A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke

This was a lovely, linear moon story. Early sci-fi was as preoccupied with the moon as we currently are with Mars it seems

In the future, there are moon tours. One of these moon tours is a ‘boat’ ride over the Sea of Thirst. It is an ocean of some sort of moon dust that is neither liquid nor solid. All is well with these journeys until one day there is an accident that finds the moon boat stuck at the bottom of the dust sea. This is a story of the survivors in the boat, the people trying to save them, the reporters reporting on the accident, and other moon base administrators dealing with the situation.

It plays out in a sort of predictable fashion and nothing is ever as easy as it seems. They are just about to be saved, and inevitably, there is another setback. This is sci-fi from a simpler time. It wasn’t all that exciting to a modern reader of sci-fi but it’s great to read classic sci-fi. You get to see the ideas that writers were toying around with back then, and how they laid the groundwork for the fiction we now have.

The captain of the moon boat that was trapped under the Sea of Thirst:

“He loved the Moon, but it had tried to kill him: never again could he be wholly at ease out upon its open surface. Though deep space was still more hostile and unforgiving, as yet it had not declared war upon him. With his own world, from now on, there could never be more than an armed neutrality.”

Rating: ★★★★

Book #71 in my 2022 Reading Challenge