earth. Neither is included here, simply because they aren’t fictionally as interesting as the ones I’ve chosen.
At one time, a number of writers were playing with ideas from mythology and legends, trying to make them over into science-fiction stories. A few good stories came from that attempt; Peter Phillips even gave a scientific explanation for ghosts and made a good story of it. Most of the results were unsatisfactory, however.
But before the flood of such stories, Hal Clement had obviously been thinking of the old legend of the vampire, who must drink the blood of his victims to gain a measure of immortality. On first appraisal, that legend is about as far from logical, rational scientific thinking as it can be. Vampires were merely an early and superstitious attempt to explain certain types of anemia, of course.
Well, maybe. But if some of the sillier parts of the legend were dropped and one were to assume that vampires were not human, but rather beings that came from beyond Earth … “Assumption Unjustified” presents two of the most appealing and decent vampires who ever lay in wait for victims, driven by the need for fresh blood. But it does far more—it looks logically at how aliens might make assumptions about human beings from a necessarily brief study, and what might happen.
That story appeared in 1946, and thirty years later, Clement returned to the same theme of vampirism. But this time he didn’t add the unnecessary assumption that the vampire was not human. And the result was “A Question of Guilt,” one of the finest pieces of Clement’s shorter fiction.
This story should also destroy the validity of the one criticism that has sometimes been made against his work—that he cannot create sympathetic adult human characters. (Nobody ever denied that his aliens were marvelously sympathetic—as evidenced in Mission of Gravity, where the Mesklinites are among science fiction’s finest creations.) The physician who attempts more than possible to him, driven by an all-too-human need, is a man who must arouse our sympathy and passion. Judith, the wife, is another character who sticks firmly in the memory.
In the conventional sense, this story isn’t science fiction. It’s laid in the past—the real past; there is no gadgetry, no problem in physics. All the conventional trappings of the category are lacking. Certainly, it isn’t a traditional weird-horror story of a vampire, either, though it was originally written for an anthology of horror stories
. There is horror in it—but it is the psychological horror of realizing what the man faces in his human need to solve an impossible problem.
In spirit, however, the story has the elements that make the best of science fiction, however subtly. A problem exists that lies just outside the limits of the technology of the time. A scientist—for his day—makes a major advance in understanding some of that problem. And he uses logic and the facts he can discover to set about solving it.
The fact that the story takes place when Rome ruled the world and that there are factors beyond the scientist’s ability to learn—ones which we discovered more than a millennium later—cannot remove this from the full purview of science fiction. Rather, those facts simply deepen the emotional effect on the reader. In the end, the inevitable and predictable logic of the ending also increases the impact of the story.
Clement is a total rationalist in most ways. But in one idea to which he clings, he’s completely wrong, as this story proves.
Hal Clement is a writer!
Lester del Rey
New York, New York
November 1978
Impediment
Boss ducked back from the outer lock as a whir of wings became audible outside. The warning came barely in time; a five-foot silvery body shot through the opening, checking its speed instantly, and settled to the floor of the lock chamber. It was one of the crew, evidently badly winded. His four legs seemed to sag under the weight of the compact body, and his wings drooped almost to the floor. Fight, or any other severe exertion, was a serious undertaking in the gravity of this world; even accelerine, which speeded up normal metabolism to compensate for the increased demand, was not perfect.