My friend Adam Sugerman's father, Arthur Sugerman, passed away about a year and a half ago. Earlier this summer Adam went to Princeton to help pack up his belongings and he came across a collection of science fiction and mystery novels that he kindly decided to send up to me. Many of the books that I will be reading during the remainder of the year will be from this collection, this is the first of those books, this and future books will be marked with an asterisk to show their source.
This book is a classic disaster story about a tourist sight seeing ship on the moon that gets buried as a result of an earthquake and subsequent avalanche. The majority of the story is about what takes place after the earthquake on the ship, among the moon's bureaucrats, among the scientists who are trying to figure out where the ship is located and among the reporters who are going to great lengths to secure special access to the rescuers and the scene of the rescue.
Arthur C. Clarke always puts forward very polished and well thought out science fiction. I am always struck by his attention to detail and sometimes struck by how accurately he depicts the future (the book was published in 1963 and is set in the mid-twenty first century). Having said that I found this book to be a little like Chriton's Andromeda Strain where the story and suspense are almost too polished and where the author builds a great platform but then fails to capitalize on the story. Clarke begins the story by describing the voyage of the ship and alluding to an event that will happen that is going to change the world/moon for ever. When I was reading this I was getting really psyched because I thought that the moon was going to blow up or some cataclysmic event of that magnitude was going to occur. I was a little disappointed that it turned out to be just a traditional disaster-rescue story. This book is well written, it feels more like a good paperback that one should take on vacation.
6 comments:
It's interesting that Clarke was writing in the "disaster" genre in 1963 -- a genre that became all the rage a decade later in Hollywood with movies like "The Towering Inferno," "Earthquake" and "The Poseidon Adventure." This seems like a book that's ripe for screenplay treatment given its mix of sci-fi and disaster. Strange to see that he's only ever had a few projects adapted for the screen (check out his listing on IMDB). Maybe there's something inherently unadaptable about Clarke, though Buzby's review suggests the book isn't that complex. Perhaps with Clarke's recent death we'll see more of his writing in the cineplex.
You should be doing the adapting!
Would you be able to take a photo of the box of books? Or just a bunch of them laid out flat? I'd love to see the covers and the condition they are in.
I will include the book covers as I post each review.
aw, so cool that you got an instant treasure trove of books to plow thru!
I think what you see with a lot of these paperback novels in the 60's is that the writers had been publishing mostly short stories in the pulp magazines. Now there was a market for novel length stories and these guys had good ideas but only for a short story. Consequently many of the books seem to run out of steam.
Can't find the cover artist on this one.
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