Customer Reviews

Tau Zero (SF Collector's Edition) (Gollancz Sf Collector's Edition)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

A space-ship designed to travel at speed, carrying explorers intending to colonise a distant star, gets into a bit of trouble and has its deceleration mechanism knocked out. Result - ship goes faster and faster and cannot stop. But this is no precursor of Speed for the space adventure generation. Despite the somewhat two-dimensional aspect of most of the characters, Anderson's novel develops into a meditation on life, the universe and everything. As the ship reaches almost unimaginable speeds, the universe outside the ship begins to observably age, leading to an inevitable conclusion with perhaps unexpected consequences. A well-handled science fiction meditation on the meaning of existence.

Poul Anderson's Tau Zero is one of the most revered Science Fiction classics - and with good reason. However, that doesn't mean it isn't sometimes tediously boring, the characters aren't one-dimensional, and the writing isn't down right clumsy. What saves the book from being chucked on to the ash heap of oblivion is the saving grace of most classic sci-fi - namely, one heck of a good idea. In Zero, Anderson acknowledges our collective desire to visit the stars and our yearning for a light speed drive to get there. However, asks Anderson, what would happen if such a device malfunctioned and we couldn't slow down? As we traveled fast and faster through space-time (yes, Anderson adds the temporal component) not only would we get farther away from Earth, we'd also move far into the future and the universe, itself, might appear to age right before our eyes! Now that's a scary concept! Such creativity makes up for a lot. That's why anyone who really likes the above situation would probably enjoy the book. However, be prepared to put up with some coal among that diamond of a concept.

If you like your SF hard and technical, Tau Zero is worth taking a look at. The main premise of the plot is based around relativity. The faster the ship goes, the 'slower' time becomes for the ship and its crew. With the result that the crew can travel immense distances in, what is for them, a few years time; and literally watch the universe age.
This is an intriguing premise, but the book, short as is, reads slow. Characterization is not well done. The crew seems to come apart psychologically too fast. After all they knew when they started they wouldn't see Earth again, and would be journeying for at least five years. I just don't believe a handpicked crew, would panic and despair in a few years, even if the universe around them had aged hundreds of millions of years.
And Sweden ruling the world?

This is perhaps the most epic book I've ever read. It's more epic than any "end of Earth" book and far more epic than any "human survivalist" story. This combines both "end of the entire universe" kind of story and "humans fight for survival" sort of story.

The spaceship, Leonora Christine, driven by a Bussard engine from earth becomes handicapped on its way to an earth-like planet. From there, the ship cannot decelerate and continues to pick up speed through 99% of light speed... and continues to climb to a billionth of a percent of light speed. Besides the 50 crew on the ship, the Leonora Christine itself feels like a character in need of sympathy. She hurls the crew through intrastellar space, time, the Milky Way, interstellar space, other remote galaxies and even further! Mind blowing originality. Wow.

The crew are a mild bunch of scientists and engineers. Being stuck together for three years with likelihood of being stuck together for possibly forever on their mission, they form non-traditional bonds. By that I mean they all have multiple partners. From this act, all the characters inevitably become involved with one another in one way or another, whether they like it or not. Self sufficient or self destructive?

I was telling a friend about this book recently, but I couldn't remember the title or author. No problem-type "bussard ramjet big bang novel" into Google and the first listing is for "Tau Zero. My point is, I couldn't remember the title, but the details of the book have stuck with me since I first read it darn near 20 years ago.

The other reviewers who have mentioned the less-than-perfect characterization of crew personalities and conflicts are right. But that's not what you remember. You remember the plot, and the crew's reaction to the plot. There is one part, quite near the end, which will stick with me forever. I won't spoil the book for you, but the ship is travelling through space, and shuddering every few seconds. When a crew member explains what causes those shudders, you may very well shudder yourself.

Read this one. You'll remember it for a long time.

A great story, heavy on science yet still readable by any sci-fi fan. The crew of a star ship are fated to a mind boggling adventure forced upon them.A group of potential human colonizers from Earth become stranded in space when they experience a very bad case of car trouble, causing them to miss their target star system and continue into the unknown. Due to their speed, time outside the ship moves much faster than within, and eventually they are the last of our kind known to exist as Earth's solar system dies out. Some of the characters are shallow, yet the Captain is solid and memorable. The characters' attempts to deal with the absence of Earth and, therefore, the absence of any familiar frame of reference in their new existence, are effective. Ultimately a triumphant story of human survival and will, and the human struggle to find a place in such a vast, unfamiliar universe. Earth truly seems small in this story, yet looms large in the minds of the nomadic crew, facing an uncertain future. An excellent and memorable book!

This book is based on Poul Anderson's short story "To Outlive Eternity," and I wish I had skipped the book and read the short story instead.

The plot is based on a great idea, which justifies it as a classic of hard science fiction, but I don't think it's enough to sustain an entire novel. Too much of the book is like a boring soap opera -- people are fighting, having affairs, etc. You don't get to the brilliant idea till the very end, and by then I was just ready for the book to end.

The short story is in his collection "To Outlive Eternity and Other Stories," which can be found on Amazon.

Bussard Ramjets were hot stuff in '60s SF. Authors who were tired of the conventions of faster-than-light (FTL) travel, which is really little more than a handy way of getting the story to planet X, loved the idea of a scientifically plausible stardrive. Putting it simply, a Bussard Ramjet works by collecting interstellar hydrogen in magnetic fields at the front of the ship, squeezing them in a fusion reactor, and squirting the result out of the back at near the speed of light. It overcomes the problem all spacecraft face, where any practical starship is all fuel and reaction mass and no payload, by collecting its fuel on the way. The original free lunch, as it were. A Bussard Ramjet can theoretically reach any speed short of the speed of light. A side-effect of relativity theory is that, for the occupants of the ship, time passes more slowly the closer the ship approaches the speed of light. The factor by which time slows down is known as tau. So if tau is .5 the journey will seem to the travellers to take only half as long as it does to observers at rest. The faster you go, the more tau reduces.

Hence the title. In this hard-SF novel - expanded from a short story - the ship Leonora Christine sustains damage to her externally-mounted braking system while travelling very close to the speed of light. Unfortunately, it is impossible to go outside the ship to fix it as the density of interstellar matter in the vicinity is so high that it will kill anyone who goes outside the hull. The only way to deal with this is to travel to an intergalactic region where matter density is lower. To only way to get there within the crew's lifetime is to accelerate until tau is close enough to zero...

So far, this is a great SF story premise. The reader is involved in the crew's dilemma - to slow down they have to go faster - and can have fun second-guessing the author's very credible plot developments. But in the expansion to short-novel length, Poul Anderson has to give us more than just a puzzle -! we have to start getting involved with the crew as well. And this is where things go wrong. The people-interest part feels all too tacked on. Had Poul Anderson spent more time and space fully developing his characters the balance of the novel would have shifted away from the original hard-SF premise. Done well, this would have been just fine. But the characters are not well developed; they act and speak as if they were in a TV mini-series.

In the end, Tau Zero falls between two stools - it's too long to be problem-centred hard SF, too short to be people-centred story SF.

For more on Bussard Ramjets, see almost anything published by Larry Niven in the late '60s and early '70s, but especially A World out of Time (aka Children of the State) which is another short-story to novel expansion which I think is far more successful.

The cover blurb of the edition I read said "The ultimate hard science fiction novel". I disagree with the "ultimate" part, but it is hard SF, and hard SF doesn't always age very well. Relativistic time dilation may have been amazing and mindblowing in 1970, but today it's an obvious component in hard science fiction (maybe thanks to this novel, but still). There are also some annoying scientific "facts" mentioned, such as the idea that neutrinos travel at the speed of light because they are massless. This isn't Anderson's fault, of course, since that is what almost everybody thought when this book was written. The cosmological idea used at the end of the book is also mostly abandoned today.

The parts of the book that don't deal with the effects of relativistic velocity are, quite frankly, really bad. The characters are annoying to the point that I hoped that they would all die in some horrible way due to radiation leakage or starvation. It feels like Anderson first wrote only the "hard SF" part of the book, then discovered that it was much too short and pasted in random parts of manuscripts from the worst TV soap operas he could find.

However, the book does push the idea of time dilation to the limit, which makes it interesting and worth reading if you manage to ignore the characters and their relations.

This book was very enjoyable, but my inner grammarian was rebeling against the poor punctuation and choppy writing style. Even though the writing was lacking, the grand ideas expressed in this book were able to compensate.

This book examines the members of society by looking at how the crew faces their existential problems. Some become Machavellian, others turn to religion, while some simply allow themselves to waste away. They all find ways to cope with hopeless odds and a future that is almost certainly destitute.

Intermingled with the crew narration, is a second grand perspective of the universe told by an unknown narrator. These sections are well done and truly convey the immensity of the universe.

I understand why this book has become a classic of sci-fi, and I recommend it to any sci-fi fan as well as any student who is currently taking physics. To deal with the equations and theorys of light and relativity is one thing, but to play with the consequences and to see where they may lead is, in some ways, more insightful and enjoyable than simply studying a textbook. Overall, I would put this on any sci-fi reader's booklist.