Every third or fourth post here seems to be a eulogy, and this is one of them. I was quite surprised to see in the paper yesterday that Hal Clement had died. He was no spring chicken, of course, but I saw him last at Worldcon in Toronto and he seemed pretty much the same as ever, so whatever ended up doing him in must have happened fairly suddenly.



Clement was the elder statesman of Boston area sf, and a fixture at just about every convention I've ever been to. The first couple years of my con-attending he was always seen with a big old SLR camera around his neck, although I'm not sure what he took pictures of. His slide shows on various astronomical topics were always entertaining, even with his relatively crude hand-drawn or -painted graphics. He seemed intent on using them as forum to provide story ideas for the would-be writers in the audience, although I'm not sure how many would be able to keep up with him. He was the quintessential Campbell author in that he wrote clanky hard sf stories from the get-go, and seemed both unwilling and unable to write about anything else. As a result, his prose is extremely wooden, sometimes in his lesser works nearly unreadable. But if you read one of his better stories you can hear Clement actually saying those words, that was really the way he talked, probably from his decades teaching chemistry at Milton Academy. In the last 25 years or so he'd fallen out of favor, with very little published work of note, but seemed to be going through a late renaissance in the last few years, much like Jack Williamson, riding on the coattails of the resurgent interesting in hard sf. There will always be a subset of sf fans who revel in his type of story, the "my problem and how I solved it" plot, the characters acting strictly as mouthpieces to the science involved, but the workings of whatever astronomical or biological idea he was trying to convey carefully thought out.



When the SF reading group was still going on at the B&N in Braintree, I suggested they bring in Clement as a guest, since he lived the next town over, and they actually did. Unfortunately his only book in print at that time, around 1994 or so, was Fossil, one of his less inspired efforts. He brought along a couple of groupies to help keep the conversation going (there were only about five of us in the group). Unlike a lot of sf authors who can ramble on about anything for hours, Clement was always good for a story, but they were usually very concise and to the point. Any amusing anecdotes clocked in at about 30 seconds, then he'd look up at the guy that ran the group as if to say, "now let's talk about something else". I came up with a few questions, hitting upon his modus operandi that he tends to think of a planet and it's unique ecology first, then build the story around that.



It'll be weird to go to conventions and not see him there, talking about the old days, doing slideshow presentations. He even liked Star Trek conventions, and he apparently entertained attendees there with talks about the real science that Star Trek ignored. Things like exterior shots of the Enterprise whooshing through space with tons of stars flying by. He said at Boskone once, "If you figure the sun is about the size of one of the lights in that chandelier up there, and the earth is about the size of one of the flecks in that ceiling tile a few feet away, then the nearest star is a tennis ball and two golf balls in St. Louis, Missouri!" I think Clement deserves as much credit as can be bestowed on one person for instilling the idea of scientific rigour in good sf. Without him on the local scene, now we have to look around for someone else to assume the mantel of dean of New England science fiction, and who's that going to be, Allen Steele? So long, Hal, thanks for sticking around a while.