Mission of Gravity

This is Clement's third novel, and clearly the best of them. It was nominated for the Retro-Hugo award for 1954, but was up against strong competition from [b:Fahrenheit 451 13079982 Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1383718290l/13079982.SY75.jpg 1272463], [b:Childhood's End 414999 Childhood's End Arthur C. Clarke https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320552628l/414999.SY75.jpg 209414], [b:The Caves of Steel 41811 The Caves of Steel (Robot, #1) Isaac Asimov https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1335782224l/41811.SY75.jpg 140376], and [b:More Than Human 541024 More Than Human Theodore Sturgeon https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403192694l/541024.SY75.jpg 988613]; it lost to [b:Fahrenheit 451 13079982 Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1383718290l/13079982.SY75.jpg 1272463].It's an old favourite of mine, and in my younger days I might have given it 5 stars; now I don't think it's quite that good, but I'll still give it four.It's the story of a long voyage across the surface of a most unusual heavy planet (called Mesklin) with a gravity that varies from extremely high to merely high. A whole series of interesting puzzles pop up and are duly solved during the voyage, in the course of a running conversation between visiting humans and an organized group of intelligent but scientifically backward natives. The humans can visit (with difficulty) only the lowest-gravity places on the planet, but they urgently need to retrieve something from a high-gravity area, for which they need much native assistance. Much of the conversation takes place by radio.The scenario and the various puzzles are interesting, and the story-telling and descriptive prose are good enough by the standards of 1950s sf. Characterization is rudimentary, although I seem to be easily satisfied with rudimentary characterization in the case of non-human creatures. The travellers progress perhaps a bit too obviously from one puzzle to another; and the degree of communication achieved between humans and non-humans seems rather too good to be true.Clement explains that the natives (Mesklinites) have slightly worse-than-human eyesight because their eyes are smaller. I think their brains must be smaller too, but they seem to have at least human intelligence; he doesn't explain this.But overall it's a good yarn, as long as you bear in mind that this is sf from 1953, and the author was more of a scientist than a writer of literature. Wikipedia tells me that he had a degree in astronomy and higher degrees in chemistry, and later taught both subjects at school. As an author, he had no interest in sex or romance, and all characters in this book are sexless as far as we can tell, although they use male pronouns and the (few) humans have male names.