Lee's Reviews > A Fall of Moondust

Arthur C. Clarke is one of those authors of whom I'm never quite sure how fond I am. I hear his name and think “Gee willikers, I love Arthur C. Clarke!” And then I think back over the books I've read by him and I'm not so sure. Before today I'd read a total of thirteen books written or co-written by him, and had given him a rather underwhelming average score of 2.4 out of 5. If one ignores the ones he co-authored (and their style in each case suggests that his co-author did most of the writing) then he leaps up to a marginally less mediocre 2.8 out of 5. Those perhaps aren't the kind of statistics that should make me pick up yet more of his work, but A Fall of Moondust was only two pounds, and it sounded quite good on the back, and there's a quote on the front cover from John Wyndham saying it's Clarke's best work, and Wyndham is an author that I really do like (he averages a much better 3.7 out of 5 from me here on Goodreads).

A Fall of Moondust is basically an episode of Thunderbirds set on the moon. And also set in a Universe where International Rescue doesn't exist, otherwise Thunderbird 3 would've sorted everything out in a few pages. But I'm getting ahead of myself. A tour bus/boat travelling across a sea of quicksand-like dust on the moon's surface falls victim to a sudden seismic shift, and is pulled a short distance beneath the surface. Like Clarke's other works, all this happens very early on in the novel. He doesn't waste time with a bunch of mindless character development or tedious backstory – all that is dealt with while the real plot unfolds. This real plot is twofold – the efforts of the engineers on the surface to find and then save the sunken craft, and the efforts of the twenty-two people stuck underground to maintain their calm.

There's enough levity and drama in both storylines to maintain the novel for its fairly brief length. Particularly quaint in the underground side of things was Clarke's gentle fun with literature. The assembled tourists only have two books amongst them to allay boredom: a copy of that literary classic Shane , and a historical erotic-romance written by a teenager on Mars featuring the couplings of Isaac Newton and Eleanor Gwyn. The brief snippet we hear from this latter work sounds like a pitch-perfect parody of today's book market, flooded with [insert genre here]-erotica riding on the Fifty Shades bandwagon. And then you remember that Clarke published this in 1961 and you have to wonder if this new trend is so new after all.

The drama stakes are kept high through the fairly formulaic approach of letting the characters sort out a problem, having them relax, tossing in some foreshadowing, and then letting some fresh complication throw matters into disarray. Every long running science fiction show has episodes like this (oh no, the crew is trapped, we only have an arbitrary time period to save them!) and they all follow the same script (oh no, now we have even less time to save them!). Clarke even has one of the characters allude to this after one particular disaster, aghast that he “should ever get involved in the Number One cliché of the TV Space Operas.” Again, this was written in 1961 so either science fiction on TV was clichéd even then or this is Clarke's trademark prescience at work. Either way, little flourishes like this help counterbalance the story's occasional aged nature.

The story is far from perfect, and it's never entirely clear if it's setting up clichés for everyone else to follow, or satirising those that already existed. Either way, it's a ripping yarn and might well fulfil John Wyndham's promise even now of being “The best book Arthur C. Clarke has written.”