Books: Escape from Gravity

ACROSS THE SEA OF STARS (584 pp.) —Arthur C. Clarke—Harcourt, Brace ($3.95).

A moon-based songwriter would have his troubles; an obvious rhyme for earth is girth, and in the radiance of earthlight, a moon-maiden’s face would shine bluish green. But if science fiction is somewhat short on romance, it does offer today’s readers the kind of adventurous, he-man escape from gravity once found in turn-of-the-century western yarns—a commodity not to be dismissed in this day of beatniks and Angry Young Men.

Pax Stellarum. Author Clarke has all the qualifications to keep the 18 short stories and two short novels in this omnibus in far-out orbit. He took first-class honors in physics at London University, headed the British Interplanetary Society, now, at 41, turns out space gas between star-watching and undersea-photography expeditions to the far ends of the earth. He sounds thoroughly convincing when he writes, at a moment of high dramatic intensity (a star is blowing up): “Those last exposures did it! … They show the gaseous shell expanding round the nova. And the speed agrees with your Doppler shifts.” His characters may seem as standard as those in any war film (his monsters, though, are quite human), but most science-fiction writers proceed on the assumption, probably correct, that one man’s neurosis, however interesting, is not very significant when the solar system he inhabits is about to be demolished.

The author gives his readers plenty of opportunity to think in cosmic terms. In Childhood’s End, one of the novels, the U.S. and the Russians are racing to launch the first true spaceship. Countdowns are about to begin when dark vessels loom in the sky above. The Overlords have arrived. With firm benevolence—and without showing their physical forms—they enforce a kind of pax stellarum. When the Overlords finally reveal themselves, dark thoughts filter up in man’s mind. The visitors are winged, horned, 12 ft. tall and have tails. What is their mission? Are they supreme in the universe, or do they serve some understandable—and thus conquerable—Overmind? It is, the author relates with relish, the end of the human race as man knows it.

Dinosaur’s Dinner. At times, tiring of the earth’s-end theme, Clarke pulls a switch, reminds his readers that mankind, whose veins run with the blood of Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun, is the more likely aggressor, could cut a dreadful swath through the tentacles, feathers and eyestalks of the galaxy’s gentle people. But the best story in Across the Sea of Stars uses the solar system’s most venerable gimmick, the time machine. A crew of paleontologists is digging out the 50-million-year-old tracks of a carnivorous dinosaur. The leader jeeps off to visit a nearby physicist, leaving his crew to work on. As they dig deeper, the dinosaur tracks deepen as if the beast had been running. Farther on, sunk in the rock that ages ago was mud, they uncover the unmistakable spoor of a Jeep. Guess what the monster ate for dinner.

Life in the future, in Clarke’s ingenious imagination, can be disturbing, particularly to readers still unresigned to life in the present. The rage among moonmen a few centuries hence: Hypercanasta.