Now Fred Hoyle, fine writer of science fiction, was also an astronomer of note, mostly for getting it wrong. In The Natural of the Universe—fortunately a very slim volume—he outlined his theory of the solid-state universe, where, basically, the matter in the universe remains constant, having always existed and always would exist. But, in his lifetime, his opponents, those would believed in the Big Bang Theory (which term he accidentally coined himself when trying to ridicule their ideas) won the day. Fred, poor man, struggled on in his embarrassment, sticking to sci-fi from then on.

  The Black Cloud tells how the Earth passes through some dark matter, causing permanent winter nights and no days until it emerges years later. The spookiest danger in the cosmos, because it is the most common, hardest to detect, and there’s no way of stopping it, not even a far-fetched highly imaginative one. Chilling...
  Andromeda Breakthrough, by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot, was a sequel to the excellent A for Andromeda, and lacked virtually all of the good qualities of the original. Poor old Fred just couldn’t take a trick.

  Folks from a more advanced but doomed planet settle in Southern Ireland and create a utopia, sort of, and Fred Hoyle just can’t bring himself to make them or us bad guys and therefore Ossian’s Ride goes up and down on the spot a bit. It was really a good short story that was padded out too much.
  Fifth Planet is a better effort, visualising as C. S. Lewis did, a visit to a distant planet with lifeforms totally unlike anything on Earth—indeed it takes them most of the book to release they are dealing with a living thing. His picture of life on Earth in 2087 looked old fashioned already.
  Rockets in Ursa Major is similar as earthmen battle an inconceivable force from another dimension.
  Seven Steps to the Sun is a time travel yarn that is best forgotten.
  In The Inferno, Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle speculate on the effects of a nearby supernova and such matters as the galaxy becoming a Seyfret type, and the inferno in fact makes everything very cold, the nuclear winter. But life goes on. It’s another of the better efforts.
  Into Deepest Space is a sequel to Rockets in Ursa Major, and the evil Yela are back, ruining the solar system with a surfeit of hydrogen. But Dick Warboys and friends are back and find the way to zap them. This stuff is rather like a prose version of Dan Dare.
   There are others but I didn’t read them and won’t. Fred Hoyle’s sci-fi was better written than most, but as with his astronomical ideas, lacked the vital spark of originality they needed. But that doesn’t matter—his first novel, A for Andromeda, obliges us to forgive him everything.