Customer Reviews

Starfarers

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

_Starfarers_ by Poul Anderson is an excellent "hard science fiction" novel, epic and thoroughly absorbing.

The basic premise is that in the relatively near future SETI astronomers find evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, not by receiving and decoding any communication from distant worlds, but by discerning interesting and at first unexplainable astronomical phenomena, occurrences that with time and study lead researchers to conclude that they are evidence of starships traveling very near the speed of light.

With the information obtained from these studies and from the further research that these discoveries inspired, humanity was able to construct similar vessels and reach the stars, discovering and then settling worlds in other star systems.

However, trips to these faraway beings were not at first possible, owing to their vast distance from Earth. It would take something close to a ten thousand year round trip journey to visit these beings which came to be dubbed the "Yonderfolk." Thanks to the effects of time dilation, only a couple of years would pass for those on board any ship that made the attempt while many thousands of years would pass for those on Earth. I was reminded at times of the Joe Haldeman's excellent _ The Forever War_, a fantastic novel that also explored the effects of time dilation on people traveling at relativistic speeds.

Eventually, a massive and highly capable starship, _Envoy_, was constructed and a topnotch crew of ten people were selected, including among them highly skilled pilots, engineers as well as a planetologist, physicist, biologist, and a linguist. The majority of the book is their epic journey, their amazing discoveries, adventures, and personal triumphs and tragedies. What they found at the end of their trip to the stars of the Yonderfolk was in many ways just the beginning of a story that made for very gripping reading.

The book is well named indeed, as Anderson, though devoting most of the novel to the intrepid crew of the _Envoy_, explored the concept and ramifications of starfaring. There were several chapters in the book that were essentially interludes, vignettes exploring the evolution of humanity and the worlds they had colonized, chronicling the rise and fall of civilizations and especially how starfaring people, the crews of near light-speed ships, fit in. I found his ideas logical and intriguing; owing to the effects of time dilation, a culture formed around the starfarers, one that over hundreds of years and then millennia increasingly separated them from the cultures of the worlds they called upon to trade exotic chemicals, alien species, Earth species for the colony worlds, new technologies, and cultural treasures from the distant settled worlds as well as eventually from the alien intelligences that they encountered. What could have been a lot of exposition and "info dumps" was made into some very good short stories, stories that helped explain the culture and technology of Earth and its sister worlds when the _Envoy_ eventually returned in the very distant future.

To a lesser extent Anderson also explored some related themes (as to me any truly good science fiction should do so). For instance, is the urge to explore a thing deeply engrained in humanity, or it is instead maybe cultural, or even perhaps found only in certain individuals? Also, what is the end result of human history; what is the nature of the "ultimate" or "final" human society, or can there ever be any such thing? Can humanity ever achieve a stable population on a world, creating a society free of war, civil strife, and living in an ecologically sustainable manner, or is that type of society too alien for our species (or maybe any species) to achieve? Will all starfaring species share the same ultimate fate, or is each species too different to share the same fate? What is the impact of thousands and tens of thousands of years of history on a society and on an individual in terms of imagination, creativity, and initiative?

A fantastic novel, one I highly recommend.

Well, almost "Tau Zero," one of my favorite all time scifi novels. Anderson presents another adventure in the same mode. Few authors write scifi like this anymore. There is a sense of wonder and a sense of uplifting the human spirit to greatness that you see in Wells, Verne, Clarke, Stapledon, Baxter, Benford, etc. The characters are all well delineated such as the affected hypomanic woman pilot who acts like she is an avatar of Robert Burns. The aliens are wonderfully characterized and multifaceted. One is also left with questions which are left unanswered, contributing to the sense of expansiveness. The book gives you pause to think about the big picture. In my humble opinion, this is what scifi should be, a kind of practical philosophy. "Starfarers" succeeds at this game admirably. Do not let the archaic language put you off; it is Anderson's tongue and cheek version of future speak!

I have read several novels that introduce many characters that are on a long intersteller voyage, some do well and you get to know the characters. ENCOUNTER WITH TIBER by Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes did a great job with this but I can't say the same for STARFARERS. This novel has so many characters that they are nearly impossible to keep track of and which person did this or that, much of it just became an unintellible mass.

Is there anything of redeeming quality in this novel? Yes, it gives a very good, even excellent story, of man's contact with alien species, and depicts science and technology very knowledgeably, so it seems. Character development is great, but as before too many characters for my taste. It is a long novel and takes patience to read.

I liked this book enormously. I was especially fond of the various side lines in the book involving the other alien races. Poul seemed to pack more ideas in this book than many authors manage in their lifetime. It is true that there aren't answers to everything, but that's what life is like. One of the best books I've read this year.

In Starfarers, Poul Anderson explores once more how existence rewards those who dare to strive for something beyond themselves. He does this with a monumental journey of exploration as his backdrop, the saga of the crew of the starship Envoy on a 10,000 year voyage to make first contact with an alien civilization. Being the excellent storyteller that he is, he doesn't let the science or the vistas overwhelm the human dimensions of the tale (in fact, the few parts of the book that dragged for me were when he was focusing on the science and technology as opposed to how those things affected people).

If you're an Anderson fan (as I am, in case you hadn't noticed!), I believe you will definitely enjoy this book. While the theme in it is similar to that of Anderson's recent Guthrie books (and echoes themes found throughout much of his earlier work), being a single-volume novel it's a tighter and more riveting story, more like the excellent Boat of A Million Years. The human characters are believable, the alien settings and cultures startling but well-drawn, and the writing downright moving at times.

I liked this book because it seemed so much like real life, not going in one direction. Some of the characters I could have done without, like the requisite bad guy.

I was a little surprised by a basic arithmetic flaw though. One of the premises is that the kith would interbreed into a different phenotype "tribe". This happens very rapidly in the book, too rapidly. A basic calculation shows that if on average 70 years pass for every year on board ship, and the ships orbit for maybe a year at each end, then each person ages 2 years for every 70 back on earth. That means their earth-life span would be about: 35 years per year x 70 years per life = 2,450 years per life span. This indicates that the rough period per reproducing generation is: 35 years per year x 25 years per generation = 875 years. In 10,000 years, for the kith, only 11 human generations would have passed. And if there were centenarians in the kith, then only 3 lifetimes would have passed at 3500 years each. Even if there were only 100 kith to begin with, that is hardly time enough to mix very much at all to produce a new phenotype. Since each ship carried that many, there were thousands of them in the first century.

I liked all the digressions, it made for an interesting story.

As a long-time reader of Poul Anderson's work, I picked this one up on faith, with expectations of similar quality. Bad choice. The book is disjointed, the plot contrived, and the horrible specimens who were the best of the few willing to venture into the unknown for such a long time belittles the human spirit.

Exploring the universe in 11,000 years is a marvelous, mind-expanding concept. Few authors besides Poul Anderson would attempt it. That he doesn't quite succeed, doesn't change how wonderful the underlying idea is. Earth detects evidence of another civilization 5000 light years away and decides to send a contact ship. Even though the round-trip will take 10,000 earth years, the crew will only age two years. The crew is chosen, the trip begins and after 6,000 years they realize the alien civilization may not be there and the trip might be futile. They go on and find three alien races and meanwhile earth is changing. The surviving crew members will return after 11,000 years to an utterly changed world. All this is well-done but the idea is greater than the execution. The book cries out for a Dominick Flandry or a Nicholas Van Rijn or some really interesting central character or a really intense story line. Instead, you are introduced to some well-sketched-in but not very interesting people with not very involving personal problems. And the story is episodic, although some of the episodes are wonderful. Poul Anderson seems incapable of writing badly. His second best work like this is far above your average science fiction. I highly recommend this for the ideas and the images of future worlds while being aware that you're taking a long interesting journey with some not very interesting people.

I first discovered Poul Anderson in the early 1970's and over the past 30 years have managed to collect practically every book he's ever published--a total of more than 80 novels and short-story collections, including his very rare historical "The Golden Slave." Up to this point I chose not to keep only one of those I read ("The Devil's Game"), but I'm afraid this title will make Number Two. SF has always been fundamentally an optimistic genre--even dystopic stories usually feature a maverick or two beating their wings against the bars of society's cage--and while in the end "Starfarers" also posits a rebirth of the human spirit, it left me feeling somehow unsatisfied. Perhaps it's that Anderson's earlier work (like the great Ensign Flandry and Nicholas van Rijn/Davey Falkayn series or the retellings of Norse sagas), despite a lurking shadow of decadence (the "Long Night" often referred to by Flandry, the Nordic gloom of the sagas), focuses on characters who are truly heroic, larger than life (though far from perfect), while the "Envoy"'s crew seem more to be an accidental association of rather ordinary folk. Perhaps it's the picture he paints (rather improbable, to my mind) of a humanity that (in some unexplained way) manages to confine itself to Earth (and a few widely scattered colonies) without overwhelming the planet with its numbers and waste. Or perhaps it's the way he portrays what seems to me a change in the basic human character over the 10,000 years of "Envoy"'s absence; after all, anyone who has read widely in history understands that people today aren't too basically dissimilar to those of ancient Egypt and Sumeria--or, for that matter, the Australian aboriginies and other modern counterparts of Stone Age humanity. Even the very late Anson Guthrie series had more of a basically upbeat tone than this one does. It's true that his Tahirian aliens are wonderfully original and excellently drawn, and the starfaring Kith--clans of traders--are a people worth knowing. And even in his age, the author lost none of his lyrical style. But if you're looking to get familiar with the best of Anderson, don't start with this novel. I'd go so far as to say that only utter completists should trouble to keep it in their collections.

I love Poul's books and saw the nice title and cool cover art and went for it. 48 pages and three days later I decided to check the reviews. No wonder I could not read it. It is dull and the charaters are poorly developed and really no idea of whats happening. I just saved my self a week of my life not waisted. I quit. If I only had checked the reviews sooner. The last book I finished in one day, I am sure I could not have ever finished this one.