The Black Cloud

The Black Cloud

Afterword by Richard Dawkins

Sir Fred Hoyle FRS (1915–2001) was a distinguished scientist, whose blunt, even abrasive, Yorkshire manner rubbed off on many of his science fiction heroes, including Christopher Kingsley, the lead character of this, his first and best-known novel. As an astronomer, Hoyle was famous for being wrong about the Big Bang theory of the origin of the cosmos. He was against it — the very name is his own sarcastic coining — preferring his own elegant and pugnaciously defended ‘Steady State’ theory. He was spectacularly right in his theory of how the chemical elements are forged, ultimately from hydrogen, in the interiors of stars. Indeed, many scientists feel that a serious injustice was done to Hoyle when he was denied a share in the Nobel Prize that was eventually given to others for this foundational theory. About his incursions into theoretical biology and evolutionary theory, the less said the better.

As a novelist, I would say his output was mixed. A for Andromeda, co-authored with John Elliott, shares with The Black Cloud the enormous virtue of educating the reader in scientific principles at the same time as it entertains. In particular, the book expounds the important idea — later reprised by Carl Sagan in Contact — that, if an alien civilization wished to take over the Earth, they would most likely not visit us in person (galactic distances are too great) but would send coded information by radio, which would be deciphered as the instructions for building and programming a computer. The computer would then act as the aliens’ proxy. To understand why this is so plausible is to understand some profound principles of science, and Hoyle brilliantly gets the point across.

Some of his other novels go the other extreme, and are little more than pot-boilers. But The Black Cloud is, in my opinion, one of the greatest works of science fiction ever written, up there with the best of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. Right from the first page, it is what used to be called a ‘rattling good yarn’, one of those stories that grabs you on page one and doesn’t let go until you finish it in the wee small hours. It helps that the book is set approximately in the present, and does not, like so much science fiction, bewilder us with strange, alien names and other-worldly customs which we don’t begin to understand until we are well into the book, by which time our busy life might have shown us something better to do than go on reading it. Hoyle’s characters love to think deep thoughts in their Cambridge rooms before a roaring log fire, and the recurring image is a delightfully comfortable one.

But the real virtue of The Black Cloud is this — without ever preaching at us, Hoyle manages, as the story races along, to teach us some fascinating science along the way: not just scientific facts, but important scientific principles. We get to see how scientists work and how they think. We are even uplifted and inspired. Let me list just a few examples of the real science — and, indeed, philosophy — that the book spins off.

Scientific discoveries are often made, sometimes simultaneously, by a convergence of more than one method. Hoyle’s black cloud is detected by direct observation through a Californian telescope, and simultaneously by indirect mathematical reasoning in Cambridge. The narrative in this early part of the book is ravishingly well-handled, climaxing with a telegram, sent from the Cambridge team to the California team. Neither side knows that the other has independently converged on the same alarming truth, and there is a goosepimpling moment when the words of the telegram ‘seemed to swell to a gigantic size’.

The gradual elucidation of the true nature of the black cloud also gives fascinating insights into the way scientists think and argue among themselves. The hero, the Cambridge theoretical astronomer Christopher Kingsley, whom it is hard not to identify with Hoyle himself, and the Russian astronomer Alexandrov, who is the book’s comic relief character, independently tumble to the startling truth — so startling that other characters stubbornly refuse to accept it. Kingsley and Alexandrov relentlessly insist that theories should be tested by prediction, and they gradually win over the sceptics. Once again, there is absorbing drama in the unfolding dialogue between cooperating and dissenting scientists.

Once the strange nature of the cloud is established, things move rapidly. In this part of the story one of the scientific lessons we learn is about information theory. Information is a commodity, readily interchangeable from one medium to another. Beethoven moves us via our ears, but in principle there is no reason why an alien being — or an advanced computer, say, with no sense of hearing at all — shouldn’t enjoy the music if supplied with the same temporal patternings (which might be hugely speeded up or slowed down), and the same mathematical relationships between frequencies — the ones that we interpret as melody and harmony. In information theory, the medium of transmission is arbitrary. This idea has been very influential on me in my scientific career, and I acknowledge that I first came to appreciate it through reading The Black Cloud as a young man.

A related point, of deep scientific and philosophical significance, is that the subjective individuality that each of us feels inside our skull depends upon the slowness and other imperfections of the channels of communication between us, for example language. If we could share our thoughts instantly by telepathy, fully and at the same rate as we can think them, we would cease to be separate individuals. Or, to put it another way, the very idea of separate individuality would lose its meaning. This, indeed, is arguably what did happen in the evolution of the nervous system. It is a thought that has intrigued me for much of my career as a biologist, and I was again led to it by reading The Black Cloud.

Arthur C. Clarke, a more consistent writer of good science fiction than Hoyle, although he only equalled Hoyle at his best, stated as his ‘Third Law’ that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The Black Cloud reinforces the message in spades. Pizarro fired his cannon, and was taken for a god by the Incas. Imagine if he had arrived in a helicopter gunship instead of on a horse. Imagine the response of a medieval peasant, or even aristocrat, to a telephone, a television, a laptop computer, a jumbo jet. The Black Cloud vividly conveys to us what it would be like to be visited by an extraterrestrial being whose intelligence would seem god-like from our lowly point of view. Indeed, Hoyle’s imagination far outperforms all religions known to me. Would such a super-intelligence then actually be a god?

An interesting question, perhaps the founding question of a new discipline of ‘Scientific Theology’. The answer, it seems to me, turns not on what the super-intelligence is capable of doing, but on its provenance. Alien beings, no matter how advanced their intelligence and accomplishments, would presumably have evolved by something like the same gradual evolutionary process as gave rise to our kind of life. And this is where Hoyle makes this book’s only scientific blunder, in my opinion. The eponymous super-intelligence of The Black Cloud is asked about the origin of the first member of its species, and it replies, “I would not agree that there ever was a “first” member.” The response of the astronomers in the story is an in-joke by Hoyle: ‘Kingsley and Marlowe exchanged a glance as if to say: “Oh-ho, there we go. That’s one in the eye for the exploding-universe boys”.” Never mind the astronomers, I must protest as a biologist. Even if Hoyle and his colleagues had been right that the universe has been in a steady state forever, the same could not sensibly be claimed for the organized and apparently purposeful complexity that life epitomizes. Galaxies may spring spontaneously into existence, but complex life cannot. That is pretty much what complexity means!

There are other flaws in the novel. Despite the wonderfully true-to-life picture it paints of how scientists think, the dialogue occasionally becomes a little clunky, the jokes a little heavy. The character of the hero, Christopher Kingsley, always on the abrasive side, rises to heights — or descends to depths — of inhumane fanaticism in a horrifying scene near the end of the book, which one reviewer described as ‘a fascinating glimpse into the scientific power dream’ but which struck me as way over the top.

Ever since I first read this book, a phrase from it has haunted me: ‘the Deep Problems’. These are the problems in science that we do not understand, perhaps can never understand, either because of the limitations of our evolved minds or because they are in principle insoluble. How did the universe begin, and how will it end? Can something come from nothing? Whence the laws of physics? Why do the fundamental constants have the particular values that they do? What about other questions that are so far beyond us that we cannot even ask, let alone answer them? The idea of the Deep Problems, and the possibility that they might be understood by a superior intelligence but not by us, is humbling, but humbling in a way that is at the same time uplifting. It is also challenging.

The tragic ending of the novel is moving and deeply thought-provoking at the same time. It is followed by a gentle epilogue — again the contemplation by the log fire — which pulls the threads together and leaves us on a high. The last words leave us exhilarated, even stunned, as we look back on this astonishing novel: ‘Do we want to remain big people in a tiny world or to become a little people in a vaster world? This is the ultimate climax towards which I have directed my narrative.”