The Black Cloud

The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle was a good sci-fi book that explores both human politics and another way a consciousness can be. One thing I was most suprised by were the strong characters and how the interaction between the human ‘factions’ played out.

Let me go back to how I reviewed some earlier works of fiction and analyse the story steps, spoilers ahead:

1. You: the whole human race, or more specifically the researchers who we get to meet
2. Need: need to be understood, they made a discovery
3. Go: travel around the world to connect the dots
4. Search: what is the cloud? can we understand it?
5. Find: the cloud arrives
6. Take: and billions of people die
7. Return: they can talk to the cloud and eventually it leaves
8. Change: there isn’t more than a page at the end of the book (after the events) so I think there wasn’t much here and that could have been further explored