Customer Reviews

The Starchild Trilogy

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If Heinlein had mixed "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" with the semantic subtheme of his short story "Gulf," and seasoned it with Clarke's "2001" and Disney's "The Black Hole," he could have cooked up this story. I would say the quality of the writing qua writing is competent but merely average, whereas the theories, especially regarding the nature of stars, are stellar. If you have read Harry Turtledove's historically-flavored science fiction, you have experienced this combination. An important thing the book did for me was to reduce the incomprehensible magnitude of space to a mentally graspable size. And--it was a real page-turner

_The Starchild Trilogy_ (1977) by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson is an omnibus of three novels dramatizing the future evolution of man. They are _The Reefs of Space_ (1964), _Starchild_ (1965), and _Rogue Star_ (1969). The copyright credits incorrectly state that _Starchild_ was a _Galaxy_ serial. In fact, all three novels were serialized in _If_ in 1963, 1965, and 1968 respectively. The basic method of collaboration was that Williamson wrote the first draft and Pohl wrote the revision. In general, this method seems to have worked fairly well.

_The Reefs of Space_ was originally begun by Williamson back in the fifties. It was worked over quite a bit before reaching its final form. The later novels were written more hastily, presumably to meet deadlines. Partly for this reason, the first novel remains the most imaginative and solid. _Starchild_ and _Rogue Star_, while passable space operas, are relatively thin.

The first two novels set up a contrast between the Plan of Man and the Reefs of Space. The first is the futuristic government of the solar system. It is tyrranical, static, conformist, militaristic, and brutal. It is run by a super computer (called the Machine) and a dictator (called the Planner). The Reefs are a series of islands of "space coral" formed by a stream of steady-state hydrogen atoms that is located well outside the solar system. They are non-mechanized, filled with some bizarre life forms (both carbon and non-carbon based). A handful of exiles and escapees have managed to form a free society there. _Rogue Star_ is set in a much later period. Mankind has spread far beyond the Reefs, and the Plan of Man has collapsed. But there are still characters known as Reefers, and Planner artifacts may still be uncovered and used.

There is a difference between the heroes of the three novels. Steve Ryeland, of _The Reefs of Space_, is an intelligent man who has seen the dark side of the Plan of Man at the outset of the novel. We can readily identify with him. Boysie Gann, of _Starchild_, is a blockhead who remains blindly loyal to the Plan for most of the novel. Even when he changes, he can't think of anything much to do except to pretend to be loyal. One of the heroes of _Rogue Star_ is a brilliant, manly, romantic fellow named Cliff Hawk. He is also insufferably arrogant, selfish, reckless, and obnoxious. Of course, he gets the girl. A similar pattern can be found with the heroines. Donna Creery of _The Reefs of Space_ is much more interesting and rounded than the heroines of the later novels.

I will conclude with some individual ratings. _The Reefs of Space_: Four stars. _Starchild_ and Rogue Star_: Three stars apiece. Perhaps not a perfect book. But certainly not a time-waster, either. Recommended.

Not a trilogy in the three-volume-novel sense, like Lord of the Rings, but three novels taking place in the same universe about a generation apart from each other, with occasional name-dropping cross-references but otherwise each standing on its own. (Which universe is Steady State, per Fred Hoyle, btw.) Over the course of the series, humankind evolves from a near-future-tech earthbound repressive global totalitarian state to membership in the magical intergalactic commonwealth of all sentient beings and stars; in ironic counterpoint, the writing and the characters DEvolve from being relatively complex and interesting to simplistic and tedious.

Particular point about the tech: for a story written in 1963, the Planning Machine with its ubiquitous teletypes anticipates 21st-century networked computers wonderfully well. Otherwise as sf, striking for the number of ideas that later appeared more fully developed by Larry Niven: the Body Banks, stocked by political prisoners to supply organ transplants for the general populace; the eponymous Reefs resemble the Smoke Ring as environments where humans live in free fall; Starchild :: "Passerby"; and even a bit of wirehead foreshadowing, though it goes in a different, more religious, direction.

The first volume by itself is interesting enough to rate three stars, as long as you're tolerant of the future tech of fifty years ago; later volumes get worse, to only one for Rogue Star--the writing just goes too far downhill, becoming stereotyped Bad 60s SF