Mission of Gravity is considered one of the best Science Fictions books ever written and is always cited as an example of what Hard Science Fiction is supposed to be. You will forgive, me I hope, for the fact that this is the first time that I’ve read it. I honestly thought that I had read Mission of Gravity and I knew the plot, but when I picked it up, I realized that it was completely new to me.

As in most Clement books, the protagonist is an alien. The humans are reasonable, unconflicted European-American engineers, and as such, are not very interesting characters. Clement removes them from the the action leaving the humans as mere observers about half way through the book. The scene on the cover (shown left) is one of the only times that the human and alien characters have direct contact. It looks like a dangerous episode, but it is over with quickly and the resourceful aliens save the day.

The Alien protagonist, Barelennan, a Melkinite, is a small lobster-like alien that lives on a weird planet with gravity up to 700 time that of earth. The planet is disk shaped and spinning at a tremendous rate so that the gravity at the equator is only around 3 times that of Earth.

Barlennan has learned to speak English without any problems and is a roaming trader who sails the methane seas of the planet in search of profit. He is a good enough person, but he is not above taking advantage of this relationship with the humans. He stands to become rich from the technological information given to him by the humans. All the humans want is for the Melkanites to rescue a probe that has crashed into the heavy gravity polar regions where man cannot go.

Barlennan is an alien Odysseus, traveling unknown seas and encountering strange beasts and civilizations and survives with the aid of the god-like humans. He communicates through a remote communications device that he carries around. Like Odysseus, Barlennan is a bit of a trickster and risk taker. He will lie cheat and even steal in order to make a profit, but his dealings with the humans are mostly on the up and up. One thing that puzzles me, is why did Barlennan go so far to help the humans when the risks were so high? I am sure that he thought that he would profit handsomely from contact with them. I think though that an experienced trader and adventurer might have quit while he was ahead rather than undertake the last dangerous part of the journey.

Mission of Gravity reads much like Jack London or Joseph Conrad novel, without the internal struggles of the protagonists. Science Fiction, in those days, was all about adventure and there is plenty of it here. The Aliens are not rich characters, but endearing. If anything they are too human. Clement wrote a sequel in 1971.

Mission of Gravity was first serialized in 1953 in Astounding Magazine by the editor John W. Campbell.