Customer Reviews

The Stardance Trilogy omnibus of Stardance, Starseed and Starmind

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This a master story teller plying his trade. First we have the story of a marvelous dancer and choreographer, Sharra Drummond. Trouble is, how many six foot tall stacked ballerinas do you know? So she ends up dancing in free space, where she can only stay for a short time before the calcium starts leaching from her bones. She is about to return to Earth when aliens show up. She dances for them a dance to tell them what it is to be hum that ends "this is what it is to be human - to PERSIST." And having overstayed her time in space she reenters the atmosphere and burns up. This is the way the original novella from Analog ends. Robinson extended it, and the ending is very different. It is a sustaining story, one that I have depended on again and again (I have multiple sclerosis.)
The heroine of the second novel of the trilogy, Rain Mcleod, is a very different sort of persistent. The third novel, Starmind, is an attempt to tell the ultimate fate of humanity and the universe. The trilogy is not hard science fiction, but it is literature, and mayhap great literature. It is a largely successful attempt to define what it is to be human.

I am a commercial artist. Most artists I know believe the same thing when it comes to the arts...it's all good. Still, some branches of the arts are harder to enjoy for some than others. I have never totally understood dance, but I have very much liked modern dance. Now, after reading Stardance by Jeanne and Spider Robinson, I can begin to actually embrace dance with an understanding of it from the inside out...from the dancer's perspective.

Spider Robinson, heir apparent to Robert Heinlein, mixes hard science fiction with Jeanne Robinson's knowledge of dance as a choreographer and dancer. They examine dance in 3 dimensions...in the zero g of low Earth orbit, and also touch upon the idea that dance communicates without words and is therefore excellent for communication with beings from another world. A current pop song by the Killers called 'Human' has a line in it's chorus that asks, "Are we Human, or are we Dancers?" I think they must have read this wonderful, Hugo winning novella, because the answer is, of course, both. Stardance is the first in the trilogy, and I now look forward to reading the next two installments, Starseed and Starmind.

The pinnacle of Spider and Jeanne's, though not Spider's, collaboration. A wonderful tale that will appeal to the idealistic and optimistic among us. Great for adolescents and an uplifting refresher for adults.

seems like a strange concept buy spider robinson does it very well with his wifes help.

I haven't had the chance to sit down and enjoy this book yet, but I look forward to doing just that very soon. I couldn't be happier with the condition of the book, which is immaculate.

I thought a Spider Robinson book would be good because he did a good job editing and writing the old Heinlein novels. I got through the first 30 pages of Stardance and came to the conclusion that the author (probably Robinson's wife) was obsessed with dance and used it as a poor excuse for a science fiction novel.