During WWII, Flying Officer Alan Bishop is reassigned from England’s Northern Coastal Defence to a new project involving the development of a new radar-based airplane guidance system called Ground-Controlled Descent (GCD). Its purpose is to guide military craft to safe landings during dense fog or inclement weather. Along with a team of soldiers and scientists, and a trio of Women’s Auxiliary Air Force operators, Bishop leads the testing of the GCD in both staged exercises and actual landings in a small airfield near Land’s End in Cornwall.
Arthur C. Clarke’s only non-SF novel, Glide Path was inspired by his participation in the development of Ground Controlled Approach (GCA) during his wartime service with the Royal Air Force.
Such a topic alone does not constitute interesting fodder for fiction, and at times, I was reminded of Clarke’s Prelude to Space, a fictional chronicling of man’s first mission to the moon in the late 1950’s with little in the way of plot or conflict.
Much of the conflict in Glide Path remains in the background and stems from Bishop’s concerns over the declining health of his father, his feelings of inferiority compared to the brilliant scientists and skilled pilots on the team, pressure from skeptical generals, and an adversarial relationship with one particular RAF pilot who becomes competition for the affections of a local harlot.
In the year 2023, a revolution is brewing against the alien overlords of Earth known as the Utt. Forty years prior, after their swift and peaceful subjugation of every world government, it had been the Utt’s conclusion that most of planet’s tribulations had been the fault of men. Thus, the Utt enacted laws that made women the dominant sex. All men are required to undergo a procedure that leaves them nearsighted and are forced to wear chemically treated glasses that somehow leaves them emasculated.
Two thousand years in the future, the solar system is united under the monarchy of the Isher family. To keep the government in check and ensure against tyranny, a guild known as the Weapon Shops has for generations provided technologically advanced arms to the citizens and maintained a close watch on imperial affairs. Naturally, this arrangement often sets guild and government at odds with one another.
In this sequel to the original Cosmos, Carl Sagan again reminds us of the intrinsic human desire to wander, and expands on many of the social and scientific topics discussed in the 1980 television series and accompanying book. Here, Sagan begins with primitive humans migrating across the planet for survival as much as to push the boundaries of a given frontier. From there, Sagan offers a personal anecdote, describing the hardships of his grandparents’ life in Eastern Europe and their fretful immigration to the United States.
On Moose-Lookit Island off the coast of Maine, a reporter from The Boston Globe fails in his attempt to elicit any undocumented tales of the bizarre from Vince Teague and Dave Bowie, owners and editors of The Weekly Islander newspaper. This later sparks a conversation between the two elderly men and their lovely young intern, Stephanie McCann.