Fred & Geoffrey Hoyle - Fifth Planet (1963)

 

I promised myself I wasn't going to have any more on the grounds of 1970's Seven Steps to the Sun having bordered on unreadable, but here I am. Seven Steps to the Sun featured this sentence:

A duck looked at him from the water and laughed in cynical fashion.

Fred Hoyle, as you may recall, was the astronomer who briefly taught Stephen Hawking and became one of his most vocal opponents, actually coining the term Big Bang while taking the piss out of the theory. Fifth Planet is better than Seven Steps - which was also cowritten with his son - although it suffers from traces of the same clunk. Domestic scenes abruptly focus upon the musings of Conway, the main character, and segue without preamble into five or six pages of theory concerning rocketry, orbital dynamics of planets, gravity or whatever. These digressions are reasonably interesting and doubtless Asimov would be proud, but the switch from one form of description to the other is clumsy, particularly when the straightforward narrative passages are themselves distinctly weird in tone:

Mike was waiting for her. He was a big, powerful fellow, with shortish hair, handsome rather than good-looking. In his official dossier he was described as well coordinated, and the figures for his reaction times were very good indeed.

Fifth Planet is set about one hundred years in the future, at least as of 1962, and writing in the introduction, Fred himself admits that attempts to predict the shape of future society usually end up looking pretty silly, so the world of Fifth Planet is conspicuously extrapolated from 1963, but 1963 as experienced by an unswinging science guy who probably doesn't play well with others, doesn't fully understand women, and fucking loves equations. Anything outside his somewhat sheltered existence seems to be drawn from movies, television, or cheap paperbacks, at a guess - James Bond mashed up with bits of kitchen sink dramas, retold by someone either on the spectrum or who is simply wound too tight. To be fair, the limits of such a perspective are acknowledged if not actually understood by the main character, and presumably at least one of the authors.

Although he could hardly believe it, Conway realised that to most people things were the other way round. It was usually the calculations on paper that seemed obscure. To most people calculations only acquired a meaning when they were translated into material terms. It was a question of the way you saw the world. Conway saw it in terms of the abstractions of the mind, not in terms of concrete everyday things. 

This goes some way towards alleviating the otherwise uneven and slightly rigid tone of the opening chapters, and once we're done with this admission, the novel starts to look up.

Conway is married to a woman he doesn't understand, a smashing dolly bird - as they were known back then - who isn't very bright and openly shags other men, with hubby obliged to accept that this is simply the way she is. Meanwhile, an alien solar system crosses celestial paths with our own, close enough to shift a few of our local planets into slightly wobblier orbits, but also close enough to visit in rocket ships not much further advanced than those which would take us to the moon at the end of the decade - and the technology involved seems to be the only concession to this being set in 2087. Expeditions are sent to Achilles, the planet of this roving system which most resembles Earth. They find plants but no animal life, and both teams, Russian and American, experience difficulties weird enough to have been drawn from the zone in the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic. Some of them make it back to Earth, but there's an alien consciousness among them, one which ends up migrating to Conway's wife.

If the novel retains its clunk in certain respects, this is easily forgotten by the second half, which compensates for any literary shortcomings with disquieting surrealism founded in some of the weirder claims of theoretical physics, and even the unflattering portrayal of Conway's wife is redeemed by the story. This is probably the best Hoyle I've read, which I didn't expect. It opens as a humourless version of Confessions of a Window Cleaner and yet somehow ends up making Arthur C. Clarke seem frivolous.