The Wreck of the River of Stars | ||||||||
Michael Flynn | ||||||||
Tor Books, 480 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Peter D. Tillman
The Middle System -- Mars, the Belt, Jupiter space -- has not developed
tidily, and the crew is made up of casualties of the great 21st-century
space boom. The Wreck of the River of Stars is their story.
The Wreck of the River of Stars is a tour de force of character developement. We watch, riveted,
as these motley misfits squabble, beef and try to cope, in the hermetic
isolation of a ship becalmed in space -- two of her four Farnsworth
engines have been ruined in a freak accident. The ship has 19 days to
rebuild the engines, or she will pass the balk line, the point of no
return, and drift endlessly away from settled space.
The repairs go slowly, but the ship's Engineer is a master of
improvisation, and no one doubts he will fix the engines in time. No
one, that is, but the oldest magsailors, who remember that the River of Stars
still has her original sails, unused for decades. They decide to fix
them up, just in case. No one likes, or trusts, the acting captain, so
they don't tell him (or the Engineer) their plan -- which has a large
share of nostalgia for the lost Age of Sail. And there isn't enough
superconducting hobartium on board to repair both engines and sails....
The Wreck of the River of Stars is a classical tragedy. Hubris, small mistakes, misunderstandings,
mishaps and personal conflicts collide, echo and feed back in a downward
spiral that will ultimately wreck the great ship. It wouldn't be fair to
reveal the ending, but it's not a happy one. There are no real villains
here, just flawed people trying to cope, at times heroically. But the
Fates are not on their side.
Michael Flynn tells his story in the third-person omniscient, with dry asides as
he develops his characters. The omniscient narrator is the Greek chorus
to the inevitable tragedy, which develops with an awful majesty. Flynn's
writing is masterful. His pacing is grave, controlled, ironic. His
characters will break your heart as they work, love, fight, grow, grieve
and die. This is a wonderful book, easily Flynn's best. The Wreck of the River of Stars is set in
the future of Flynn's popular near-future "Star" tetrology (also
recommended), but is a stand-alone novel. This is the best hard-SF tragic
novel of character yet written (though this is an uncrowded niche). And
the cover art, by Stephan Martiniere, is just flat gorgeous. Highly
recommended.
Pete Tillman has been reading SF for better than 40 years now. He reviews SF -- and other books -- for Usenet, "Under the Covers", Infinity-Plus, Dark Planet, and SF Site. He's a mineral exploration geologist based in Arizona. More of his reviews are posted at www.silcom.com/~manatee/reviewer.html#tillman . |
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