Stefen’s Bookclub – April

In April we will be reading Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement.

First published in 1953, Mission of Gravity is the story of a human expedition which enlists native help to recover a probe which has crashed at the pole of a high gravity world. In the course of the book Clement engages with the interaction between the aliens and humans, explores what a high gravity planet might be like and does some remarkable world-building. This is hard science and space opera and I think comparing it to more recent science fiction and actual science is going to be interesting. There’s also the social ideas expressed in a book more than sixty years old and the relationships between the humans and natives to consider. It’s only 203 pages, but I think we’ll have plenty to talk about.