It's a pure man-against-nature
story, a scientific mystery in which human conflicts play no part. There
are no mess-room tirades, no star-crossed romances, no saboteurs lurking
near the engine.
Clement is focussed on the
exploration, underlining the isolation of the astronauts from Earth by
putting each character in independent living quarters under medical quarantine,
where they never touch.
He underlines it again by
skipping over the journey to Titan, a trip that's worth a book in itself
-- as Stephen Baxter recently proved by writing Titan.
Instead, after a brief
prologue, Half Life begins
with the characters hard at work and just starting to make discoveries.
Whether you find their discoveries
exciting depends on how excited you are by science, but I like to think
that the typical space.com reader will be in for a treat.
A speculative expert
Clement is an expert in the
field of building worlds and, with experience reaching back 50 years, he's
possibly the best in the world. At conventions, he teaches people how to
take current science, add speculation, then carefully model the consequences
and find the story in them.
He is a master of detail,
and when he's done developing a world he can tell you exactly how it works,
from the way a small pond will ripple to the ebb and flow of planetary
weather cycles.
His vision of Titan is stark
and forbidding, in some ways even more inimical to humans than outer space,
but it lives and breathes. Every detail the characters uncover adds to
our understanding of this world, leaving no need for human drama -- it
would be a distraction, like gaudy beach tourists on a New England seascape.
Not that humans don't have
a place in the book. We need eyes to see Clement's painting of Titan, and
his characters -- also a kind of portrait themselves, representing science
at its purest -- provide them.
It's no accident that their
work is basic research, or that they pay such careful attention to following
the rules of good science despite not being professional scientists.
If Greg Benford and other
SF writers excel at portraying scientists as they are, then Clement excels
here at portraying scientists as they should be, with the implied moral
that any well-educated person should at least be able to follow their work.
If these characters are a bit too dedicated and focused to pass for complete
and well-balanced humans, this may be simply another subtle way that the
title Half Life connects to the story -- they're living half-lives.
Not that this is going to
make the book popular in some circles. The action is low-key, and there's
no sex or violence. No Star Children show up bearing epiphany, and the
crew refuses to sit around moaning in hopeless despair. Even worse, Clement
doesn't just expect you to think about what he writes -- he forces you
to. He has a vocabulary, and he's not afraid to use it.
All of these elements break
the rules, either of high or popular literature as understood in the contemporary
marketplace, and that's a good thing.
We sometimes forget that
the typical style of novels is just a form, and that there are different
approaches to narrative fiction. Half Life is a true novel of ideas,
one of those different approaches, and Clement has the skills and experience
he needs to make it rewarding.
Chris Aylott is co-owner
of the Space-Crime Continuum, a science fiction and mystery bookstore
in Northampton, MA.
advertisement
