Mission of Gravity

This book is good in the same way that old low-budget B movies with cult followings are good. Quaint, unintentionally amusing and sometimes ground-breaking. As a fan of hard SF I acknowledge the usage of real science in an SF as well done for the early 1950's. I also acknowledge that when this novel was first published it was probably quite eye-opening with its caterpillar aliens living on a squished planet orbiting a binary star system and with an atmosphere made up of hydrogen and methane. At the time I'm sure it was great. That said for me it was very boring; an adventure odyssey to recover a human exploratory rocket stuck in a place inaccessible to humans. The characters are flatter than the planet that the inhabit and the "and then this happened, and then this" timeline in the blandest of prose just didn't do it for me. It seems that I'm in the minority but I find Clement to be a wonderful scientist but a hack writer. 2 1/2 stars