Those Were the Days of the Comet - A Guest Post by John Howard

Recently a reference in the social media to Comet Kohoutek (1973-74) made me recall some schoolboy memories and ransack a cupboard. In those years I was seriously interested in astronomy. My parents had given me a pair of binoculars and a book of star charts and would put up with me standing out in the back garden looking for objects listed in The Observer’s Book of Astronomy by Patrick Moore. (I’m not sure whether the term ‘light pollution’ had been invented by then, but I certainly became familiar with the phenomenon.) Although I was not allowed to stay up and watch him on The Sky at Night, Moore was a familiar figure from early evening children’s television and the news. We were living in the Space Age, after all.

I borrowed books on astronomy and the Solar System from the public library and started to assemble a small collection of my own – mainly Christmas and birthday presents from my somewhat bemused though never discouraging parents. My little library soon included two or three books by Patrick Moore which explained in clear terms something of the history of astronomy, the development of our understanding the universe, and, using the latest knowledge, speculated on the conditions that might be expected to be found on the planets and satellites of the Solar System. He also wrote about common but still dramatic celestial events that even a twelve year-old boy could see: eclipses of the Sun and Moon, meteors and meteorites, and comets.

It must have been in the late autumn of 1973 that the wider world first heard of a new comet that was predicted would soon be visible from Earth. Discovered by Czech astronomer Luboš Kohoutek and so eventually named after him, Comet Kohoutek would sweep in from the outer dark, and, after crossing the orbits of the inner planets and reaching its closest approach to the Sun (‘perihelion’ – thank you, Mr Moore), head back out to its ancient frozen obscurity. I already knew about comets from the books I was reading. For example I had learned about Edmund Halley working out that the comet that had appeared every 75 years or so for millennia was in fact the same one. Last visible from Earth in 1910, it was expected to return in 1986 – ages away in the unknowable future.

The discovery of Comet Kohoutek must have led to an increased interest in these icy visitors from the deepest reaches of the Solar System. Patrick Moore wrote a short paperback book, The Comets (1973) ‘to coincide with the expected spectacular appearance’ of the comet. I was given a copy for Christmas.

The book did not only cover facts I already learned. It was also a historical survey and included a chapter on some of the notable comets observed in the past. I was fascinated by descriptions and illustrations of the succession of huge, bright comets (some even visible in daylight) that had appeared from the late eighteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth. It seemed to me that all those lucky Victorians and Edwardians had to do was look up into the sky and there would be a tremendous comet, glowing against the constellations, slowly moving against the background of stars and leaving as silently as it had come. Drawings and paintings depicted objects of breathtaking, delicate beauty, such as Donati’s Comet of 1858 (pictured above), which Moore considered to have been perhaps the most beautiful comet ever observed. I felt a mixture of awe and wonder – and an unformed feeling of something close to anxiety and dread. Comets were so large, and Earth and humanity so small, puny by comparison – and unprotected. I had adopted a Lovecraftian worldview several years before I heard of him!

Would I now get to see a great comet for myself? 

I became a comet seeker. In the freezing January dusk I trudged the few hundred yards to an open and exposed place which gave a good view of the horizon, and waited while my eyes adjusted to the growing darkness. I would impatiently scan with my binoculars the area of sky where the comet should be visible. For several evenings, hope renewed, I looked and looked. I recalled the illustrations of the bright and beautiful comets, but the longed-for awe and wonder faded into frustration and disillusion. It was not the hollow chill of aeons reaching across millions of miles of dark space that touched me, but the very earthly penetrating damp of winter nights with Christmas gone and school homework still to be done. 

Even so, I was left with one tangible souvenir of Comet Kohoutek’s disappointing visit. As well as being an enthusiastic back-garden astronomer, I was also a devoted stamp collector. My father would often bring home the latest issue Stamp Monthly or one of the other magazines, and in one of these I saw an advertisement for a special commemorative cover – and my parents ordered one for me. I still have it, as I still have the copy of The Comets.

Over the next few years my interest in both astronomy and postage stamps waned, although never vanished entirely. To occupy their place came science fiction. I stopped buying stamps on approval and instead saved my pocket money to buy paperbacks by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. I haunted the public library for sf.

Of course, the answer to my yearning was to be no. As it turned out, Kohoutek’s Comet was a great disappointment. It was rarely, if at all, bright enough ever to be seen with the unaided eye. I would have to wait for that next return of Halley’s Comet, over a decade in the future. 

Leaving school, I was able to spend much of my earnings on sf paperbacks. After I had given my father a percentage of my wages for ‘board and lodging’ there was little else I wanted to buy apart from sf books and magazines. When I spotted a new paperback edition of H.G. Wells’ novel In the Days of the Comet (1978, first published 1906) in the local Smith’s I quickly bought it. The cover by Jason Todd was apocalyptic: the baleful visitor from space blazing in the heavens and illuminating a lurid landscape of fleeing people and burning towns. I opened the novel in the expectation of reading a disaster story as good as The War of the Worlds or “The Star” – but I was, yet again, to be disappointed by a comet.

Earth is not destroyed in Wells’ novel: it is transformed by the Great Change. The planet passes through the comet’s tail – something entirely possible – and its gases affect every inhabitant, causing the human race to wake up, see Wellsian sense, and remake the world as a clean, uncluttered state of peace and free love. Without intending to I had discovered that by 1906 Wells had written most of his classic scientific romances and was beginning to use his novels as vehicles for his ideas and speculations concerning social and political issues and developments. That was not the H.G. Wells I wished to read then (although I certainly like to do so now).

By the early 1980s I was hunting out issues of the sf magazines Amazing Stories and Fantastic Stories published between 1969 and 1979. Their editor during that period, Ted White, produced a pair of lively and entertaining magazines on a miniscule budget, and I enjoyed reading them. And at that time Halley’s Comet was approaching the Sun again and science fiction writers were turning their minds towards the possibilities. That return also turned out to be disappointing, and I did not see it. But to make up for that I had discovered a notable story, “The Death of Princes” by Fritz Leiber, which had appeared in the special issue of Amazing published in 1976 to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary.

Leiber had been born in 1910, the year of Halley’s previous visit – and that might have influenced his theme. “The Death of Princes” is as much a meditation on time and friendship as a piece of fiction. The narrator, Fred, is one of a group of aging friends that included Francois Broussard, ‘our leader, but also our problem child…’ Fred recounts how, over the decades of their friendship, he and the others had always found Broussard to be different, unconventional. Interested and gifted in both arts and sciences, Broussard would describe his visionary ‘dreams’ of regular shapes floating in vast dark spaces. Slowly assembling the evidence, Fred concludes that Broussard is linked, somehow, to Halley’s Comet – which had last passed Earth in the year of his birth. With the possibility of a space probe being sent to fly past the comet, now only ten years away from perihelion, Fred wonders what will be revealed. “The Death of Princes” evokes a sense of cosmic terror and awe: that immense forces are inexorably in operation which are capable of bringing horror and magnificent wonder in equal measure.

And now – where have all the bright comets gone?

One explanation offered for the sequence of spectacular comets during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is that a perturbation of the Oort Cloud, out on the boundary of interstellar space, caused them to be jolted from their remote orbits and sent curving inwards towards the Sun on millennia-long parabolic paths.

Towards the Sun – and Earth. What force could have disturbed and expelled those comets? There have been no great comets in our skies for over a century now. Instead of being disappointed, I now wonder whether that absence is to be interpreted as a good sign or merely a pause. And if the latter – what is to follow?

(John Howard)