Cycle of Fire

 
 
Cycle of Fire
by Hal Clement
Ballantine
1957, reprinted 1981

 

 

Cycle of Fire is the second Hal Clement novel I've read, and like the first, Mission of Gravity, it involves a long overland journey across the landscape of an alien planet, which leads to the discovery of secrets about how this strange world actually works.

 
Teenage space cadet Kreuger ends up assumed dead by his human crewmates, and tags along with alien Dar, who is transporting a load of books to the polar ice cap for safety. Dar is also on foot and alone after his glider crashed, and so the two learn to work together.

 
In a reversal of the way I feel like these things usually go, Kreuger doesn't end up as the 'leader' of the expedition. He follows Dar's lead, treats him as a mentor, and learns much more of the alien language than Dar learns of English. He's decidedly non-colonial for a mid-century scifi protagonist!

 
Dar and Kreuger travel over lava fields and through jungle. They get taken prisoner by a strange village of Dar's species who confiscate their books, which prevents the duo from leaving. Dar is used to his people being ruled by Teachers, but this village is weird. The Teacher is never seen in person, and the villagers don't write and aren't delivering any books to the ice cap.

 
While they're sort of captives, Dar and Kreuger are also allowed to explore the area, so long as they return at regular intervals for questioning. They find an abandoned city that appears to belong to another species that Dar's never seen before. They also find a high tech underground headquarters hidden beneath a mountain.

 
Eventually Dar and Kreuger signal another glider, and catch a ride to the ice cap, where Kreuger gets to meet the Teachers. He also learns that a 'dying time' is coming soon, when most of Dar's species will die off, and some length of time will pass until they're all reborn, with only the Teachers and the books to preserve the species' language and culture between cycles.

 
Then something Kreuger never expected happens - another human crew comes to the planet to learn more about it, and are willing to rescue him too, now that they know he's alive.

 
With the humans, we learn a bit more of the truth. The planet's two suns work to create decades-long super-seasons. Although tropical by human standards, Dar's people live during the 'cold time,' while another sentient species lives during the 'hot time.' The other species is much more technologically advanced. The abandoned city is theirs, and the mysterious Teacher belongs to this species, communicating by radio. The two species exist in a strange symbiotic relationship, with one being born from the dead bodies of the other at the start of their 'season.'

 
There are debates among the humans about how much scientific knowledge to allow the aliens to acquire, and what might happen if they colonized the stars. Kreuger, to his credit, is more loyal to Dar and Dar's people than to his military superiors or the interests of humans as a species. (The human officers are chauvinistic in a way that feels typical of the time.) In the end, Dar is the one to decide his own fate, which again, I appreciated.

 
Cycle of Fire belongs to a mini-tradition of scifi novels about planets with binary stars and super-seasons, which includes Poul Anderson's Fire Time, Brian Aldiss's Helliconia trilogy, Joan Vinge's Snow Queen and Summer Queen, and, via a very different mechanic, Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. The 'hot time' aliens also made it into Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials.
 

Anderson, at least, credits Clement as inspiration, and Fire Time might be an even better novel, with more viewpoints and political depth, and maybe more plausible biology. But Cycle of Fire is also a good scifi mystery - it's interesting to see the clues accumulate and try to understand what they all mean for the nature of the planet. And Kreuger's empathy, humility, and willingness to defer to the wisdom of the alien makes him an unexpectedly appealing human protagonist.

 

Cycle of Fire illustration by Wayne Douglas Barlowe