Florida 4: Tourist Trap.

Although I do most of my travel reading on my iPhone, I always pack some paper books to fill in those gaps when the airline may request that I not use my electronic devices, or in case of battery exhaustion on flights without recharge sockets.  Because the highlight of my Florida trip is a visit to the Kennedy Space Centre at Cocoa Beach, I thought it would be appropriate to bring thematically suitable reading material:  The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, and A Fall of Moondust, by Arthur C. Clarke.

I've started my reading with A Fall of Moondust, which is a conveniently short read at 215 pages.* I chose this novel for a very simple reason:  it tells the tale of an accident involving tourists - tourists on the Moon.

The cruiser Selene offers a unique experience for lunar visitors: a boat excursion on a world without water.  Except it's not really a boat, and the Sea of Thirst is aptly named -  it's not made up of water, but of moondust, a powder so fine as to be almost liquid.

As the latest group of tourists embark on their tour of this unusual ocean, a moonquake opens a sinkhole in the dust beneath the cruiser and swallows it, marooning the 22 passengers and crew of two beneath a blanket of metallic powder that blocks all radio communication and diffuses its heat signature.

The book alternates between the trials faced by the trapped travellers and the efforts by their rescuers to locate the ship, discover its fate, and then invent some way of reaching the people on board before lack of oxygen renders their efforts irrelevant.  As it turns out, there are more subtle perils to threaten the lives of the buried sightseers...

To be honest, Clarke is not at his best working with romantic subplots and personal drama, and as a result that part of the story never quite rings true. However, that's not really what interests him.  The key to the story is the battle between the ingenuity of the rescuers and their relentless opponents:  vacuum, the dust, and time.

The most astonishing thing about Clarke's tiny perfect tale of disaster and rescue is that no one dies.  I strongly suspect that in a movie adaptation, the irritating spinster reporter would be lucky to make it to the end of the first act, let alone be the first one out of the boat when they open the escape hatch.

- Sid

* It's interesting to compare the length of SF and fantasy novels from the 50s, 60s and 70s with the current offerings, there's been a definite upward slope in terms of page counts.  I remember when The Lord of the Rings was viewed as epic not only in concept but in length, with 481,103 words in the story  - not including the appendices - and now we have things like The Wheel of Time series, which clocks in at almost ten times the length at 4,410,036 words.