Outcasts of Heaven Belt [Paperback]

Joan D. Vinge (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Roc (July 6, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330312820
• ISBN-13: 978-0451116536
• ASIN: 0451116534
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,737,837 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Starship travel isn't always as clean and pretty..., July 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Outcasts of Heaven Belt (Mass Market Paperback)

... as most S/F stories portray it. This novel tells of a future where interstellar travel is a reality, but just barely. No galaxy-spanning empire, just a set of planets, some marginally habitable, full of colonists trying to survive, and sometimes to get ahead.
The system was called Heaven, because it contained resources enough to sustain life and maybe even more. But when an outside starship fell into the system on a trade and contact mission, the crew discover how easily people can make a hell out of heaven.
Civil war has reduced the once-great civilization of Heaven's Belt to a set of struggling, isolated societies, each too intent on their own survival to help the others. The crew of the starship Ranger must find a way out of the system before their ship is taken and used as the last weapon for the last war.
I enjoyed the differentness of this novel. Life in the future may not be as easy as most S/F tales portray it. What would our culture turn into if we ran out of resources?

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An interesting book, October 21, 2004

By 

Juan Suros "jsuros" (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Outcasts of Heaven Belt (Mass Market Paperback)

This is a minor little science fiction novel with a few really interesting ideas. It has the feel of a good author's "early novels", where they typically put a lot of effort into each book. It is definitely worth reading but not a classic, hence 3 stars.

The story may be related to another book, "Heaven Chronicles", by the same Author, which I have not read.

The book is about an interstellar trade mission from a planet in distress to a wealthy neighbor. The starship Ranger arrives in the system of the Heaven Belt to find that war has reduced the fabled space habitat based civilization of the belt to a bare subsistence level. The Ranger represents an extremely valuable commodity to the waring factions of the Heaven Belt and all sides start scheming and jockeying for position the moment it arrives. After lots of intrigue, the crew of the Ranger agree to use the technology of the Ranger to jump start the technological recovery of the Heaven Belt to it's former glory.

This book is notable for two ideas: calendars based on the second (e.g. megaseconds instead of weeks), and the political system called "The Demarchy".

Basing a calendar on multiples of the second is a sensible idea for a spaced based civilization, especially one that extends to more than one solar system. We've seen this idea used in a minor way in books like "The Mote In God's Eye" but this novel uses it consistently.

The Demarchy is a totalitarian republic whose every decision is based on constant public polling. The hideously constrictive nature of a government where every decision is subject to accurately measured public whim is an amusingly subversive idea, and the author has some fun with it.

The original meaning of "computer room", a room full of men who manually "compute" parts of a large mathematical problem in series, is recreated in this book. I liked that nod to the pre-computer age in a science fiction novel.