A Meeting With Medusa is all about setting, setting, setting

 While most of the Tor Double Novel series republished New Wave or post-New Wave works, the headliner of the very first volume Arthur C. Clarke's A Meeting with Medusa. Clarke isn't a name I see associated with the more cynical, mature and philosophical bent of New Wave. That being said, I honestly assume works like Childhood's End, 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Nine Billion Names of God had some influence on New Wave.

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A Meeting with Medusa is about the first manned exploration of Jupiter. Since Jupiter is a gas giant, this has to be done with the high tech equivalent of a hot air balloon, although the balloon has to use super heated hydrogen to function in Jupiter's atmosphere. As you'd expect from Clarke, when actual science gets involved in the plot, he goes all in.

The protagonist, pilot and sole occupant of Kon Tiki high tech balloon is Howard Falcon. His personal story serves as bookends for the novella. At the start, we read about the terrible accident that forces medical science to turn him into a cyborg. At the end, we are shown, for the first time, how heavily he has been rebuilt, to the point where he has wheels instead of feet.  There is a thin theme about how Falcon is now a liminal being, existing in between worlds and can act as a bridge between them.

But that's not why anyone remembers A Meeting with Medusa.

No, what you take away from this book is Clarke's vibrant vision of Jupiter, including what kind of life could evolve in that kind of environment. In this case, medusa does not refer to the Greek legend but the jellyfish. Clarke's vision is very much of sea life, floating and gliding through the thick atmosphere. And the showpiece of this vision is indeed a jellyfish ten times larger than a whale. That might even be intelligent.

The plot is remarkably thin. Falcon goes to Jupiter, observes the fantastic landscape and makes reasonable decisions in order to get back safely. The opening scene of the balloon crash that cripples Falcon is easily the most dramatic part of the entire book.

But again, that doesn't matter. What you take away from the book is the setting and that is worth the price of reading. I don't know if that was Clarke's real point in writing the work but it has become the point. 

In the decades since A Meeting with Medusa, Clarke’s vision of Jupiter’s ecology as a fusion of sea life and ballooning has informed many later visions of Jupiter. In fact, while reading it, I realized that the 1980 National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe used it as the basis for theoretical life on Jupiter.

As a work of fiction, A Meeting with Medusa isn’t that strong. As an exercise in world building, it’s amazing.