I have searched the book ever since, but it's quite an old print (First print-1957) and was very difficult to find. Many of the bookstores hadn't even heard of an author named Fred Hoyle. Recently I was in Bangalore on a business trip and happened to bump into a dingy, dusty second hand book store. To my surprise, I saw a copy of this book lying in a corner (in a pretty good shape, I must add). I could have bought the book even if the shop owner demanded a bullion.. luckily he didn't. I was a proud owner of a long lost memory.

I am not sure if you have ever read the same book after a huge gap (17 years) and tried to compare how you had felt when you read it first and now? When I had read it as a child, every thing was science fiction and I was filled with awe reading about the technologies described in the book. When I read it this time, it felt more like a vintage classic.

...also the B.B.C has been using a somewhat different form of coding known as frequency modulation". The prime minister said "Ah, that's what frequency modulation is, is it? I have often heard people talk about it"

There was a brief mention about computers that caught my fancy. It goes like this...

...he went to the building where the machine was housed, the machine that could do five years of calculations in one night... His first move was not to the machine itself, which in any case was being operated by other at this moment. He still had to convert the letters and figures that he had written in a form that the machine could interprete. This he did was a special kind of typewriter, a typewrite that delivered a strip of paper in which holes were punched, the patter of holes corresponding to the symbols that were being typed.

Anyway, the story is about life forms from space. Not the little green ones, or the shiny silvery ones on saucers. Fred Hoyle took the brilliant diversion into exploring life forms quite unlike the life forms on Earth. The creature being described here is a gaseous entity with a radius equalling that of the orbit of Venus. The lifeform gets drawn towards the sun for the purpose of feeding. It uses solar energy to regenerate its nutrition by a mechanism similar to photo synthesis. This he does by remaining in close vicinity of a star for many earth years before traveling back into the void of the universe. On reaching earth, an intelligent contact is made with the cloud via short wavelength radio waves. During the initial periods, the could gets between the Earth and Sun effectively cutting off sunlight and heat plunging the earth into nearly another ice age. There is also a period of global warming where the temperature of earth raises by several degrees. It's quite interesting to note that Fred Hoyle didn't mention the melting of the polar ice caps and drowning of the costal areas as s result!

The story ends by the cloud trying to transfer it's knowledge to humans via a complicated mechanism of cathode ray tubes. Visual information injection. This attempt fails after two of the scientists are killed because of information overload.

Unless you are fond of vintage science fictions, I would not recommend reading this book.