The Black Cloud Society into the book. Hoyle was also responsible for the term "Big Bang", though Hoyle himself did not subscribe to the Big Bang theory in favour of his own Steady State Theory. In a plot twist that foreshadows Hoyle's stance on panspermia, the cloud expresses surprise that intelligent life is capable of forming on planets. The novel has a recurrent theme of the duplicity and shallowness of politicians compared with scientists. The Black Cloud The Black Cloud is a science fiction novel by British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. Published in 1957, the book details the arrival of an enormous cloud of
History of the Big Bang theory and the consensus became widespread, Hoyle himself, albeit somewhat reluctantly, admitted to it by formulating a new cosmological model that other scientists later referred to as the "Steady Bang". From around 1950 to 1965, the support for these theories was evenly divided, with a slight imbalance arising from the fact that the Big Bang theory could explain both the formation and the observed abundances of hydrogen and helium, whereas the Steady State could explain how they were formed, but not why they should have the observed abundances. However, the observational evidence began to support the idea that the universe evolved