A Mission of Gravity

"Despite the fact that I’m known as someone who is doing modern takes on classic sci fi , I’m not actually a great reader of that whole ‘golden age’ thing. I’ve read a bit of Asimov , a bit of Clarke and a handful of others, but in general, I much prefer to read current sci fi written by living authors. A Mission of Gravity is one of those older stories, it’s from the mid 1950s, and it’s one of those I was aware of for a long time, because it is talked about a great deal – and very justifiably. It’s got some really interesting aliens. I’ve got a book coming out called Shroud in 2025 which I was aware might end up clashing with some of the territory in this very well-known story. So I thought, right, I’d better read it. I was very glad I did! Not because it was a clash that I was going to have a problem with, but because it turned out to be a really fun story from the alien perspective, and a really fascinating story from the perspective of the history of science fiction writing. The basic shtick is, there is a planet that’s a very weird shape, which means that the effective gravity of the planet varies depending on where you are – because your distance from the centre of the planet is varying. Humans can just about manage on the least gravitic parts of the planet, although it’s got a very hostile atmosphere. But the local species exist all over the planet. They are very flat, centipede-like creatures. So this is one case where Golden Age sci fi is delivering a really fascinating alien concept. You get a lot of sections of the book from the point of view of the aliens. There’s a thing the humans need to recover, which has crashed in one of the highest gravity areas. So the humans are trying to get the aliens to go and get it for them, because they have no other way of getting it back. From the humans’ perspective, they are absolutely exploiting these aliens who they feel are probably not terribly clever. The aliens are technologically sophisticated to very roughly an Age of Enlightenment level; they’re getting to the point where they’re curious about their own world, but traveling around their own world is very difficult. One of the things I love most about them is that they have an absolutely crippling fear of heights, because in the high gravity areas, a fall of a couple of inches will kill you – so that’s a very basic element of their psychology. The aliens are very wise to what the humans are doing. They spend a lot of time thinking, “How can we use this arrangement to our advantage once we’ve got this thing? What will the humans give us for it? What concessions can we wring from them? What do we understand about what the humans even are ?” So it’s not a case of the dumb alien being outmanoeuvred by the superior Earthman, which was a lot of the fiction at that time, especially for younger readers. The alien part of the narrative, which is probably about 75% of the book, is extremely good. The human part of the narrative is very of-its-time, which is to say that the educated-white-men college-professor types who are on this mission spend their time sorting through big piles of paper and smoking pipes on their spaceship. It reads very weirdly to the modern eye, because they are so 1950s. An awful lot of science fiction at the time didn’t really consider the idea that going to space would change people. The idea was that we would discover stuff and we would invent stuff, but people would be absolutely the same—even down to coming from 1950s America. I tend to refer to this as the ‘time machine factory problem’: you have a lot of these short stories where our hero gets back from a hard day’s work at the time machine factory, and his wife has got dinner on the table, and he’s gone back to his little apartment and all of that… It’s literally 1950s America, and the fact that you have time machines in mass production has made no difference at all. It’s a very common thing in 1950s and 1960s sci fi, and it absolutely is on show here in the human narrative; but at the same time you have this amazing alien story, and they are some of the best aliens in classic science fiction. So there are two really good reasons to read this book, which is very readable and fairly short – almost novella length. One is the great alien stuff, and the other is that it’s a fascinating artifact in the history of sci fi."