Collection. — Del Rey/Ballantine, 1979. — 379 p. ISBN: 0-345-27689-2. Hal Clement: Rationalist (1979) essay by Lester del Rey. Impediment (1942) novelette by Hal Clement. Technical Error (1944) novelette by Hal Clement. Uncommon Sense (1946) shortstory by Hal Clement. Assumption Unjustified (1946) novella by Hal Clement. Answer (1947) shortstory by Hal Clement. Dust Rag (1956)...
So you’ve left us, Mr. Cunningham! Malmeson’s voice sounded rougher than usual, even allowing for headphone distortion and the ever-present Denebian static. Now, that’s too bad. If you’d chosen to stick around, we would have put you off on some world where you could live, at least. Now you can stay here and fry. And I hope you live long enough to watch us take off — without...
The Nitrogen Fix is a 1980 science fiction novel by Hal Clement. The plot revolves around a nomadic family in a future where all oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere has combined with nitrogen, so the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen with traces of water, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide, and the seas are very dilute nitric acid. The family is allied with an alien, an octopus-like...
The world’s energy was limited… and with overpopulation and a high level of technology, the Power Board had virtually become the real government of the world. Power was rationed, it was guarded, it was sacred. Thus when three of the Power Board’s agents disappeared at sea, and there was evidence that something irregular was happening to the energy quota in that area, it was...
Hal Clement, the dean of hard science fiction, has written a new planetary adventure in the tradition of his classic Mission of Gravity. It is the kind of story that made his reputation as a meticulous designer of otherworldly settings that are utterly convincing because they are constructed from the ground up using established principles of orbital mechanics, geology,...
Well known as the author of Mission of gravity, cycle of fire, close to critical and for his many other extraordinarily realistic creations of extraterrestrials, it is remarkable that Hal Clement's novelettes have never appeared in book form before. — Here are three of the best — each dealing with a different aspect of communication with creatures so alien to mankind that the...
Iceworld is a humorously pointed novel of clashing perspectives, which we may designate as hot versus cold. Even for readers who have not seen H. R. van Dongen's fine cover painting for the novel's first installment in Astounding, Hal Clement does not keep us long in suspense that the planet which is unaccessible because of its climate of extreme cold is our own Earth. In...
Shrouded in eternal gloom by its own thick atmosphere, Tenebra was a hostile planet: a place of crushing gravity, 370-degree temperatures, a constantly shifting crust and giant drifting raindrops. Uncompromising — yet there was life, intelligent life on Tenebra. For more than twenty years, Earth scientists had studied the natives from an orbiting laboratory and had even found a...
Alvan wren, poised beside a transparent port in the side of the service rocket, gazed out with considerable interest. The object of his attention, hanging a few miles away and slowly drifting closer, was not too imposing at first glance; merely a metal globe gleaming in the sunlight, the reflection from its surface softened by a second, concentric, semitransparent envelope. At...
Apology. Generalities. Details. Complications. Arrangements and People. When in Doubt, Ask. The Moral of a White Lie. Joke. Routine, Modified. Joke Two. Joke Three. First Aid. Joker. Reconstruction. Professional. Official, from Headquarters.
Two alien races lived under a single sun, someplace across the galaxy, sharing their world… sharing life itself. For they lived together in a partnership more perfect than any other known to the intelligences of the galaxy. Together, the two races became one, each deriving from the other that which made him greater than his individual self. Host and symbiote, they lived...
Clement’s Mission of Gravity was the engaging tale of the adventures of Barlennan, a sea captain among his caterpillar-like people, on the high-gravity world of Mesklin. In Star Light Barlennan and his sailors go with humans to the even stranger world of Dhrawn, a crusted star of the type mentioned by Harlow Shapley. Dhrawn circles the feeble red star Lalande 21185, which...
Winter storm. The flyer. Off the ground. Breakdown. Mapping job. The sled. Stone defense. Cure for acrophobia. Over the edge. Hollow boats. Eye of the storm. Wind riders. Slip of the tongue. The trouble with hollow boats. High ground. Alley of wind. Elevator. Mound builders. New bargain. Flight of the Bree.