Book Review: Sir Fred Hoyle's

The Black Cloud

This book written by Sir Fred Hoyle in 1957 is fascinating to say the least. Hoyle is the well-known British astronomer, that coined the term Big Bang to describe the origins of the universe.

In this short book, he creates a story of an extraterrestrial visitation to Earth using real science concepts including calculus equations to show the alien's pathway to Earth.

I am amazed it was never adapted to a Hollywood movie.

It is the first book in the science fiction genre I've read that held my attention, made me wonder, and made sense. The simple differential calculus derivation of the period of time before the cloud reached Earth had me exclaiming this is too good to be true. A book with calculus in it! I mean Freddie, you gotta be crazy you'll lose the mass audience doing that!

Tell me how many sci-fi books have you ever read that used actual mathematical formulae to set their plot? Few if any right? After that, I knew, this book that isn't written for a shallow reading audience. This is no Stephen King, trashy horror story author for sure, I thought.

 

The novel examines the possibility of alien life visiting Earth. This life form is a large gaseous cloud that is on a collision course with Earth.

A team of mathematicians, astrophysicists, and humanities scholars in England assemble to study and determine the effects of this cloud engulfing Earth.

The results are dismal. It will wipe out all life on Earth should it reach the planet. The team calculates the cloud will take 2 years to collide with Earth.

From this point, the novel examines many moral-philosophic questions. The various learning disciplines argue about whom should survive and why.

As the cloud is at last only a few thousand miles away from Earth, one scientist discovers it's not just an inanimate mass of gas, but a sentient being.

It's a super-intelligent being. A group of scientists devise a plan to communicate with it and first contact is made.

The scientists discover that the intelligent cloud is as surprised as they are, to see that a sentient being could exist in the form of solid matter.

Because of its huge size and lack of any visual apparatus, the planets it visits never revealed any living matter.

Its initial probes showed nothing but forms of inanimate matter, like minerals, water (remember, to the Black Cloud water is not a form of life, as it couldn't detect microbial life), and combustible materials (volcanoes).

It concluded that the planets it visits are prime material to fuel its existence as it consumes them via a process of synthesis. The scientists respond that they could never see how a life form could evolve inside a gaseous mass.

The cloud explains it's a conglomerate of various sub-organisms that compose a superstructure and it has evolved into this over a period of hundreds of millions of years.

While, the biological science is weak here, the science idea is a novelty. The story ends with the Black Cloud breaking off its engulfment of Earth and heading to the aid of a fellow cloud in another galaxy.

The Aspects of the Novel

I was gripped by this novel from page one. As I read it with increasing amazement, I kept asking myself, why hasn't anybody ever made this into a movie?

This is the kind of science fiction that makes stories like Star Trek and Star Wars seem trivial. As I thought about it, it occurred to me, that many sci-fi films are based on it. The first Star Trek in 1979 was a direct lift of this novel.

Of course, the screenwriters changed the cloud entity to be the Voyager probe sent back to Earth from an intelligent alien society, but come on, it makes such use of the plot and theme of this book it ain't funny, to use a vernacular.

I saw that B/S in rerun on TV just a few weeks ago, and couldn't help saying to myself, This is the Black Cloud, 

Nonetheless, there are some flaws to the novel. First, the principal point of the work is telegraphed long before it's revealed.

A reader can tell by the middle of the work the cloud is alive and intelligent. Yet, Hoyle keeps up an extended period of verifying the theory of it being alive.

Radio signals are sent back and forth to test the theory it's alive. This extension of plot is boring. Second, the explanation of the biological structure of the cloud is weak and not as solid as the physics descriptions of its trajectory with Earth.

Third, the sub-plot is very cornball love story.  Anyway, this is 50's literature, what do you expect but cornball romance? Why he couldn't even use profanity back then!

With these stylistic shortcomings discounted, the Black Cloud is a masterpiece in the science fiction genre.

I was particularly amused and engrossed to read about the state of technology at the time. Computers were room-sized machines and printers had to have their output encoded on keypunch machines, then fed into a reader that sent the code instructions to a dot-matrix printer.

I couldn't help but giggle reading that, remembering all this was once true. What is most profound about this book is its premise is a real scientific possibility.

If we are going to theorize about alien life it most certainly would be something like what Sir Fred Hoyle describes.

 

Robleh Wais

8/2/10