he title isn't the half of what's half about Half Life. Hal
Clement's latest book is half a story, half a cast, half a climax, half a
book, half asleep, half precious. Maybe all precious. Half Life is
certainly an object lesson in how not to write a work of fiction; and it
is absolutely deliriously unsuccessful as a work of fiction. But this is
absolutely deliriously deliberate. Hal Clement has undertaken to
accomplish what he has accomplished in this utterly strange little
volume.
It is indeed very strange. We begin with a page-long passage
entitled "General Order Six (GO6)," which lays down rules of oral
discourse for scientists who wish to speculate about their observations
and theories; these rules of discourse are designed to ensure
objectivity, politeness, balance, and calm. They are adhered to
throughout by the cast of the novel, almost all of which is devoted to a
series of objective, polite, balanced, calm discussions. Nobody gets
angry at nobody. Nobody is power mad. Nobody is manic depressive. Nobody
does nobody in. Nobody--in any normal sense of what human beings amount
to in a work of fiction--is the name of the cast.
A short prolog called "Ante" follows "General Order Six (GO6)."
It is narrated in an extremely distant narrative voice, and tells us why,
two centuries up the line, an unnamed ship has left Earth for Titan
(Saturn's largest moon), crewed by 50 humans, most of whom--like most
of the shrunken population of Earth--are fatally ill. Life on our planet
has been assaulted by a long series of opportunistic illnesses. The ship
(I swear it is unnamed, though I may have missed something here) has been
sent to Titan in order to "fill the information gaps between the mineral
and biological worlds," to find out if the pre-life conditions on Titan
might give some clue why biological processes on Earth have gone so
seriously awry.
Talking heads
The book itself takes place entirely in orbit around Titan, or on
the surface of the great moon, and is fixed up from an amalgam of
previously published stories, each featuring different members of the
crew of the spaceship/station. But it is something of a misnomer to say
"featuring," because most of the cast consists of talking heads who sound
identical; and it is equally misleading to say "takes place," because
almost nothing happens where, as it were, the story is being told.
This requires a bit of explaining.
As the main narrative begins, we learn that every surviving
member of the crew is quarantined from every other member of the crew.
Nobody meets anybody during the course of the book. Nobody (as far as I
could tell) even sees anybody during the course of the book. The three
landing craft that are being used to explore Titan are normally piloted
by remote control, through waldoed body suits, by one or another crew
member. Most of the events that take place on the surface of the planet
take place, therefore, without anyone really being present or visible at
all.
Nobody can be seen doing anything to nobody, nobody can be seen
doing anything to any thing.
No time to spare
There is also a computer (I do not, however, remember Clement
actually using the word "computer") on board the unnamed ship. Though two
centuries have passed, it is a very stupid computer, differing from my
own desktop mainly in that it has a voice function. Like most First SF
writers, Hal Clement has no time to spare for the computer, or for the
information revolution in general: as far as the pages of Half Life
depose, his imagination does not like contemplating the transforms we
are already over the edge of beginning to witness. He is interested in
something else.
So. We have a cast we cannot visualize. We have events nobody
witnesses in the flesh, mostly. We have a book made up mostly of blind
conversations meticulously adherent to the story-unfriendly protocols of
General Order 6. What in the world do we have that we can do anything
with?
A strangeness on Titan
We do have a strangeness on Titan: motile hollow cups or cusps
seem to be forming around the landers and what they deposit upon the
un-live surface. One of the humans, dying of a particularly painful
disease (almost as intolerable as shingles), deliberately goes to his
death on the surface, opening his face mask to let the devouring gel in,
so that it may be seen how it will react to the wealth of stimuli a human
body might provide. I am not competent to report on Clement's characters'
polite discussions of the consequences of this action on the sort of
lifelike gel; but I retrieve some sense that what happens is a proto-life
activity, perhaps at the enzyme level. It is all highly conducive to
speculation. And finally, late in the book, one of the characters ties
what is happening on Titan to what may be happening on Earth.
And the book ends.
So far, what is being described is a book as subversive of normal
narrative procedures as an anti-roman from France. Is there anything
left? Yes, yes. Two things. One: slowly but inexorably, any reader who
stays the course of Half Life will fall in love with thought itself,
with the caress and tickle of ideas inching into focus. All is
sacrificed--cannily, knowingly, naughtily--to that process. Half Life
is an exudation of thoughts borning.
Two: it stands at one pole of what SF used to be all about, in
the 20th century we have loved so much, a time when some of us were
ambitious enough to write stories in which we understood our tools. Half Life
hearkens back to those days. It is a machine for making thought
work.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list; much of this material has
been collected in Strokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986 and Look at
the Evidence: Reviews and Essays.
