Customer Reviews

Search The Sky

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I read this book years ago and I still remember it clearly. Strange things are happening on the distant planets where, in the far future, mankind has scattered. Every planet has something oddly wrong with it. On one, people simply have no drive left; on another, the old rule the young; on yet a third, women rule men (yes, it's faintly sexist, but don't let that ruin a great book). A group of adventurers go from planet to planet, trying to find out what has caused this problem and barely escaping from each planet with their lives. Finally they make their way to old Earth... and what's going on _there_ makes all the messed-up planets look like paradises. Only in a great book like this could the statement of a mathematical formula make you gasp and drop the book. (Well, I did.) It's a shame that this book is out of print, but I strongly recommend that you find it somewhere!

I read this book years ago and enjoyed it. I can't say the same for the Kindle version, as it is riddled with hyphenated words with the hyphens showing all the time instead of just at line breaks. This is extremely distracting... enough so that I quit reading.

Did anybody bother to proof this before it was published? Three stars for the story, zero stars for the formatting.

Unfortunately for sci-fi fans, Cyril M. Kornbluth had a very short life (1923-1958). Nevertheless he was able to deliver several very good novels alone or usually in collaboration with other authors as "The Space Merchants" (1952) and "Gladiator-at-law" (1954) in collaboration with his friend Frederik Pohl, "Gunner Cade" (with Judith Merril 1952).

Frederik Pohl (1919) the other co-author is one "Sci-fi Golden Age" writers. He is still producing new books, imagine! He has authored more than one success as the already mentioned collaborations with Kornbluth, the underrated but excellent "Drunkard's Walk" (1960) and Hugo & Nebula winner "Gateway" (1977).


"Search the Sky" (1954) was Kornbluth's second novel, written in collaboration with Pohl.

The plot is as follows: humankind has expanded from Earth thru the vast universe. At the present moment each stellar system is more or less isolated from the rest. Long reach spaceships arrive around every twenty years with exotic cargoes from faraway systems.
Ross is an inhabitant of Halsey planet disquieted by evident decadence around him.
Fate give him the opportunity to ride a spaceship "faster than light" to investigate a series of planetary systems and try to discover what's going on.
The reader will assist to an interesting cavalcade thru a fading universe.

Enjoy this little known sci-fi classic!

Reviewed by Max Yofre