Before the Ash Cloud – there was The Black Cloud

Last April, at the height of Icelandic ash cloud hysteria, when the London Bookfair was a barren landscape of lost looking publishers and agents, Stefan McGrath, Managing Director of Penguin Press, had an inspired, if vague recollection.

After a frustrating, rather surreal morning receiving countless emails with the line ‘due to the ash cloud over Iceland, I’ve been unable to fly to London’, he remembered an old book his friend had raved about involving a giant cloud that came across the earth, wrecking havoc and hysteria. On returning to the office, a quick Google search brought up Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud, an old Penguin Classic, as it turned out. Being a fan of slightly wacky, literary science fiction – it was, then, over to me!

A call to the Penguin archive and, the next day, I had the book in my hand. There were, it transpired, not one, but three different editions, published in the 1960s:

For the next few days, I was plunged back into 1960s Britain and America, to the surprisingly thrilling world of astronomers – the maverick Professor Kingsley, the pipe-smoking Dr Marlow, the dignified Astronomer Royal and the taciturn Alexandrov – as they struggled to understand a mysterious black cloud rapidly approaching the earth.

Fred Hoyle combines his expertise as a renowned Cambridge astronomer and cosmologist with his fluent writing ability to tell a compelling, engaging tale of an eccentric group of scientists working madly to save the planet from a giant black cloud which has emerged from outer space to sit in front of the sun. Hoyle throws in enough scientific facts and mathematical equations to add to the story’s chillingly credible premise, but not enough to dissuade non-scientists, like me. I am not, by nature, a hard core science fiction lover, at least in the sense of aliens jumping about on far away planets or inter-stellar space battles. And that is decidedly not what this is about (sorry if that disappoints). It is a fantastic ‘hard’ science-fiction story told in the pacy, heart-thumping style of John Wyndham and John Christopher, set in a very recognisable England and California.

When I put it down several days later, I was convinced this was a story that must come back into print on our Penguin Modern Classics list. Hoyle’s brilliantly imagined story carries one breathlessly through from the first sighting of the cloud to the philosophically challenging, poignant end. How soon could we publish?

Just as I set out to win over our publishing team, Stefan came to me with the news that our mission had been completely misguided. In fact, the book his friend had recommended years ago was called The Purple Cloud by M P Shiel.

How many cloud books were out there? The whole endeavor was starting to seem slightly fantastical. Despite the fact it was another book entirely that prompted The Black Cloud reading, it was, nevertheless, a title worthy of pursuit. And so, too, it turned out, was The Purple Cloud.

First published in 1901, kicking off the ‘science fiction century’, Shiel’s apocalyptic tale is a vastly different sort of book. It has been called one of the greatest ‘last man’ novels ever written and follows the story of a young doctor, Adam Jeffson, who is the last man left on earth – by chance or design – after a poisonous purple vapour erupts from a volcano and annihilates every living creature on earth apart from him.

In the end, we are publishing both books. The Black Cloud in September 2010 and The Purple Cloud a year later, in September 2011.

The Black Cloud published on the 2nd September, with an illuminating and erudite Afterword by Richard Dawkins, who first came to appreciate the book and the ideas it presents when he read it as a young man. 

We also have a brilliant new jacket designed by our art director, Jim Stoddart, who has combined the concepts of the previous Penguin jackets with a fresh, modern look. I am thrilled by the opportunity to now present this prescient, entertaining and challenging book to a new audience in the Penguin Modern Classics livery.




Emily Steadman
Publishing Co-ordinator, Penguin Press

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Comments

[Mike Linte]

That's great but couldn't you have published this more quickly and while it was more timely as an ebook?

[James Pardey]

In fact Penguin published not three but seven different editions of The Black Cloud prior to its reissue as a Modern Classic:

http://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/covers.html#1466

It is a good story - perhaps Hoyle's best - although the calculus, trigonometry and other mathematical formulae were a bit of a surprise.