History Creator / HalClement

* BizarreSeasons: Shows up in a few of Clement's books, and most prominently for the planet Abyormen in ''Cycle of Fire''. Abyormen has both weeks-long and much more extreme many-decades-long seasons due to being a binary system. Cultures alternate between groups adapted to the hot and cold phases of the longer cycle.

* BizarreSeasons: Shows up in a few of Clement's books, and most prominently for the planet Abyormen in ''Cycle of Fire''.

Hal Clement (real name: Harry Clement Stubbs) was an American ScienceFiction writer and high school astronomy & chemistry teacher. Generally considered one of the harder science fiction writers, he enjoyed creating unusual and extreme, but still realistic, settings and creatures for his stories. His best known works are ''Literature/MissionOfGravity'', about the inhabitants of an ''extremely'' massive planet, and ''Literature/{{Needle}}'', about a [[TheSymbiote symbiote]] detective who visits Earth in search of a symbiote criminal. All told, he wrote over a dozen novels and numerous short stories during his career. He was declared one of SF's [[UsefulNotes/DamonKnightMemorialGrandMasterAward Grand Masters]] in 1998.

** ''Iceworld'' is told from the point of view of aliens who find Earth be be dangerously cold.

* TidallyLockedPlanet: Clement wrote a couple of these. Eyeball in ''Fossil'' is the usual version, with an ocean in the middle of the dayside and a large ice cap extending over the terminator from the night side making the planet [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin look like an eyeball]]. Abyormen in ''Cycle of Fire'' is more complicated: The planet is tidally locked to the red dwarf star it orbits, but the orbit is eccentric and the planet's spin axis is inclined. This produces parts of the planet where the red dwarf does not set, parts where it rises and sets, and parts where it never rises. The red dwarf is in turn in an eccentric orbit around a blue giant star, further complicating Abyormen's climate and [[spoiler: creating the titular cycles of destruction and recreation of its biosphere]].

* [[MediaNotes/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness]]: Clement was one of the codifiers of the hard science fiction genre, and described inviting his readers to find science mistakes in his stories as one of his favorite games. Most of his stories fit under [[Mohs/SpeculativeScience Speculative Science]] or [[Mohs/OneBigLie One Big Lie]].

* MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness: Clement was one of the codifiers of the hard science fiction genre, and described inviting his readers to find science mistakes in his stories as one of his favorite games. Most of his stories fit under [[Mohs/SpeculativeScience Speculative Science]] or [[Mohs/OneBigLie One Big Lie]].

* MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness: Clement was one of the codifiers of the hard science fiction genre, and described inviting his readers to find science mistakes in his stories as one of his favorite games.

Hal Clement (real name: Harry Clement Stubbs) was an American ScienceFiction writer. Generally considered one of the harder science fiction writers, he enjoyed creating unusual and extreme, but still realistic, settings and creatures for his stories. His best known works are ''Literature/MissionOfGravity'', about the inhabitants of an ''extremely'' massive planet, and ''Literature/{{Needle}}'', about a [[TheSymbiote symbiote]] detective who visits Earth in search of a symbiote criminal. All told, he wrote over a dozen novels and numerous short stories during his career. He was declared one of SF's [[UsefulNotes/DamonKnightMemorialGrandMasterAward Grand Masters]] in 1998.

* WeirdWeather: Appropriately for the various strange alien worlds that Clement invented, and for the Earth's changed atmosphere in ''The Nitrogen Fix''. Reflecting his training as a physical chemist; Clement particularly liked to design places with large raindrops (due to high atmospheric pressure or due to extremely low gravity) and to make use of the properties of liquid mixtures such as ammonia and water (which can have very different melting points and density than either compound by itself).

* DoubleMeaningTitle: Applies to several of Clement's books, mostly using science-based puns. For example: ''Still River'' features an underground river that both eventually stops flowing, becoming still, and gradually changes its composition from water to [[MadeOfExplodium concentrated hydrogen peroxide and hydrazine]] by differential evaporation, acting like a chemical still.

* DoubleMeaningTitle: Applies to several of Clement's books, mostly using science-based puns. For example: ''Still River'' features an underground river that both eventually stops flowing, becoming still, and gradually changes its composition from water to concentrated hydrogen peroxide by differential evaporation, acting like a chemical still.

* BabiesEverAfter: In ''Still River'', when they plan a return to the planetoid, a woman scientist observes that some of the aliens are coming out of curiosity in her pregnancy.

* EverythingTryingToKillYou: Several of Clement's works focus on the natural hazards of the various fictional worlds he invented, both to lifeforms that evolved on them and to those visiting from elsewhere. Tenebra from ''Close To Critical'' is typical: surface conditions that rapidly corrode metal into ooze and make even stone knives degrade; rivers and lakes that make the air temporarily unbreathable when they evaporate; and hungry animals that attack explorers every couple of hours from on the surface, from underground, or from in the air.

* Xenofiction: Prevalent across Clement's works.