{"id":8677,"date":"2016-08-08T20:33:55","date_gmt":"2016-08-09T00:33:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/?p=8677"},"modified":"2023-08-12T20:39:20","modified_gmt":"2023-08-13T00:39:20","slug":"mission-of-gravity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/mission-of-gravity\/","title":{"rendered":"Mission of Gravity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>{4.5\/5} &#8220;Intellectually he knew that the thing would not fall &#8212; he kept telling himself that it could not; but having grown to maturity in an environment where a fall of six inches was usually fatally destructive even to the incredibly tough Mesklinite organism, his emotions were not easy to control&#8230; After all, it was still <strong>hundreds of feet<\/strong> up&#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Mission of Gravity<\/strong> by Hal Clement, published in 1954<\/p>\n<p>Humans sent a rocket to examine the amazing world of Mesklin but it crashed. They went to the planet after the rocket to get the valuable information inside, but they can&#8217;t get it themselves. The gravity on Mesklin varies but it goes up to 700 times that of Earth &#8212; humans can&#8217;t endure that. So they must make a deal with some aliens native to Mesklin. Who happen to be 15 inches tall and look like caterpillars &#8212; but they&#8217;re seafaring traders and they&#8217;re up for an adventure.<\/p>\n<p>The two main characters are Barlennan, the Mesklinite leader, and Lackland, the human he communicates with the most and who helps him find his way to the rocket.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a unique story that deserves your attention. The problems are solved with logic, science, and a bit of trickery.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a bit science-y but you don&#8217;t have to understand why the world works the way it does to enjoy it.<\/p>\n<p>This is the first book by Clement that I&#8217;ve read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>{4.5\/5} &#8220;Intellectually he knew that the thing would not fall &#8212; he kept telling himself that it could not; but having grown to maturity in an environment where a fall of six inches was usually fatally destructive even to the incredibly tough Mesklinite organism, his emotions were not easy to control&#8230; After all, it was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,28,5,8],"class_list":["post-8677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-book","tag-novels","tag-review","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8677"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22111,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8677\/revisions\/22111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}