A short life of the author
Hal Clement (30 May 1922 – 29 October 2003), the pen name of Harry Clement Stubbs, was an American science fiction writer and high school science teacher who was the foremost practitioner of “hard” science fiction — the subgenre in which scientific extrapolation is rigorous, internally consistent, and central to the narrative. His masterpiece, Mission of Gravity (1954), set on a massive, rapidly rotating planet where surface gravity ranges from three times Earth’s at the equator to nearly seven hundred times Earth’s at the poles, is widely regarded as the greatest world-building achievement in the history of science fiction.
Life
Stubbs was born in Somerville, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard (B.S. in astronomy, 1943), Boston University (M.Ed., 1947), and Simmons College (M.S. in chemistry, 1963). He served as a B-24 bomber pilot and copilot in the Eighth Air Force during World War II, flying thirty-five combat missions over Europe.
After the war, he became a science teacher at Milton Academy, a preparatory school in Milton, Massachusetts, where he taught for forty years while writing science fiction on the side. This dual career — professional scientist-educator and working SF writer — was central to his literary identity. He approached fiction the way he approached a lab experiment: define the parameters, work out the consequences, and present the results.
Hard Science Fiction
Clement’s approach to science fiction was methodological. He would begin a novel by designing a planet — calculating its mass, rotation rate, atmospheric composition, temperature ranges, and the biological adaptations its inhabitants would require — and then construct a story that explored the consequences of those parameters. The science was not window dressing; it was the story.
He articulated this method in a famous 1953 essay, “Whirligig World” (published in Astounding Science Fiction), in which he described how he designed the planet Mesklin for Mission of Gravity: beginning with the desire to write about a world with very high surface gravity, he calculated the mass and rotation rate that would produce such conditions, worked out the atmospheric and geological consequences, and designed the Mesklinites — centipede-like beings adapted to enormous gravitational forces — as the logical inhabitants of such a world.
Mission of Gravity (1954)
The novel follows Barlennan, a Mesklinite sea captain — a caterpillar-like creature about fifteen inches long — who is engaged by human scientists to retrieve a research probe that has landed at Mesklin’s south pole, where gravity approaches 700g. Barlennan must sail and trek across a world of wildly varying gravitational conditions, and the reader experiences Mesklin through his alien but comprehensible perspective.
The genius of the novel is that the planet itself is the protagonist. Mesklin is so vividly and rigorously imagined that it feels real — its methane seas, its hurricane-force winds, its crushing polar gravity, its inhabitants’ instinctive terror of heights (in 700g, falling from any height is fatal). The human characters are secondary to the Mesklinites and their world, and Clement’s sympathetic portrayal of Barlennan — who is intelligent, curious, mercantile, and pragmatic — is one of the most successful portraits of an alien consciousness in the genre.
Other Work
Needle (1950) — Clement’s first novel — is an unusual blend of hard SF and detective fiction: an alien symbiont that can live inside a human host pursues an alien criminal who has also taken a human host, and the two must be identified from the inside. Close to Critical (1964) is set on a planet where the surface temperature is near the critical point of water. Star Light (1971) is a sequel to Mission of Gravity. Iceworld (1953) ingeniously inverts the usual perspective: aliens from a hot world visit Earth, which is to them an impossibly frigid, frozen wasteland.
Critical Standing
Clement is universally regarded as the master of hard science fiction, and Mission of Gravity is consistently ranked among the finest SF novels ever written. His literary skills were modest — his characters are functional rather than deep, his prose is clear but unadorned — and his influence is primarily on the world-building and hard-SF tradition rather than on science fiction’s literary mainstream. He was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1999.
Collecting Clement
Mission of Gravity (1954, Doubleday) in first edition with dust jacket brings $200–$800. Needle (1950, Doubleday) brings $100–$400. His later novels bring $20–$80. Signed copies are uncommon; Clement attended conventions but was not a prolific signer.