Customer Reviews

Star Bridge

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I first read "Star Bridge" in sixth grade at the age of 11; I'm now almost 43, and I still hold this as one of the greatest SF books I've read.

Williamson's imagery and wordcraft set the standard for many of today's modern masters. His antihero Horn, the eccentric man-with-a-secret Wu, and his decaying human empire are shown in high relief, and the imagery evoked burns itself into your mind permanently.

Find and read this book; do what you must to acquire a copy, and savor it slowly. Horn's passage through the Tube and hyperspace is one of the most stirring examinations of consciousness I've yet to read; it still moves me.

Find out why one man can move an empire...

According to Alexei and Cory Panshin, in the critical work The World Beyond the Hill, Star Bridge's genesis goes back to 1944 or so. Jack Williamson, inspired by Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories, decided to do his own "managed history/galactic empire" novel, with the working title of Star of Empire. Williamson had problems making the idea work, so that it took 10 more years plus James Gunn's assistance to finally make a story out of the idea.

And what a story! I first read this novel at the age of 9, just a few years after it came out, and have periodically re-read it every so often since then. I outgrew much of what I read in my teen years and before, but this book is one of those stories that I still enjoy now as much as I did then.

This story succeeds on more than one level. Most obviously, it is a fastpaced adventure story. On another level, it's one of those stories where things aren't quite what they seem at first glance. Or at the second (third? fourth?) glance. That, I think,is what keeps me coming back to this novel -- the thought that I may see something in it that I missed on the previous reads.

One thing that completely perplexes me is how unknown Star Bridge is, even among science fiction fandom. It is in the top rank of Williamson's work (that goes for Gunn, too), yet I find that even big fans of Williamson often have never heard of it. Hopefully there will be enough demand for used copies of this book that someone may do another reprint. I think it's about time -- and it would really be cool if it were to be made into a movie.

Why has this book never been made into a movie? It has it all...adventure, romance, a Metropolis-like futuristic empire, the idea of near-instantaneous space travel.
Well, that part of the book was probably the inspiration for the original Star Gate movie. But this book's plot was much more coherent than the revolt against the sketchy, androgynous tyrant of Star Gate. The character of Wu is one of the best executed and most thoughtful in the history of the SF genre, IMHO.

Like the previous reviewers, I discovered this book in my teens. It must have been shortly after it was first published. I have since re-read the book many times, and even had to buy another copy after my first one was lost. I have always regarded it as one of the best science fiction books ever written. It has action, heroism, romance, a thought provoking premise, a grand vision--everything you want in a science fiction novel. I just picked it up again, and found it to be just as fresh (and contemporary) as when I first read it almost 50 years ago. My brother loves the book too--we have passed our copy back and forth over the years. And yes, it would make a great movie.

I first read STAR BRIDGE in high school during the early 1960s. The book was lost in a move and I have been casually looking for replacement ever since. I received a copy from Amazon and re-read the book in one weekend. It is just as good as I remember and has "aged" better than I. The science and the fiction are both very, very good. The book contains the first discussion of worm holes in time/space that I remember.

I can't understand why it has never been made into a movie.

I came across Star Bridge well over 20 years ago, and after college, could never find it again. Since I could not remember the title or auther, I spent the last ten years obsessing over finding it, and was thrilled when I stumbled on just the right Google search of my few memories of the book to find it. I was afraid that in rereading at this stage in my life, I would not find the book quite as engaging as I found it when I first read it. Happily, I was wrong, and enjoy this book just as much as I did when I first read it. It has definitely found a well-deserved spot on my shelf between Foundation and Dune. It is just a shame that it is not as well known (and of course, that the full epic series was never written).

A great novel with (at the time) revolutionairy ideas of travel via 'wormholes'. The character is typical of Sci-fi writing of the time, and there is a leading character that has to be an early personification of 'Giles Habbibula'.
Well worth the read, and great book from THE Grand Master of Sci-fi.

"And here, face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on."
-- Archibald MacLeish, "You, Andrew Marvell"

In his autobiography, _Wonder's Child_ (1984), Jack Williamson gives a bit of the background on the writing of _Star Bridge_. In 1941, Williamson began to toy with the idea of writing a novel based on Arnold Toynbee's idea that "civilizations are super-organisms with life spans of centuries" (132). Williamson started a novel called _Star of Empire_ that got out of control. The manuscript was set aside. Roughly ten years later, Williamson and James Gunn reworked the raw material in collaboration. Gunn wrote the final draft in December, 1953. The novel was published by Gnome Press in 1955.

Now, a common failing of many Jack Williamson novels is that they frequently contain a protagonist who stays in essentially the same condition from begining to end. This is not the case with _Star Bridge_. The hero, Alan Horn, finds himself constantly moving from one hot spot to another. He jumps from out of the frying pan onto the griddle, from the griddle to the oven-- and watch out, baby, there is the nuclear fire below! Some readers might complain that the novel is a touch too melodramatic, but I doubt that you will find many who will accuse it of being too stagnant or dull.

The structure is a series of alternative narratives: a Gibbonesque future history about the Fall of the Eron Empire and a third person narrative about the adventures of Alan Horn. The two plotlines parallel one another and dovetail into a not altogether surprising (but oddly satisfying) twist at the end.

Since there is a lot of hard-boiled action in this novel, it may be appropriate to ask if the work is marred by Spillanism-- graphic violence for its own sake. I will admit that this can be something of a judgement call, but I am inclined to argue against this position. The violence in the novel is not meaningless. It is linked to Williamson's original historical theme.

In Starbridge, Jack Williamson and James Gunn try to produce an adventure story with an epic scope and the "sense of wonder" SF critics are always talking about. We get the time-honored cliches of adventure fiction; lots of chases, lots of disguises, lots of people getting captured and then escaping. In the epic department we get a space empire consisting of hundreds of planets connected by tubes. How you can connect two planets, each of them rotating and orbiting a star which is itself moving, with a tube, I do not know, but that is not much less credible than what we get in the "sensawonda" department: an immortal man and his math whiz pet alien have been, Hari Seldon style, manipulating history for 150 centuries.

Somehow Williamson and Gunn tie these elements together so that they almost work, and even add a romance, a space pirate who says "Arr," a surfeit of philosophizing about free will and whether history is driven by the choices of great men or vast impersonal social forces, and a bracing dose of moral relativism. The pace is fast and Williamson and Gunn take the whole thing seriously, which I appreciate.

I'm reluctant to say Starbridge is good, but it is a hell of a ride, and looking back at it I can't help but smile at some of the wacky capers described therein, so I guess that is a recommendation.

I read this 1955 novel in its 1977 Berkley paperback edition. The red cover by Richard Powers is pretty good.