Rating: 
Summary: fine for genre fiction
Review: I was surprised when I first landed here to see that "The Black Cloud" is apparently so much more popular than Fred Hoyle's more compelling science fiction works, "Andromeda Breakthrough", "A is for Andromeda", "October the First is Too Late", etc. A bit of mouse-clicking showed me the answer: the rest of Fred Hoyle's science fiction is out of print. This is sad. Maybe buying "The Black Cloud" will encourage someone to bring back the others.Recommended: "October the First is Too Late", Paul Creston's "Principles of Rhythm", Jeff Burns's "Pentatonic Scales for the Jazz Rock Keyboardist" (still in print!).
Rating: 
Summary: British Political, Science, and Social Commentary
Review: I'd wager this is one of the few science-fiction books written by an astronomer. The book starts out with considerable astronomy: a struggling young Norwegian (making a living scanning the skies for supernovae, which appear maybe twice a year) finds a ring of oscillating stars and takes it to a learned local astronomer, G. Marlowe, who is "ready to talk astronomy at all hours of day or night." Marlowe & friends discover, through mathematical calculation, that a large Black Cloud (see "Barlowe's Guide to the Extraterrestrials" for a good summary of its nature) will encounter the Earth in 18 months. I expected it to be a unique but rather dull read. It seems I am mistaken. Although much of the first half is considerably uninteresting, I found Hoyle does make the characters interesting. I particularly miss the short appearance of the Astronomer Royal, a humorous character whose best scene is definitely the beginning of Chapter 2, in which he enrages the main character by mimicking a talkative and excessively boring minor scientist. Kingsley, the hero / main character, gets the attention he deserves (he's a very logical man whose repeated confrontations with politicians are unfortunate since they think illogically). By the end I had established a minor emotional connection with the characters and their personalities -- Kingsley, his flirt (a musician, Halsey), Marlowe (who smokes aniseed!), Weichart (a very clever and knowledgeable person), Leicester (an Australian radio astronomer), Parkinson (a politician who symphathizes with the scientists), Alexandrov (a crude, rude, brevid Russian who just happens to be brilliant), Stoddard (an uneducated gardener), and even Green & Jensen, two personalities mentioned very briefly. I particularly mourn Jensen, the struggling Norwegian whose character was developed then killed off abruptly. The plot? Oh yeah. Both the Americans (mentioned in the first paragraph) and the British discover the Cloud separately, meet, and the scene focuses almost entirely on the British, who are granted a country estate at Nortonstowe. Here the scientists congregate and socialize, unable to leave. After periods of intense heat and cold (around 500 million people die) the Cloud removes itself from the Sun. At this point an egg of unknown science hatches and scatters across the pages, and the author speculates everything from the failure of politicians to correctly analyze situations to what would happen if we discovered God somewhere. The story ends with the infamous danger of processing too much information and comes VERY close to being too Hollywood-dramatic. If you like studying the idiosyncracies of man, if you enjoy astronomy and science-fiction, if you detest politicians, if you wondered what life was like at observatories, if you ponder the mysteries of the Universe, then I recommend you read the "Look Inside" feature provided at this site, and then buy the book if you're not bored.
Rating:
Summary: Great book I hope it doesn't disappear again.
Review: I've been looking for this book for awhile. I hope you guys keep it around since I intend to buy it. Of course there's various reasons I can't do that now. The science in it is somewhat dated, but I think it's quite accurate for the time. It is also a more entertaining look at the lives of scientists then say Timescape. In some ways it wasn't what I expected, but in most ways it was a whole lot better.
Rating:
Summary: Ossian's Ride, too
Review: I, like many of the other reviewers below, read "The Black Cloud" many years ago in paperback, lost track of my copy and/or had it simply disintegrate after many lendings and rereadings, and searched in vain for years until able to buy the recent reissue. It's just as good as I remembered it, with the Astronomer Royal and the Cloud itself as wonderfully drawn characters that the reader wants to hear much more of. The laments that "Ossian's Ride" is unavailable are silly -- just look under the "Used & New" line of the initial book request display for "Ossian's Ride" and you'll see a whole bunch of listings of used copies for -- $1.45 and up!!! We truly live in a great age; all those books you grew up with and can't find any more are available for certainly no more than $10 a copy. I have recently bought "Sheila Levine Is Alive and Well and Living in New York", Adam Smith's "Powers of Mind", and, of course "Ossian's Ride" this way. All (without exception, all) were deaccessioned library copies in good shape, hardbound, with the original dust jackets and transparent library covers. The concept of "out-of-print and (hence) unavailable" is dead.
Rating:
Summary: Astonishingly Prescient
Review: In this slender tale (190 pages) from 1957 -- the year of Sputnik and tailfins -- renowned astronomer Fred Hoyle managed to foretell AI (artificial intelligence), OCR (optical character recognition), TTS (text-to-speech converters), digital burst communications and a whole host of other technologies which didn't become commonplace until 40 years later.
Perhaps his most famous innovation in this story, however, is one very few other writers or thinkers have been able to contemplate, even today: non-organic intelligence. Most science fiction assumes "little green men" with bilateral symmetry and carbon-based morphology (think "Twilight Zone" with bad rubber masks). Hoyle was one of the few to theorize information-processing as the hallmark of life and/or intelligence, rather than some biological definition. In this, he is still ahead of us, nearly half a century later.
Rating: 
Summary: ...and in the end a curtain.
Review: It is good to see that this work is still in print. It will likely remain in libraries and on bookshelves of a long time to come, mostly due to its brilliant construction and story development. Of the more clever elements of the book is the endless contrasts and confrontations that arise in the telling of the story: science versus religeon, politics versus reason, accepted ideas versus the unknown truth. Although it must be said that a few too many of these confrontations are put together into too small a framework, with little time devoted to any one and leaving a lot of loose ends, but these loose ends also allow the reader to mull over what he's read afterwards rather than simply running on to the next book. A serious flaw in the story's telling is the endless dialog between our scientist heros. Although it would have been difficult to cut much of it back without sacrificing understanding, it becomes somewhat clear towards the end that even the author was getting wary of this habit, and more and more passages skip over what is either already known or inferable. This (neccisary) beating of a dead horse is really the only drawback to the book, and may frustrate those who are looking for a book with continual plot advancement and interesting, in depth dialog. Still, unlike many novels of science fiction, not everything is explained away, or even rationalized beyond doubt. This allows a great deal of imagination to come forth regarding how things look and what is actually occuring. This book is reccomendable to most, but particularly to those interested in the philosophy of science and theories of extraterrestrial existance.
Rating:
Summary: A premium work of Science Fiction
Review: Like many others I've been hunting for this book for some 30 years. I first read it in the sixties and was profoundly moved by it. If you like SF that takes place in the present (well... allow for the dating) and reality based you will love this book. It would be great to see other Fred Hoyle books published again, especially "A for Andromeda" and "The Fifth Planet", all great works from a great mind. The science may get to be dated but great writing should never be allowed to fade away.
Rating:
Summary: A great book!!
Review: May be I'm sentimental, because this is the first science fiction book I ever loved. But Hoyle's ability to merge in the 'Black Cloud' scientific hypothesis and imagination, a great plot and great characters, is in my opinion unsurpassed in contemporary SF.
Unfortunatly, U.S. readers seem to be not familiar with this book: despite its age, I would STRONGLY recommend it to any SF reader.
Rating:
Summary: One of Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time
Review: Not surprisingly, Fred Hoyle, distinguished British Radio-Astronomer, wrote a small but classic work in "The Black Cloud". I have an old 60's paperback edition and read the book each year as a matter of course
Rating:
Summary: an entertaining diversion: very light reading
Review: Re: "Sir Fred Hoyle, [a] scientist and polymath extraordinaire, [b] was also one of our greatest sci-fi novelists, and [c] it is a pity that his SF works are not better known." [a]: Yes, Hoyle was both a scientist and a science-fiction writer--and a popularizer of science as well, but I don't see that that makes him a polymath, particularly since his science-fiction, though entertaining enough, had no especial literary value. [c]: In the sixties, his science-fiction was very well known, very nearly as well known as that of Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov. I'd guess that most of his stuff is now out of print for two reasons: 1) Genre fiction tends to be ephemeral, and 2) Hoyle's scientific reputation plummeted (deservedly so) as he continued to promulgate his long-since discredited "steady-state" theory of the universe and to embrace such fantasies as the space-spores "theory" of the origin of life, with no credible evidence or argument to support either. [b]: Hoyle's stuff was probably just as good or better than most or much of Clarke's, Asimov's, and Bradbury's (though I don't think Hoyle ever equaled Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" or "Childhood's End", nor do I think Hoyle ever equaled Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" or "Fahrenheit 451"-bearing in mind I haven't read either of these last two since before my own childhood's end), but as it happens there have been only TWO great science-fiction writers (I'm not counting great science-fiction works such as "Brave New World" and "Planet of the Apes" written by writers primarily known for non-science-fiction): H. G. Wells and Stanislaw Lem. In any case, "The Black Cloud" is neither Hoyle's best novel nor his worst; it's fairly middling. The exaggerated claims made for it below are patently absurd.
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