A Fall of Moondust

"So this was one of Clarke’s most acclaimed novels, in 1961, nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. It’s a classic ‘How do we get out of this disaster?’ scenario. Unlike Mars in The Sands of Mars , which is in the process of being colonised, here the moon has been colonised – and now we have space tourism. It’s interesting with everything going on at the moment, with Musk and Bezos… Clarke imagines here, once we colonise, we’ll turn it into a commercial enterprise. And I think he’s actually quite sceptical about that. Clarke imagines – and this was well in keeping with scientific speculation of the time, although whether or not it’s true now is another matter – but he imagines a basin on the moon, covered with a kind of dust, which we can glide across with a sort of cruiser. And we can have tourists, and they can take pictures and say, ‘I’ve been on the moon, and I came back with this awful t-shirt,’ that kind of thing. But then what happens if there’s – not an earthquake, but a moon quake? What if there’s a landslide, and the dust isn’t stable, and the cruiser falls into a massive trench in the moon’s surface? How are we going to get these guys out? There are various attempts to get them out, and so on. Westfahl sees this very much as another cosmic engineer novel – how does the scientist, Robert Lawrence in this case, get these guys out in the nick of time before they die? It’s a bit more complicated than that, actually. Clarke pays a lot of attention to the crew – Pat Harris and Sue Wilkins – the people who aren’t scientists, the guys in the commercial enterprise. Who’s going to ship these passengers around, who’s doing that? So this is space exploration as a nine-to-five job. They’re not running the enterprise: they’re the labourers, the workers. Very similar to E. C. Tubb, a much-maligned figure in British science fiction – and John Christopher’s great short story ‘Christmas Roses’ is another example. I think there was definitely a class element coming in here. Clarke comes from this lower middle class, upper working class farming community – he’s not somebody who is born into wealth or privilege, he’s worked very hard to get where he has. He absolutely sides with the working characters – even if they’re not working class, they’re labouring people. But conversely, he’s very sceptical about the idea of space tourism. The tourists are treating the moon as if it’s a pleasure garden – as if it’s just a place you go to, you take pictures, and you come back with your rubbish t shirt. And it’s like – hold on a minute, this is the moon ! We’ve got this extra-terrestrial object, we’ve landed here, we’ve colonised, we’ve done all this amazing stuff! And they just treat it like a holiday. It’s a critique about seeking leisure for its own sake. It’s an interesting tension about ideas of work, which isn’t just simply about engineering. It’s no surprise that by the end of the book, one of the characters is planning their next journey to Mars: we’ve done the moon, now Mars; and then from Mars, we’ll think about Jupiter, or Saturn, and so on. So that’s the proper job. That’s the proper work to be done. So I think, actually, it’s a more interesting book than just, “How do we get these guys out of the problem?”."