A Fall of Moondust

Arthur C. Clarke was born on December 16, 1917 in Minehead, Somerset, England. He was educated in King’s College located in London, England. From 1941 to 1946, during World War II, he served in the Royal Air Force. During this stint in the Air Force Mr. Clarke was in charge of the first radio talk-down equipment, now known as ground control. On June 15, 1953 he married a woman named Marilyn Mayfield. However, they split in December of that year. When asked about the marriage, Mr. Clarke said, “The marriage was incompatible from the beginning. It was sufficient proof that I wasn’t the marrying type, although I think everyone should marry once.” His first novel, Prelude to Space, was written in three weeks. He now resides in Colombo, Sri Lanka at the age of eighty-six.

In 1968 he and Stanley Kubrick were nominated for an Oscar regarding their work together on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mr. Clarke followed the movie up with a novel based on it, with the same name, that did phenomenally well.

He helped co-broadcast the Apollo 11, when man first set foot on the moon, Apollo 12, and Apollo 15 missions along with anchorman Walter Cronkite.

He came up with the concept of telecommunication through satellites all over the world. Because of this contribution the orbit in which all telecommunication satellites orbit, the geostationary orbit, is known as the Clarke orbit.

In 1998 it was announced that he was to be knighted but it was postponed because a tabloid called The Sunday Mirror had published a lot of serious accusations against him. However, in 2000 it was obvious that the accusations were false and he was awarded the title of Knight Bachelor.

Before I get into the presentation of this book, let me explain to you an important fact: dust in low gravity is like water. It flows like water and it makes waves like water. Normally, on Earth, dust would float around for days or even weeks before it settled after being disturbed. However, on the Moon, there is no wind to carry the dust so it just settles back into its former position. So, on the Moon, it is feasible to have craft that “ride” oceans of dust; such as you shall see in this presentation.

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Pat Harris is the skipper of the one and only dustboat on the Moon and in the solar system, Selene. However, this is not something he is exactly proud of. He would much rather be piloting an interplanetary spaceship than a lunar jalopy. However, he did not finish grad school so he lacks the credibility to be put in control of a spacecraft. But his little boat has treated him well and he enjoys hearing the squeals of surprise and gasps of awe that he can get out of the tourists when he shows them a vista they will never forget. He has no wife, no kids; only his ship and his job. Life isn’t anything spectacular for Harris, until he and his passengers get sucked forty-five feet underneath the surface of an ocean of dust. Using his intellect and his sheer will to survive he is able to save him and his passengers aboard Selene. The character of Pat Harris is round and dynamic in that he shows many different emotions and personalities throughout the story such as love, fear, and bravery.

“We’ll never forget the efforts that so many people have made to help us, and whatever happens we’d like to thank them. All of us are quite sure that everything possible has been done.”

Commodore Hansteen is a solar system renowned astronaut. He’s traveled to Pluto and back and has been everywhere there is to be in the solar system. He has dealt with holes in spaceships, mutinous crew members, and even men driven insane by the boredom one faces on long trips between the planets. However, nothing has prepared him for what he is to experience underneath Sea of Thirst. While trapped underneath the sea he implements his leadership skills, along with Captain Harris, in order to keep everyone occupied and to keep their mind off of their impending doom. He also serves as the motivational spirit among the passengers because he helps to keep them fighting for rescue and to never give up. However, his character is round and not dynamic because, all though a motivational leader, he only displays this personality.

“Don’t give up now!” screamed the Commodore. “We’ve only two hours air left, I know. But where there’s a will there’s a way, so come on!”

Chief Engineer Lawrence is an intelligent man and he knows all there is to know about engineering and problem solving. However, being faced with rescuing twenty-one hostages of a sea of dust is a whole new breed of problem. He has to be able to combine his skills with other scientists’ from all over the Solar System in order to figure out how to make a craft light enough to float on the dust yet strong enough to pull Selene out of it.Lawrence’s character is round and dynamic. This is because he expresses many emotions throughout the story, such as desperation and anger. However this is the only personality that he shows, his commanding one.

“Alright, I need a boat that can float on dust, but still be able to suck twenty-one doomed passengers out of a sunken ship. Make this happen, we’ve got lives to save!”

Sue Wilkins is the stewardess aboard Selene and is also Pat Harris’s love interest. During the hardships that follow the ship’s sinking into the Sea of Thirst Ms. Wilkins is a strong, guiding force and helps to keep the passengers in a positive and uplifting mood. Wilkins’s character is a round and static character. She is round because she expresses emotions like love and anger. She is static because she only shows one personality to the reader, her dutiful-stewardess personality. She is flat and her dialogue is boring and tired.

“Pat, if we never make it out of here alive, I want you to know that I love you. From the bottom of my heart. I love you.”

Tom Lawson is a prodigal astronomer who spends his life in a little space station in orbit above the moon. He is a shut-in and has no friends or family. He is called upon by Chief Engineer Lawrence to help locate the missing Selene. While helping in the search effort, Lawson starts to become a real person again. He realizes that he is appreciated by his colleagues and that they respect his immeasurable wealth of knowledge about the moon. He begins to get over his fear and hatred of people.Lawson’s character is round and very dynamic. He is the most dynamic character in the book because you watch him transform from an introspective people-hater into a person who eats up attention and learns to love.

“You’re looking in the wrong place. She’s not on the moon anymore; she’s in the moon!”

Exposition

Pat Harris, captain of the dustboat Selene, takes the ship and its twenty two passengers on his umpteenth tour of the Sea of Thirst. He takes them on the usual route across the sea and through the Mountains of Inacessability. He weaves in and around dangerous precipices and through tightly squeezed crevices, getting many oh’s and ahh’s from the passengers. After the tour he turns Selene back to port and heads back to Clavius Base, the home base. All is going well, the passengers are enjoying their tour and Pat is loving his job. That’s about when the Sea of Thirst opens up and swallows him and his ship whole.

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A large pocket of gas underneath the Sea of Thirst collapses and leaves a gaping hole through which dust gets sucked out of the sea. It is in this funnel of swirling dust that Selene gets sucked into and drawn into its abyss. As they assess their situation they find that being stuck forty-five feet underneath the Sea of Thirst is the least of their problems. They face running out of oxygen in seven days, possibly not long enough to get rescued. Worse than this is dying of carbon dioxide poisoning if their filters cease working. The passengers also face running out of water an dying of dehydration. They also try to keep themselves occupied as they wait for rescue so they do not go insane from the isolation and the fact that this ship may be their tomb.

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Climax

Chief Engineer Lawrence and his crew locate Selene forty-five feet underneath the surface of the Sea of Thirst. Very carefully, they lower a coupling down through the dust and attach it to the submerged vessel. Then Lawrence gets lowered down the tube so he can open up a hole in Selene for the passengers to escape through. While he is planting explosive charges to make the hole, Selene’s engine inexplicably starts to overheat and combusts. When Lawrence finally punches through the hull of Selene, smoke has filled the cabin and the passengers are frantically fighting the flames while dust pours through the ruptured hole that the fire has caused.

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Very quickly, each and every passenger launches him/herself up the coupling in the low gravity and into a pressurized tent that the rescue team set up. Just as the last passenger, Captain Harris, launches himself up the coupling and into safety the flames aboard Selene reach the liquidized oxygen tanks and they explode violently, destroying the boat. However, everyone makes it out alive and are transported back to Clavius Base.

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After their harrowing ordeal together, Captain Harris and Sue Wilkins get married and have a child. Harris also decides resigns from his position as the captain of the only dustboat on the moon and take up a job as a captain of a real starship that was offered him. However, he still took the Selene I, Selene’s successor, out on her maiden voyage.

On/in the Sea of Thirst on the Moon

Clavius Base

Inside of Selene

“The falling dust was…rising outside the walls of the cruiser. Now it had reached the lower edge of the windows; now it was creeping up the panes; now it had covered them completely. In darkness and in silence, they were sinking into the Moon.”

“Far overhead, wispy cirrus clouds were sailing by-or so it seemed. They were, or course, only images projected on the inside of the dome, but the illusion was so perfect that it sometimes made the C.A. homesick. Homesick? He corrected himself; this was home.”

“In the dim red glow, the interior of Selene now had a fantastic appearance, one that would have been utterly inconceivable when she left Port Roris a few hours before. Twenty-two men and women, most of them stripped down to their underclothing, lay sprawled across the seats or along the floor.

The dialect in this story is written in formal English. Writing it in one character’s dialect would be too difficult because it is told from at least four main characters’ view points. If the dialectic style was limited to only one character, it would be confusing when the author switched perspective from one character to the next.

Stated

Implied

Perseverance-no matter how many times the passengers of Selene think themselves doomed, they never give up and in the end make it out alive.

Mental Strength-it takes an enormous amount of mental strength for the passengers on Selene to keep themselves calm and not to go completely insane during their week of isolation.

Survival-each and every passenger aboard Selene did what he or she could to try and secure their survival underneath the Moon’s surface.

Sacrifice-the crew working to save Selene’s crew put their lives on the line so that they could make it out of the boat alive.

Given the opportunity to do so, a cold man will turn warm-Tom Lawson was a mean, cold angry man because of the abuse he received as a child and his foster home experiences. However, as more and more people are friendly with him, he too becomes a kind, friendly person.

Dramatic

A scientist on Earth named Father Ferraro tells officials on the moon that Selene had been trapped underneath a landslide in the Mountains of Inacessability, the mountains surrounding the Sea of Thirst, when in fact she had been sucked underneath the sea of dust.

Chief Engineer Lawrence calls off the search for Selene in the Sea of Thirst because of Father Ferraro’s report, but he doesn’t know that Selene is there, just underneath it.

Verbal

Captain Harris tells the passengers that they will be able to survive for seven days with the current conditions inside the dustboat when the truth is that they will all die of heat stroke within the next twenty-four hours. This is because the dust outside the ship is trapping their heat and radiating it back into the ship, causing the temperature rise three degrees per hour.

Dr. Lawson tells reporters that they have not yet found Selene, even tough they have, so that he could ward off the horde of journalists.

Situational

When the passengers take knockout pills to help conserve oxygen, the Commodore takes one too and Captain Harris is forced to stay on watch for the rescue team even though one would think Hansteen would take watch for the rescue.

You think that the passengers will all die of heat stroke but in the end the temperature stabilizes because when the dust around them heats up, it rises to the surface of the moon and the heat dissipates. Therefore, the sand absorbs their heat but also helps to dissipate it, not to radiate it back in.

Although Mr. Clarke did not use many examples of symbolism in this book, there was at least one very good example of it. This was that the boat, Selene, represented humankind’s efforts to explore space and to populate it as well. However, the dust that has captured it represents the hardships and setbacks that man will face on the path to familiarizing space.

“Now he could hear it, faint but distinct, and it set his skin crawling with apprehension. There could be no doubt; it was the sound of countless dust grains whispering past Selene’s walls like a ghostly sandstorm.”

“When Captain Harris awoke, it was already much hotter. Yet it was not the now oppressive heat that had interrupted his sleep, a good hour before he was due to go on watch.”

“It was unmistakable, and so was its meaning. Something metallic was scraping along the hull.”

“He had sailed the Sea of Thirst a hundred times, yet never before had he touched its substance with his naked skin. The gray powder sprayed into his nose and eyes, half choking and wholly blinding him. Though it was as bone dry as the dust from a Pharaoh’s tomb-dryer than this, indeed, for it was a million times older than the pyramids-it had a curiously soapy feeling.”

“Like a cool sea breeze after a dusty summer day, like a wind from the mountain pine forests stirring the stagnant air in some deep lowlands valley-so the flow of oxygen seemed to Pat. He took four slow, deep breaths, and exhaled to the fullest extent, to sweep the carbon dioxide out of his lungs.

The mood in this story is a tense one and also an apprehensive one. The characters help to express this mood by constantly worrying over whether or not they will escape from their ship alive or dead or at all. The characters also make an apprehensive mood because they do not trust one another and therefore keep expecting one of them to go insane or snap. For in a confined, isolated space, it doesn’t take much to make a person snap. So the reader is constantly looking for which passenger will go crazy first or which one lose their cool.

“’I can’t take it anymore!’” cried Mrs. Schuster as she collapsed to the floor sobbing. Pat thought to himself, ‘One down, twenty to go’”.

“’It’s already getting harder to breathe,’ the Commodore told Pat. ‘I’d say if we’re still here after five maybe six hours, we’re done for’”.

“Pat overheard one of the passengers say, ‘Huh. Seems like Ms. Wilkins and Mr. Harrison are doing just fine. If they tried as hard at saving us as they did that,’ she scoffed, ‘we’d be gone by now’”.

The tone of this book is largely one of suspense. The author treats this as a suspense novel in that he cuts away from exciting scenes just as they reach their mini-climax. He also creates a tone of urgency in his novel. This is because just when the crew of Selene and the crew trying to rescue her think they have everything figured out, it all falls to pieces. In the end, it is almost like a race against time.

“Pat collapsed on the ground and started gasping for breath. The carbon dioxide was too much for his lungs too take. Then all of a sudden someone started tapping on the outside of the boat.”

“’Thank God!’ thought Lawrence to himself. The coupling had connected perfectly; or so he thought.” Cutaway to next chapter, 14, and different scene

The point of view that A Fall of Moondust is written in is third-person omniscient. Mr. Clarke chose to write this book in third-person omniscient because it involves so many characters and each one is very important and his/her actions are vital to the plot. So if he had written the book in first person or third person limited and had focused on Pat Harris, for example, the reader would never have known what was going on with the search effort and therefore would be stuck inside a stuffy cabin with twenty-two seemingly doomed passengers. What an exciting book that would have been. Using this point of view also helped to accent the tone of urgency because it showed you how much everyone was doing in order to save the passengers inside Selene and the problems that they faced doing so.

How long will it be before we are taking tours on one of the Moon’s dust oceans?

Does the situation make the man or does the man make the situation?

Is the human race ready for all the hidden dangers that the Moon presents?

How would I react to a life or death situation?

Does a sense of urgency help to unify and bring people to cooperate together?

Ten questions I believe the author wanted the reader to ask when he read this book are:

Are certain people born natural leaders?

What does it take to become a hero?

What year is this supposed to take place in?

Why did Pat and Sue get married after the incident? Did it take a situation like the one they were in to spark true love?

Are there really oceans of dust on the Moon?

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

This novel is a good book to read in company with A Fall of Moondust because it too is based in outer space and deals with isolationism and how people either keep themselves occupied or drive themselves insane.

When Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer

This novel is a good read along with A Fall of Moondust because it involves a race against time as scientists try to figure out a way to evacuate the Earth before an errant planet collides with it.

Islands in the Sky by Arthur C. Clarke

Another good follow up novel to A Fall of Moondust, this book is about a young man who wins an internship to a space station in orbit around the Earth. While there he encounters dangers such as nuclear radiation, and being sucked into space. It carries on the theme of survival that is expressed in A Fall of Moondust

The World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl

Out of millions of worlds that have been populated by the human race, only one remains. Now it is its inhabitants are challenged to survive ice ages, wars, and even alien attacks. The survival of the human race rests squarely upon their shoulders.

The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke

This story deals with not being saved on the Moon, but being saved on Earth. The novel takes place about 200,000 years in the future. The earth has withered and died and is now nothing but desert. Man was once a great dynasty throughout the Universe, but was crushed by an alien race. Now, humans live in contained cities and have life spans of about one million years. Now they are trying to break the cycle and reconnect with one another to save their dying planet Earth.

Over all I would have to say that this book was just okay. It wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t great. It was all too obvious that it was written by a young and budding science fiction author who still needed quite a bit of improvement. One reason why this was so obvious was that Mr. Clarke made each character seem too righteous, too smart. He made everyone seem like a godsend and a genius. It seemed as though he focused too much on accurately depicting the moon, its features, and the physics of low gravity instead of focusing more on the characters and their emotions and vulnerabilities. Another reason why this was such an obviously underdeveloped book was that every main character seemed detached from what was going on in the story. Whenever a problem occurred they were cool, calm, and calculated. They never flinched at a setback, whether minor or major. That made the novel seem very unrealistic.

Arthur C. Clarke’s main purpose for writing this book, A Fall of Moondust, was mainly to test the waters. He wanted to see what his abilities were in the writing world and its different genres, for this was only his fifth book. Prior to this book, his other novels had been based mainly in philosophical sci-fi. However, he decided to try his hand at a thriller.