American scientists led by Dr. Peter Yudkin (who feigns a foreign accent to go with his European-sounding surname to seem smarter) at an observatory take photographic plates of a mysterious celestial object near Mars using a highly sophisticated telescope and determine it is a cloud of some sort. Predicting that it will reach Earth in a matter of days and that the planet will in fact pass through it, NASA sends a rocket to collect samples of it. Analyzing the samples, they determine the cloud is organic in nature, composed primarily of polymers and a few other elements they can't identify. However, test animals subjected to the particles the rocket collected don't seem affected by it, and so at first it seems as if nothing harmful will come of its contact with Earth.
The cloud soon permeates the planet's atmosphere. Although Earth is only enveloped in its mass for a day before it moves on, the organic polymers start having an unusual effect on the environment. Oceanographer Dr. Sam Brooks and his colleague Dr. Charlie Frazier along with a science reporter named Carl Loudermilch are out on the ocean collecting samples of seawater for analysis when they discover that the cloud is increasing water viscosity somehow. All water on Earth is slowly taking on a consistency roughly akin to rubber cement or gel. With nothing to drink, no rain, no water to irrigate crops and the oceans slowly solidifying into a viscous glop, Brooks, Frazier and Loudermilch, along with wealthy yacht owners Hugh Winthrop and Gail Cooper, stranded in the ocean, have to figure out a means of reversing the cloud's effects as order begins to break down around the world with Earth facing a potentially apocalyptic global drought.
I really liked Thomas and Wilhelm's earlier collaboration,
The Clone, and
The Year of the Cloud doesn't disappoint. To an extent, it feels like an evolution of the basic idea in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
The Poison Belt. Like
The Clone, it focuses on a catastrophe (an interstellar cloud as opposed to a blob monster) affecting a large and varied cast of characters, showing the reader how the authorities, the scientific community and ordinary people deal with the crisis, but with a few key differences.
First and foremost is the nature of the threat. The "clone" in the previous novel was an amorphous flesh glob possessing a rudimentary intelligence (of a sort); it had agency and motivation and was decidedly terrestrial in origin, created accidentally by human carelessness. The Yudkin Cloud, as it's named after the kinda Yudkin who takes credit for its discovery (although it's actually an assistant named Charlie Porter who first notices it on the photographic plates) despite its informed organic nature is just, well, a cloud, traveling aimlessly through outer space with no end goal in mind; that it happened to cross paths with Earth is pure chance.
Secondly, there's the scale of the disaster. In
The Clone, the eponymous monster only threatens Chicago; there is the threat of it spreading beyond the city limits and into the rest of Illinois and eventually the country/the world, but the authorities, led by the heroic Dr. Mark Kenniston, are able to successfully beat it. In
this novel, however, the entire world is already under threat from the cloud's effects; the damage is done and it's up to Brooks and co. to reverse rather than prevent the apocalypse.
And thirdly, although there are other characters, unlike
The Clone,
The Year of the Cloud is primarily concerned with the people on the yacht, and said core group are more or less stuck; Mark, his girlfriend Nurse Edie Hempstead and his friend Harry Schwartz run around from place to place in Chicago aiding the authorities, but Brooks, Loudermilch and co. are pretty much stranded on the boat for the duration.
One improvement over
The Clone is that the protagonists actually thus have a reason to continue being involved. As much as I love
The Clone, it's weird seeing a junior pathologist, a nurse and a dishwasher commanding legions of fire fighters, cops and being allowed into high level government meetings; like Ben Peterson in
Them!, Thomas and Wilhelm continue having them around as the main characters apparently for no other reason than they were the first characters (besides the unfortunate Wendalls) who encountered the clone and it feels just as artificial there as it did in
Them! (much as I love
that movie). Here, at least, Brooks is a scientist specializing in the study of seawater, so his profession puts him front and center of the crisis, Loudermilch is a reporter, so his continued involvement makes sense, and as for Hugh and Gail, well, they own the boat the other characters are on, so they make sense by default. In short, everyone actually has a reason to continue being involved in the narrative (not that this attention to detail matters, exactly, considering the other reason everyone continues being involved is because their vessel is stranded in a sea of Jell-O).
So the two books are similar but different and it's nice to see that Thomas and Wilhelm don't repeat all of their previous novel's themes and even fixing some of the mistakes.
Also, yes, I have the Playboy edition, and, yes, it's odd that Thomas is going by "Ted Thomas" and not his full name as he did with
The Clone. He goes by Ted Thomas on the Doubleday hardcover edition as well. Did he start shortening his name later his career (
The Clone's original short story version being from 1959 and the expanded novel with Wilhelm being from 1965,and
The Year of the Cloud being from 1970).
On a more personal note, the idea of scuba diving in ordinary water only to suddenly have it transmogrify into a more solidified state that I can't swim through and having to thrash, kick and fight my way to the surface or risk being trapped is a pretty grotesque and terrifying concept. Note I'd ever go scuba diving anyway as deep water terrifies the absolute hell outta me. But still, kudos to Mr. Thomas and Ms. (Mrs.?) Wilhelm.
