Book Review: The Black Hole

Alan Dean Foster’s novelisation of the classic Disney sci-fi adventure movie.

This was the second of three vintage books I picked up on a trip to National Trust Ightham Mote last year. Their delightful little used bookshop had a locked glass cabinet of ‘rare’ and ‘vintage’ books which were reasonably priced. The first was the novelisation of RoboCop by Ed Naha which I read straightaway. The others were The Black Hole—the subject of this review—and Superman: Last Son of Krypton. It was a brilliant find. So as it says on the cover this is Alan Dean Foster’s novelisation of the screenplay by Jeb Rosenbrook and Gerry Day, which became the 1979 Disney movie of the same name—at the time the most expensive movie Disney had ever produced. I only fairly recently (in the last couple of years) watched the movie on Disney+. It’s pretty campy and very silly, but I rather enjoyed it, so I was well up for trying out the book. I’ll definitely have to do a rewatch to catch all the differences!

Blurb

For five years the crew of the Palomino had ranged through deep space searching for evidence of alien life—with no result. Then, their mission almost at an end, they discovered a giant collapsar—the largest black hole ever encountered—and, drifting perilously near it, was the long-lost legendary starship Cygnus.

Incredibly, the ship was not a lifeless hulk. Its commander, the genius who had designed the Cygnus and planned its epic voyage, still survived, served by a horde of mechanical slaves. But Commander Reinhardt had no desire to be rescued. He had a rendezvous with the incredibly hellish forces of the collapsar—and he planned to take the Palomino’s crew along on his doomed adventure.

Review

This novelisation of The Black Hole was surprising for a lot of reasons, and I enjoyed it much more than I did the movie. Similarly to other sci-fi books of the 1970s such as Rendezvous with Rama and Ringworld, it follows a group of scientists/space explorers who come across something unusual that encapsulates the particular scientific concept the book wishes to explore. With Rama it was the O’Neill Cylinder, with Ringworld, it was the titular megastructure. The Black Hole is less focussed on the hard science and it’s less about the stellar remnant than it is the strange case of the starship Cygnus found strangely motionless near the black hole’s accretion disk. The book is actually more a blend of this trope and a space-based retelling of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

That’s not to say there isn’t surprisingly hard science in the book, though. A Disney property from 1979 wasn’t where I was expecting to find references to gravitational waves (predicted by General Relativity decades before, but only experimentally confirmed in 2015), and intermediate mass black holes (which are theorised because of the gap between stellar-mass black holes at 5–70 solar masses, and supermassive black holes starting at ~100,000 solar masses, but are yet to be confirmed—though there is strong evidence for their existence). The black hole in the novel is around 100 solar masses, putting it on the low end of the theorised intermediate range, making it a significant discovery worthy of the Palomino crew’s attention. The movie really doesn’t make very much of this and kind of gives the impression that the “science” of the story is more arrogant flights of fancy akin to some of Jules Verne’s megalomaniacal antagonists. Also on the hard science table was ESP, or extra-sensory perception. Now, hear me out: A lot of older sci-fi posits that ESP could be possible for humans to develop, and mostly it’s some kind of higher, evolved ability. Not so in The Black Hole. It’s purely a tech-based wireless communication implant with a direct brain interface that can help people communicate at a distance with robots. It suffices to say, I was impressed by the book’s attention to detail on these fronts.

In terms of characters, as is typical for the time, the male protagonists are almost cardboard cut-outs and copy-pastes of one another. The best variation in character we get is with the robot, Vincent, the brilliant scientist, Dr Kate McCrae, and with the Nemo-inspired antagonist, Commander Reinhardt. There’s much less sexism in this book than there was in the aforementioned novels by Niven and Clarke, though towards the end McCrae did unravel a bit—less so than the cowardly journalist, Harry Booth, however. With Captain Nemo as his template, Reinhardt was a superb antagonist, though much more villainous.

— — Spoiler Warning — —

In this section I’m going to talk briefly about the endings of the book and movie, which may constitute spoilers, even though the properties are over forty years old.

The ending of the book is very different to that of the movie. In both, the protagonists discover the secret behind the disappearance of the human crew of the Cygnus and set out to escape Reinhardt before he can put his plan into motion to plunge the starship into the black hole. But they’re too late and as the ship dives through the accretion disk, it takes catastrophic damage. It’s a long, harrowing sequence where the Palomino crew are cut off at every turn either by security sentinels trying to kill them, or by meteorite damage. The Palomino itself is destroyed by Reinhardt after an act of cowardice from Harry Booth, which also claims his life. So the rest of the crew need to get to the one singular lifeboat. In both, they make it, launch but are too late to get away from the pull of the black hole and so they fall in. This is where the movie and book diverge significantly, because in the movie they survive their strange trip through the black hole, emerging from a white hole and fly towards a planet. There’s a whole weird sequence in between in which Reinhardt fuses with his killer robot, Maximillian; there’s hellish landscapes and bright cathedrals and all sorts of imagery. In the book, however, they pass through the event horizon and are spaghettified as physics demands—they are atomised and their consciousnesses are spread across the universe as some kind of strange living/unliving debris. It’s far more esoteric and more akin to the weirdness of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s pretty bleak, too, as it’s essentially a poetic way of describing their deaths. I rather like that ending better than the movie’s.

— — End of Spoilers — —

The robots are brilliant. Vincent is a standout character, and Maximillian is a chilling villain. Bob is another robot like Vincent, but an older model, who manages to help the crew of the Palomino on account of Vincent. His character arc is really well done and heartbreaking.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this novelisation. It’s very well-written, as expected of Alan Dean Foster, surprising in its scientiand does much better with the source material than the movie. By all rights, the movie, while campy and fun, was a huge disaster and the novelisation is absolutely the superior adaptation of the screenplay. If you’re going to consume one, I’d recommend this book (though it’s harder to get hold of than simply watching the movie on Disney+).