The novel “Through the Eye of a Needle” by Hal Clement was published for the first time in 1978. It’s the sequel of “Needle“.
The Hunter remained on Earth due to the impossibility of getting in touch with his people, who are knows how many light years away. As a result, he kept on living in symbiosis with Bob Kinnaird but after seven years the boy’s body is undergoing a degeneration that the Hunter doesn’t know how to stop and has already become a risk to his health.
Back to his home island, Bob consults with Dr. Seever, one of the very few people who knows about the Hunter’s existence. It’s an unprecedented situation and the only hope is to find someone of the Hunter’s species with enough biological knowledge to restore Bob’s health before it’s too late.
Almost thirty years after the publication of “Needle”, Hal Clement published a sequel set about 7 years after the original novel. Bob Kinnaird, who was a teenager, has just got a college degree in the second novel but there’s little to celebrate for him as he’s weakening. The Hunter is a policeman and, although his species is used to living in symbiosis having the host’s health as the first priority, human beings were an unknown species. Something in his symbiosis with Bob went wrong but his knowledge about biology are not enough to fix it.
Bob Kinnaird’s return to his home island aims to find a cure, but it quickly becomes clear that only the Hunter’s species’ specialists would be able to manipulate the boy’s physiology with the precision needed to fix the problems involuntarily created by the Hunter. In “Needle” the plot was focused on the search for an alien criminal hiding on the island, instead in “Through the Eye of a Needle” there’s the search for other members of his species and there’s only the hope that they have reconstructed his route and came to look for him. Precisely because even in the second novel the protagonists look for indications of the presence of other aliens it can be considered a science fiction mystery but it’s very different from the first novel.
Another key difference between the two novels is the amount of important characters. In “Needle” Bob and the Hunter were the absolute protagonists, in “Through the Eye of a Needle” there’s a group working to help Bob. The presence of the Hunter is no longer an absolute secret but was revealed to a growing number of people even if caution remains. Bob’s parents are part of the group who know the secret and try to help their son but in the meantime they had a daughter who, despite being just a child, is often involved in the events. In essence, in this novel, important interactions among characters are much broader than in the first one, even if overall character development is not exceptional.
What remained unchanged is Hal Clement’s style, oriented towards hard science fiction with scientific elements and rationality in the development of the plot and therefore of the search for a possible alien presence on the island. The ethical and moral elements also remain, in this case linked to the problem for the Hunter of saving Bob. The damage caused to the boy’s body is due to his imperfect understanding of his physiology and his inability to fix it is a huge burden for him.
In the end, these elements are not enough to fill an entire novel and Hal Clement adds some strange incidents that even raise the suspecion that the criminal pursued by the Hunter is still alive. This also adds a bit more action to a story that in many parts is made up of dialogues among characters and therefore with a pace that is sometimes slow. The author was at that point very experienced so he probably tried to balance the various elements of the novel and to maintain a certain tension in the story in different ways.
After making the plot longer, Hal Clement ended “Through the Eye of a Needle” very quickly. It’s not a perfect novel and after thirty years there’s no longer the originality of “Needle”. However, it seemed to me well thought out so if you liked the first one I think it’s worth reading this one as well.
