So, what with discussing hard sf in this TohuBohu a few times, when Your Humble Blogger saw Hal Clement’s Half-Life (NY: Tor 1999) on the library shelf, it went into the bag without a second thought. And boy, is this book Not For Me. Just because I know nothing at all about chemistry, I should point out, as the book seemed, dimly, to be interesting, except that every individual plot point seemed to have something to do with chemistry, and I had no clue why it was interesting that the black substance was a gel, or that there are, or aren’t, double-carbon links in it.
The basic background to the book is that people begin pretty rapidly to die off. One virulent disease after another appears and kills a few million people before a cure is found. It’s a disturbing and powerful concept; most of the individual illnesses are controlled within a few years, but the total effect is that there are fewer and fewer people, and life expectancy is shorter and shorter. Science is pretty advanced, particularly medical science, although energy appears to be cheap and plentiful. Anyway, in desperation, they ... send a mission to Titan to study the possibility of life forming there. You know, because if they learn about life, they can apply the—hey, what the heck else are they going to do? Anyway, they send a dozen and a half people mostly young (because people don’t live very long) and mostly ill in serious but controllable ways. The youth, lack of what we would consider training, and various physical handicaps lead to some interesting plot devices, or at least they seem like they would be interesting if I could figure out what they were trying to figure out.
I should point out that when I say I know nothing at all about chemistry, I mean that the last time I took a chemistry course was sophomore year in high school, at which time I sat in the back and paid very little attention. Nor have I paid the slightest attention to chemistry since then. I am truly a chemistry ignoramus; I know that there are, you know, elements, and molecules, and that different things combine in different ways, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge. So I have no idea if a reader with one college course in their distant past has pre-reqs for the book, or if it really is for chemists. I more or less enjoyed it anyway, but it’s your call.
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-Vardibidian.