Hal Clement (real name: Harry Clement Stubbs) was an American Science Fiction writer and high school astronomy & chemistry teacher. Generally considered one of the harder science fiction writers, he enjoyed creating unusual and extreme, but still realistic, settings and creatures for his stories. His best known works are Mission of Gravity, about the inhabitants of an extremely massive planet, and Needle, about a symbiote detective who visits Earth in search of a symbiote criminal. All told, he wrote over a dozen novels and numerous short stories during his career. He was declared one of SF's Grand Masters in 1998.
Clement is credited with coining the term "symbiote"; the proper term in biology is "symbiont", but Clement's coinage caught on.
Works by Hal Clement with their own trope pages include:
Tropes in his other works include:
- All There in the Manual: Clement published an essay titled Whirligig World along with his novel Mission of Gravity when it was serialized in the magazine Analog, detailing the planet Mesklin and his process for designing it - including a couple of points where he admitted to not following physics for the sake of the story.
- The Aggressive Drug Dealer: In Iceworld, the protagonist is sent to infiltrate a criminal syndicate which has discovered a drug vapor that addicts those who inhale it with one dose. The story takes place among aliens who live at very high temperatures, and the drug is tobacco, acquired via robot probe from a human who has no idea why the aliens are willing to trade gold for cigarettes.
- All Planets Are Earthlike: Averted by many of his works. Clement would go to great lengths to invent non-terrestrial planets and populate them with believable life forms. Subverted in The Nitrogen Fix, where Earth is very similar to the home planet of the alien Bones - but only because Earth's atmosphere has been drastically changed.
- Babies Ever After: In Still River, when they plan a return to the planetoid, the human scientist protagonist observes that some of the alien scientists are coming out of curiosity about her pregnancy.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: From centipede-shaped creatures comfortable under hundreds of times Earth gravity to sentient viral goo to living interstellar dust clouds.
- Bizarre Seasons: Shows up in a few of Clement's books, and most prominently for the planet Abyormen in Cycle of Fire. Abyormen has both weeks-long and much more extreme many-decades-long seasons due to being in a binary star system. Cultures alternate between groups adapted to the hot and cold phases of the longer cycle.
- Cultural Translation: In-Universe in Iceworld. The novel's extra-terrestial protagonists are from a planet that is literally as hot as an oven, and "Iceworld" how they nickname Earth in (the English translation of) their discussions. The narration points out that "Solid sulphur world" would be a closer translation, since the protagonists never saw water ice.
- Double-Meaning Title: Applies to several of Clement's books, mostly using science-based puns. For example: Still River features underground rivers that both eventually stop flowing, becoming still, and gradually change their composition from ammonia and water to concentrated hydrogen peroxide and hydrazine by differential evaporation, acting like a chemical still.
- Earth All Along: The Nitrogen Fix kicks this up a notch by making Earth actively uninhabitable to human beings (as in, survival domes and oxygen masks), and introducing an alien race that thrives in the new environment.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: Several of Clement's works focus on the natural hazards of the various fictional worlds he invented, both to lifeforms that evolved on them and to those visiting from elsewhere. Tenebra from Close To Critical is typical: surface conditions that rapidly corrode metal into ooze and make even stone knives degrade; rivers and lakes that make the air temporarily unbreathable when they evaporate; and hungry animals that attack explorers every couple of hours from on the surface, from underground, or from the air.
- The Fair-Play Whodunnit: Needle is both a science fiction novel and a mystery novel. If you pay attention to the story and spot the clues, you can figure out the Fugitive's hiding place in the exact same way the Hunter does.
- Good Thing You Can Heal: Handled consistently in Needle. An symbiotic intelligent virus can heal many minor injuries and consistently defeat disease. Cue the protagonist getting careless about handling sharp objects, and nearly dying from an infection when the symbiote leaves.
- Humans Through Alien Eyes: A trope found in many of his works:
- Needle has an alien detective getting a crash course in humanity so he can try to find the bad alien, who is hiding out on Earth, without revealing his own existence.
- Iceworld is told from the point of view of aliens who find Earth to be dangerously cold.
- The front cover blurb for Cycle of Fire invoked this with the words: "Each of them was a stranger to the other. But which was the alien?"
- Made of Explodium: In Still River, the underground rivers' endpoints are concentrated liquid hydrogen peroxide and hydrazine. That mixture is literally unstabilized rocket fuel. Then somebody tries to evaporate a sample for analysis ...
- Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness: Clement was one of the codifiers of the hard science fiction genre, and described inviting his readers to find science mistakes in his stories as one of his favorite games. Most of his stories fit under Speculative Science or One Big Lie.
- Organic Technology: Shows up in several of Clement's books and stories, particularly The Nitrogen Fix and Noise. The latter includes a Living Ship, used by humans to sail across an ocean world recovering metal sieved from the seawater by other engineered lifeforms.
- Science Is Bad: In-Universe: in The Nitrogen Fix, city dwellers are taught that science is why Earth became uninhabitable, and the very terms "science", "research", "laboratory" and the like are considered obscene. (In truth, it does seem a genetically-enhanced organism was the culprit.)
- Space Is Cold: Inverted in-universe "Sun Spot". 'Grumpy' Ries has to spend a couple hours keeping an astronomical camera, and its operator, from getting cooked on the surface of a comet making a very close pass by the Sun. When he comes back inside, the observatory's doctor offers to treat him for burns. Ries points out he's been manhandling sacks of frozen methane and other ices which were still at the temperature of interstellar space. "Break out the frostbite remedy, will you, please?"
- The Symbiote: The detective-creature in Needle and Through The Eye Of The Needle was a blob of protoplasm that entered a human host to survive and move around—bordered the commensalistic and parasitic versions, because the boy was not harmed at first but then became ill in the second book. There was also another creature, the hunted fugitive, who'd taken another body and was a Puppeteer Parasite type.
- Symbiotic Possession: Needle and Through the Eye of the Needle had a boy and a symbiotic alien protoplasm that were like this, until the kid got sick.
- Technology Marches On: In Mission of Gravity and Star Light (as in 'not heavy'), the humans in the stations orbiting the supermassive "Terrestrial" type planets Mesklin and Dhrawn use slide rules. Star Light was published in 1970. By the time he wrote Still River, published in 1987, Clement was giving his characters portable computers, automated factories, and flocks of survey drones.
- Tidally Locked Planet: Clement wrote a couple of these.
- Eyeball in Fossil is the usual version, with an ocean in the middle of the dayside and a large ice cap extending over the terminator from the night side making the planet look like an eyeball.
- Abyormen in Cycle of Fire is more complicated: The planet is tidally locked to the red dwarf star it orbits, but the orbit is eccentric and the planet's spin axis is inclined. This produces parts of the planet where the red dwarf does not set, parts where it rises and sets, and parts where it never rises. The red dwarf is in turn in an eccentric orbit around a blue giant star, further complicating Abyormen's climate and creating the titular cycles of destruction and recreation of its biosphere.
- Underwater City: Handled as realistically as possible in the short story and novel versions of Ocean on Top. A colony of humans is established on the ocean floor, using geothermal power to provide light and a specially-made oxygen-carrying dive fluid in place of air. But since the humans are less dense than water, the humans have to wear weights if they want to stay on the bottom or even have neutral buoyancy. They sleep tied to the ceilings of their buildings.
- Water Is Air:
- Averted in "Ocean on Top" when a colony of humans is established on the ocean floor, using geothermal power to provide light and a specially-made oxygen-carrying dive fluid in place of air. But since the dive fluid is denser than water, the humans have to wear weights if they want to stay on the bottom or even have neutral buoyancy (their bones were denser than the fluid and their lungs were filled with it, but the rest of their bodies were less dense and the net effect was a slight positive bouyancy). They sleep tied to the ceilings of their buildings.
- Played with in Close to Critical. The planet Tenebra has atmospheric conditions close to the critical point of water. This leads to some truly bizarre effects like large blobs of water hovering in the air, and people lighting fires to drive water away at night.
- Weird Weather: Appropriately for the various strange alien worlds that Clement invented, and for Earth's changed atmosphere in The Nitrogen Fix. Reflecting his training as a physical chemist; Clement particularly liked to design places with large raindrops (due to high atmospheric pressure or due to extremely low gravity) and to make use of the properties of liquid mixtures such as ammonia and water (which can have very different melting points and density than either compound by itself).
- Xenofiction: Prevalent across Clement's works. Several of his short stories are entirely from alien points of view; while in his novels he often alternated between human and alien characters' perspectives.
