Customer Reviews

To the Stars

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Science Fiction is not my typical reading genre but I was interested in the problem posed by the book about space travel as it nears the speed of light. I was very pleasantly surprised by the depth of the story and how fascinated I was with Alan Corday's increasingly difficult situation. Mr. Hubbard has a unique way of making the characters more important than the science fiction. I really loved reading this book and have recommended it to several people. I'd love to see a movie based on this. I'd also to comment that this story was written over 50 years go and must be one of the first if not the first to use the time dilation problem in a story.

L Ron Hubbard is an excellent SF writer and I have enjoyed his other stories - like Battlefield Earth. The book was awesome.

To the Stars, written 50 years ago, illustrates how innovative and forward thinking Hubbard was as an SF writer.

His ability to tell a story and bring his characters so vivdly to life is unsurpassed. I was immediately drawn into the dilemma of Alex Corday and the crew.

And the fact that he was one of the first to use the time/speed idea highlights his position as one of the greats of SF.

First, I must admit that I am neither a die-hard Sci-Fi fan, nor even an L. Ron Hubbard fan. I am, however, a Chick Corea fan. Corea, a jazz pianist who is very much a Hubbard guy, recently released a recording en homage to this book. I had to check it out for myself.

I have to say that the framework, the bones, for a top-10-books-of-my-life quality read are here. The fundamental premise, the relative effect upon time as mass approaches light speed, is sufficiently mind-blowing to warrant reading the book. However, I found the plot and character development to fall somewhat short of the book's promise. Here are my gripes, enumerated:

- The story ultimately asks the reader to understand the deep personal nature of the relationship between Corday and Jocelyn when, in my opinion, it does little to develop that relationship throughout. Admittedly, much of what the story reveals is done as an epiphany, but I would like to have seen a little more foundation.
- The "Hound of Heaven" (and why does it have that name?) visits Earth several times during the story. For certain reasons, the "circumstances" on Earth are very different upon each visit. I thought that the details and stories surrounding and resulting from each visit, especially the final one, could have been expanded substantially, adding value to the story.
- A certain romance develops in the book. Or, I should say, develops in the final paragraph of the book. It's easy to see it coming; I thought Hubbard poorly ignored it until the denouement.
- There is another planet called "Johnny's Landing" (and why does it have that name?) which the "Hound" visits a couple of times. Again, there seems to be much to say of these visits, and many stories to tell, none of which are told.

Ultimately, I felt that I had read an abridged version of a great book, which amounted to a fair book in my estimation. Also, while I realize the book was written in a far different time Sci-Fi wise, it seems Hubbard could have arrived upon a better title than "To The Stars", which seems a trifle mailed-in to me.

I own the latest version of this novel along with the music soundtrack, but I first read an old version of this novel as a boy, and I was fascinated by the early parallels (in a sense) with Star Trek that it had, yet its differences, in that Corday was an alternate and more outwardly rational, yet inwardly conflicted Captain Christopher Pike or Captain James T. Kirk; as a genuine science fiction lover, I have to recommend this novel fully on the merits of it being a Jules Verne type psychological character analysis combined with a great adventure. I end the review "enigmatically" here so that you can fully experience the story and everything for yourself.

"To The Stars" by L. Ron Hubbard is one of the earliest works dealing with relativity and the time dilation effects of traveling close to the speed of light. This will forever make it an interesting and important work in science fiction history. The story is solid, and probably better than average for its day, but at the same time it was very predictable and has been surpassed many times by other works. Published originally in the February and March editions of "Astounding Science Fiction" in 1952, it created a stir. However, it has not aged nearly as well, and has been largely forgotten by fans. It did not receive any recognition at all, until it was nominated for the Retro Hugo in 2001, for novellas published in 1950.

The story is a fairly basic one. Alan Corday is kidnapped and finds himself on a long passage to Alpha Centauri and other ports. When he returns to Earth after a few years (his time), he finds little familiar and so has little choice but to become a permanent member of the crew. He finds himself to be a bit of an outcast, never fully accepted by the crew. It isn't until many years later that he learns the truth. While I found the book to be somewhat predictable, I will not go any further into the plot so as to not spoil it for anyone else.

While the story is borderline average, the book itself is well put together. The Galaxy Press edition is a very nice hardbound book, the type is large and easy to read (a novella length story takes over 200 pages in this format). I can think of many classic science fiction works which I would like to see receive the same treatment.

I loved reading To the Stars. It made me think about space travel in a way I never had before. The characters are interesting and the book made me really appreciate how good we have it living here on Earth. It kept my interest throughout.

I read "To The Stars" some years ago and it still stays in my mind as one of the best Sci-Fi books I've read. I just enjoyed it and found it hard to put down and will be reading it again soon. Read it! You won't be disappointed.

This book took me on a journey to places I have never been and introduced me to colorful characters I which I could only hope to meet.
If you like adventure, if you like Sci Fi with a real science backbone and if love not being able to predict the end of a story, you will love this one.
Enjoy!

I actually remember this book vividly from when I first read it as a child; it made quite an impression on me at the time, and that's why I took the trouble to find it in the library, now it's reprinted.

Since it was first published in serial form in 1950 when I was five, I was probably 10 or 12 when I read it.
Now of course I know Hubbard as the creator of Scientology, and his reputation as a mediocre science fiction writer of the 40's and 50's before that. I'm not a fan of Hubbard as a person, or of Scientology, and it's mildly unpleasant to see his picture and read the propaganda on the jacket and in the intro; but I don't care about that. I figure this is a guy who really wasn't a very good science fiction writer, but maybe not too bad, I don't know; some of his stuff, like the absolutely unreadable Battlefield Earth, is abysmal. To be fair, you can say the same about some of Heinlein's last works. Obviously this guy is no Heinlein, but it might be that a few of his best works are pretty good; or those few best works might still be pretty weak, or might even be very good. I wanted to read at least one thing by him, one of his best works, just to satisfy my curiosity, and I wanted to read this one because I do have this vivid childhood memory of it.

Well, it's not that good. In some ways it's pretty weak. And it's not that bad. Just considered as a science fiction novel, it really doesn't stand up today; there are tons of current novels in the bookstores, mostly by people you never heard of, that are really not particularly good, but just as good as this. However, I think a lot of science fiction stories from the 50's are worse. This hasn't stood up like early work by people like Asimov and Heinlein, it doesn't even match up with work by people like, oh, Murray Leinster , Eric Frank Russell, Hal Clement who were less seminal in the field than the Heinleins and Asimovs; but I'm sure it was well above average in 1950. Most of the Hubbard books being reprinted now, of course, are due solely to the efforts of Scientology, and probably most of them, like Battlefield Earth, have no merit whatsoever, but this one just might have made it on its own merits.

Turns out it hardly qualifies as a book either; I was amazed how fast I got through it. Partly this was because it reads very smoothly and easily; that's a positive, I think. It means there's nothing difficult in it, nothing hard to understand, nothing really worth pausing and rereading, but it does move along smoothly. Today it's best understood as a juvenile, although it may have had a big adult audience when it came out.

It's like Dan Brown in a way; Brown's sentences are terrible, but he does move the action right along. On the other hand, the other reason you can read this book in a couple of hours is that it's really just a novella. It's a large hardbound book in large print, so it looks like a real novel. I recall it as a small, skinny paperback when I read it as a kid.

There's an absolutely unnecessary glossary in the back that defines for you things like "appetite over tincup" and "skidded" that you either already know, or you can certainly figure out from context; there is absolutely no need for it, and it would be inexplicable if you didn't know that dictionary definitions are a fetish of ElRon's that play a large part in Dianetics/Scientology. The idea is that people don't understand things because they skip over the words they don't know, so you should always have a dictionary to hand, and never skip over a word, always look it up. They really had to strain to come up with this though; there simply are no hard words in this book. It's a juvenile. I loved it when I was ten, and I'm sure I didn't need a dictionary.

The story, I can't say whether it really may have been exciting when it came out; of course it's very tired now.
Travel at near-lightspeed, age slowly, your family and even your culture is dead when you come back, so you're isolated. We get it. The science is a little off-- ElRon thinks a light-hugging ship could actually reach the speed of light and get stuck there and never be able to slow down, and he thinks that the engines have to keep pushing to maintain speed-- but again, what do you expect in 1950? The story of this young guy getting Shanghaied by this Captain Ahab sort of character, it's extremely predictable, but again it may not have been so bad by the standards of pulp SF in 1950, and it does read surprisingly well. The individual sentences tend to be a little purple, and of course the characters are all cardboard cutouts, but the whole thing marches right along, goes down pretty smoothly. It might be as good as some Heinlein juveniles. It's actually a little bit fun to read.

(spoilers)

One thing, though, that's pretty jarring to modern sensibilities-- I imagine it didn't bother too many people at the time, certainly not John Campbell, the editor who published it in Astounding-- is the ending, with its big reveal.

The book's mostly about the protagonist's great tragic loss of his girlfriend and his life in his time, and then his gradual adjustment to his new life; the ship comes back to Earth a few times and there's never anything going on that's attractive or interesting to the characters, or us, and we never actually see any of the interstellar colonies, either. Making a fortune trading, exploring the universe, it's not any fun for the characters or the reader. What we do find out, at the end, is that there are many intelligent races in the universe. They're not interesting either; in fact, we hate them, because they're not us, and we kill them whenever we have a chance. That is the high destiny that Captain Jocelyn has been grooming young Alan Corday for. This is why the "Long Passage' traders have to keep on truckin', even though it's such a terrible life; they have to make sure no nonhuman races ever get to the point where they could threaten humanity. Ick. Ho-hum. Is that it? It's anticlimactic, underwhelming, disgusting, boring and horrifying all at once. (Kind of like Scientology, I imagine ;-) The existence of alien races is only introduced near the end of the book, which adds to the anticlimactic nature of it. You don't get a chance to hate or fear the nasty aliens; you just hear at the end that that's what it's all about, that there are aliens, and you're just supposed to go along unquestioningly with the idea that the aliens all have to be killed and kept down. Really disgusting.

I honestly would prefer to give this book one star or less, for the disgusting ending, or its maculate origin, or the propaganda, but it really reads pretty well, especially for something from 1950, so I think it deserves every bit of two stars. Three might not be crazy, but I'm going with two, I think that's about right. I might give it two and a half if I could. It's odd that the Scientologists made such a big deal out of the utterly repulsive and unreadable Battlefield Earth; this is infinitely better than that, actually not bad at all, and would have been a much better choice, at least on literary merits.

I loved this novel so much that I read it twice when it recently came out in hardcover. The characterization, plot line, drama and writing style is the work of a master--it will really grab you.