Here is a good question for nerdy trivia nights: Before winning a Hugo for Rendezvous with Rama in 1974, only one Arthur C. Clarke novel was a finalist for a Hugo Award for Best Novel. What was it?
A lot of people would probably answer 2001: A Space Odyssey, but only the film was nominated then. Others may try answering with other famous earlier works like Childhood’s End or City and the Stars, but they would still be wrong. It was 1961’s A Fall of Moondust, an often overlooked work that I would argue may actually be his best.
To set the scene, the moon is a 21st-century, kind of space Antarctica. It is not populated, apart from a few research stations, but tourists take cruises on specially designed “boats” to admire the landscape and probably to show off to their friends when they get home. During one of these cruises, a sudden moonquake buries the cruiser Selene below moondust. With no way to generate a new oxygen supply, time is running out to rescue the passengers.
Four years before the puppets of Thunderbird’s International Rescue graced our screens, we got a futuristic tale of daring rescue. Moondusts’s rescue mission works through a careful consideration of the problems and has engineers construct clever solutions based on what is available for use. The novel manages to never feel repetitive or contrived but instead keeps up the literary pace of the best disaster films.
Also, like the best disaster films, Moondust is a memorable book for its characters. These are not the usual kind of stiff-upper-lip engineers, eccentric outsiders, and screaming women that often populated tales of this time. Instead, the characters are more than just their roles and feel fully fleshed out. Captain Pat Harris and his head stewardess, Sue Wilkins, fight to keep the passengers calm while an engineer on Earth works with a moon-based astronomer to find the cruiser in time.
Unfortunately for Moondust, scientific knowledge got ahead of the text—one possible reason why it hasn’t gotten as much appreciation as Clarke’s more famous works. While we now know that the moon does not have seas of dust or catastrophic seismic events, Clarke was working from the best data he had available at the time. His attempt is to consider something that was not, at the time, unprovable, but rather what could be a real possible disaster in his lifetime. Something for which I believe he should be praised.
In the end, one thing I most enjoy about this book is that it does not feel the need to resort to violence or nihilism to keep the reader engaged. The story is instead about working through problems in a logical way and getting to a solution to help people—something that the world needs more of, even more so today.