Week Seven: The Black Cloud - Sir Fred Hoyle

Week Seven - the Black Cloud was written by famed UK astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, back in 1957 and is a stunning and precipitous novel about contact with an alien intelligence. It defies conventional wisdom and structure to climax in a way that would horrify literary and film critics alike. Sweeping and calamitous events are dealt to in short and almost off hand paragraphs, which serve to illustrate the nature of the story itself.

There are some wonderfully naive and intelligent characters contained and they say the most amazingly intelligent, coherent and perceptive things about humanity and alien beings in very succinct terms.

I picked up a recent re-print edition after seeing it reviewed in the Guardian online. It comes with an afterword by Richard Dawkins, and having read the book I can see why he would want to, or was chosen to comment.

It's about the nature of a whole bunch of things like the universe, humanity, politics, religion, physics and by extension of all those things, God and our place etc...

But it does not preach and that is the brilliant thing about this - this is an academic exercise, not an action movie or worse, a sermon.

Above all else this is a great read.