It is perhaps fitting that, on the centenary birthday of Sir Arthur, I re-read and review Sir Arthur’s first published novel, Prelude to Space.*
This was one of the first of Sir Arthur’s novels that I read, though not the first. I had actually come to his work through his short stories, such as The Star (1955) and The Nine Billion Names of God (1953), before finding a copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in my school library.
Prelude is not a book of the same calibre of 2001. And yet its quiet manner, a tale of men and women working together to reach out into the unknown, is one that has stayed with me for over forty years.
“It was written in July, 1947, during my summer vacation as a student at King’s College, London. The actual composition took exactly twenty days, a record I have never since approached. This speed was largely owing to the fact that I had been making notes on the book for more than a year; it was already well organized in my head before I set pen to paper.”
As the novel was written in 1947, the plot is perhaps understandably rather cliched these days. Set in the 1970’s and told from the point of view of historian Dr. Dirk Alexson, it is the story of how Mankind first reaches the Moon. We view it as a non-specialist would see it, as it would be given to the general public by an objective observer. It also allows us to see science non-technically – a role in a few years that, as a populariser of science, Sir Arthur would happily fill. It is clearly a creative summation of Clarke’s ideas of how it could be, although it is different to what really happened.
“You Americans have always been a bit conservative about space flight, and didn’t take it seriously until several years after us.”
In Clarke’s book the research and development is not achieved by government funding but by private enterprise, and mainly European and Commonwealth participation at that. Think of a British Space-X – perhaps Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, rather than NASA.
Clarke’s explanation of this is charmingly straightforward:
“In 1947, it seemed quite reasonable to base an Interplanetary Project in London; as one of my English characters remarks… That statement was still true a decade after I had finished the book—when Sputnik I was launched in October, 1957. It is now very hard to realize that right into the late 1950’s many American engineers in the rocket field itself pooh-poohed the idea of space flight.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, the perspective of the novel is a Brit-centric view, with much of the research and development occurring in London and the final flight setting off from that ex-British colony and member of the UK Commonwealth, Australia.
However, it is not as jingoistic as that outline might suggest. Alexson is from the University of Chicago, for example, and the group of scientists and pilots that Alexson observes is deliberately multinational. Even German scientists, who a few years earlier were bombing London, are accepted as part of this group. There are no national or political barriers on this brave new frontier, clearly something that Clarke believes in passionately and ardently.
It is also partly biographical, with many of the characters and events allegedly based on Clarke and his compatriots’ work in the 1940’s and 50’s, but then extrapolated further. I think that it is this that I found attractive on first reading. There is this feeling that, in the 1970’s, this is what it would be like to be part of that exciting, and dangerous, experiment, on the cutting edge of technology and the edge of the unknown.
Nevertheless, from the perspective of the 2010’s, Prelude is also easy to criticise. For all of its buoyancy and confidence, it is also naïve and unrealistically optimistic. It was out of date by the time Mankind reached the Moon, something Clarke admits in his honest and endearing Post-Apollo Preface, written in August 1969.
Being a product of the 1940’s and 50’s, the writing style is charmingly old-school. There’s a lot of explaining going on through the characters, of Dirk being told things to help his understanding and his writing of the historical record. It is linear in style and occasionally stilted in prose, but even so something I found engaging and endearing.
Clarke also addresses the belief held by many general readers that science fiction is ‘the fiction that predicts the future’. Clarke, in his Post-Apollo Preface refutes that: “… few (science fiction writers), if any, have ever claimed “this is how it will be.” Most of them are concerned with the play of ideas, and the exploration of novel concepts in science and discovery.”
Despite the author’s protestations, Prelude did, admittedly, get some ideas right. This is the first time that Clarke’s ideas of geosynchronous satellites are shown in his novels, something taken for granted today. There are other ideas here that were shown in the real Apollo missions – crews of three, each with their specific roles, the use of booster spaceships to launch the final spaceship into space, rather like the Space Shuttle riding on a Jumbo jet and so on.
There are also some aspects that, even with the passage of seventy-odd years, modern readers will recognise. The media coverage of the mission is as it would be now – when the secret mission is announced, there is a media frenzy as newspaper reporters try to gain exclusive admission to the training centre and the astronauts, wheedling details out from those involved and making facts up if they don’t have access. There are attempts at terrorism and disagreements from religious groups over whether Mankind should travel into space. None of this, of course, would happen today.
Other elements are less pertinent in 2017. The use of nuclear booster rockets is not generally seen as workable these days, although Stephen Baxter did use them in his alternative history, Voyage. Similarly, the importance of governments in sponsoring research and development was underestimated by Clarke, although he justifies his choice in his new Introduction.
…The modest amounts of money with which I assumed space research could be conducted will now cause some rueful amusement. No one could have imagined, in 1947, that within twenty years not merely millions, but billions, of dollars would be budgeted annually for space flight, and that a lunar landing would be a primary objective of the two most powerful nations on Earth. Back in the 1940’s it seemed most unlikely that governments would put any money into space before private enterprise had shown the way.”
Prelude is very much a debut novel of an author growing in style and structure. There are themes here that Sir Arthur will revisit in his other more famous novels – the benefits of space travel, the unifying nature of international cooperation towards common goals, for example. It is obviously a story close to Sir Arthur’s heart. There are parts that border on the biographical, or perhaps what Clarke hopes to be in the future. The CEO of Interstellar, Sir Robert Derwent, is perhaps the mouthpiece of Sir Arthur’s hopes and dreams for the future, his distillation of the discussion why humans should, and will, travel to the Moon and beyond.
Whilst very much a product of its time, Prelude to Space is a novel that holds up better than many other debuts from other equally famous authors. Compare this with Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo, for example, and the differences are clear. Whilst it could be argued that Galileo is aimed at what would now be referred to as the ‘Young Adult’ market, and Prelude is much more of a grown-up affair, Clarke’s novel is a much more refined and subtler work, although Clarke could also write for a younger audience. Clarke’s novel The Sands of Mars, also published in 1952, is perhaps more like Galileo.
As much as I enjoyed it, Prelude is a lesser work when regarded in the context of Clarke’s full bibliography, and yet it is a reflection of the time it was written – an optimistic, forward-looking treatise of the Space Age and how the future could be. For all of its literary limitations, it is an endearingly appropriate celebration of Sir Arthur’s life and work.
*The original version of novella Against the Fall of Night was published in Startling Stories in 1948, but was expanded and rewritten in 1951, after the publication of Prelude. Eventually, in 1956, it became perhaps my favourite Clarke novel, The City and the Stars. Prelude is therefore usually regarded as Sir Arthur’s first novel, envisioned as a novel.
Prelude to Space by Arthur C Clarke
Published 1951 by Sidgewick & Jackson
ISBN: 978-0283986222
147 pages
Review by Mark Yon
