Customer Reviews

The Wreck of the River of Stars

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

I'm surprised that this book hasn't received more attention. It's an absolutely outstanding novel and is that rare case of genre fiction that transcends its genre and qualifies as literature. The story is simple --- the title says it all --- but compelling and the characterization, narration, and dialogue are sharp and intelligent. Best of all, the characters drive the story, rather than the other way around (a common failing in sf, where ideas are typically much more interesting than people). The entire novel takes place on The River of Stars, a Jovian merchant ship that has seen better days. Its crew and a single passenger are the only characters, and their backgrounds and interactions propel the story to its tragic conclusion. There are very few missteps in this book. I can think of two: that the characters of Corrigan and Gorgas seem fuzzily delineated (were they a single character in an earlier draft?) and that mysterious events in the pasts of the crew are somewhat abruptly and implausibly revealed at the end of the book. These are minor, however, given the overall success of the novel, which I highly recommend.

The MSS "River of Stars", the grandest of the great magsail liners, was launched in 2051. But the new Farnsworth fusion thrusters rang the death-knell for the magsails, and the now-obsolete liner was converted to fusion power in 2084. Two decades later, she has become a tramp freighter, bound for Dinwoody Poke, Jupiter space, on what will be her final voyage....

The Middle System -- Mars, the Belt, Jupiter space -- has not developed tidily, and the crew is made up of casualties of the great 21st-century space boom. RIVER is their story.

RIVER is a tour de force of character developement. We watch, riveted, as these motley misfits squabble, beef and try to cope, in the hermetic isolation of a ship becalmed in space -- two of the four Farnsworth engines have been ruined in a freak accident. The ship has 19 days to rebuild the engines, or she will pass the balk line, the point of no return, and drift endlessly away from settled space.

The repairs go slowly, but the ship's Engineer is a master of improvisation, and no one doubts he will fix the engines in time. No one, that is, but the oldest magsailors, who remember that the RIVER still has her old sails, unused for decades. They decide to fix them up, just in case. No one likes, or trusts, the acting captain, so they don't tell him (or the Engineer) their plan -- which has a large share of nostalgia for the lost Age of Sail. And there isn't enough superconducting hobartium on board to repair both engines and sails....

RIVER is a classical tragedy. Hubris, small mistakes, misunderstandings, mishaps and personal conflicts collide, echo and feed back in a downward spiral that will ultimately wreck the great ship. It wouldn't be fair to reveal the ending, but it's not a happy one. There are no real villains here, just flawed people trying to cope, at times heroically. But the Fates are not on their side.

Flynn tells his story in the third-person omniscient, with dry asides as he develops his characters. The omniscient narrator is the Greek chorus to the inevitable tragedy, which develops with an awful majesty. Flynn's writing is masterful. His pacing is grave, controlled, ironic. His characters will break your heart as they work, love, fight, grow, grieve and die. This is a wonderful book, easily Flynn's best. RIVER is set in the future of Flynn's popular near-future "Star" tetrology (also recommended), but is a standalone novel. This is the best hard-SF tragic novel of character yet written (though this is an uncrowded niche). And the cover art, by Stephan Martiniere, is just flat gorgeous. Highly recommended.

Review copyright 2003 by Peter D. Tillman

WHY YOU SHOULD READ:

Readers who delight working out puzzles involving people, this is an excellent book. As a study of group dynamics and clashing personality types within a disaster setting there really is nothing else like it in the genre. A good segment of the reading public would be those people who enjoy reading mysteries not so much for the dénouement but rather for how the various parties think and act would adore River. Also, those readers steeped in religion will find the allegorical implications of people operating in the absence of God profoundly affected by the ending of this tale.

WHY YOU SHOULD PASS:

This book requires an incredible amount of patience. There will be times that even these most patient readers will be tempted to give up and move on. The detailed examination of each and every crewmember plus their motivations and desires is so exhaustive and so unrelenting that you've really got to be into this kind of thing to even venture into the River. The plot moves at about the same pace as the stars wheel in the sky. For those readers who have blazed through English Lit courses in college, River reads, for good or ill, very much like a Henry James novel--horribly trying but with immense rewards. If you are the sort of reader who looks for immediate payoff--and that, without being insulting, is certainly a large body of the speculative fiction reading public--then you should look for something else.

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Most of the sf published in the last few years has left me bored or uninterested. In contrast, "The Wreck of the River of Stars" is a grand reminder of why science fiction once comprised most of my pleasure reading. It has that combination of solid writing, interesting characters, and ideas worth contemplating after the story is done, and more.

As others have indicated, Flynn was channeling Heinlein when he wrote this novel, and that doesn't detract from Flynn's own style. An example of this is the masterful way he gives his world a vivid past that is still in our future, not through the "infodumps" of less polished writers (think Dan Brown), but through casual references interspersed in the characters' conversations.

Fans of Patrick O'Brian may also come away from River thinking that Mr. Flynn has spent more than a few hours in the company of Jack Aubrey and co., from the way he evokes the terminology of an earlier age of sail.

This excellent novel deserves all the accolades it has received.

Michael Flynn has written a great, character driven novel. The novel the follows the story of the crew of the interplanetary freighter _The River of Stars_, a ship that bridged the era of magnetic sailing ships and fusion propelled vessels, after the death of the captain that brought them together.

Flynn bends the traditional storm story of a ship in distress to the science fiction genre like a new sail to a mast. The best comparison would be to Joseph Conrad's novella, "Typhoon." Both examine a crew under the stress of great events and great danger. The characters are fairly well-characterized individuals with their own faults, flaws, and strengths. More than technology and technological change, the stories are driven by the character of the actors and loom at their histories, motivations, and, especially, faults. Flynn writes is a thoughtful style with a fluid, almost late 19th Century, use of language.

A similar adaptation of the genre is Susan Schwartz' 2001 novel, _Second Chances_, which takes Conrad's _Lord Jim_ to science fiction.

I read scifi for decades and then stopped. Too many brain-dead umpteen-part series with juvenile authors drawing cheap cartoons in their own heads.

This book, all by itself, restored my faith that Asimov, Heinlein, and Bradbury were not a dead end. Mr. Flynn has constructed a story with the sort of tragic inevitability an ancient Greek poet might envy. Strung on the ribs of a seamless technical logic of hardest science fiction is a minor epic of the grace, hubris, brilliance, and stupidity of humankind. This novel is a stunning achievement. It is literature.

I have no idea why certain people don't seem to "get it." Your Mileage May Vary, I guess. I suspect that our attention spans may have all been corroded by commercial media breathlessly racing toward the next commercial; the next cheap paperback.

All I know for sure is that this book goes on my shelf alongside "Gravity's Rainbow." I look forward to reading Mr. Flynn's subsequent books.

To me, the mark of an excellent story is that, when you look up from the pages, you feel a slight disorientation as you adjust back to reality. So with Flynn's novel. I am a fan of Patrick O'Brien novels. If you are as well, you understand (unless you're a mariner skilled in the sailing of tall ships) when I say I am mostly lost within the technicalities of shrouds, stays, lines, etc. The important thing is that O'Brien understands so fundamentally the world he's describing that I can't help but be swept along and utterly convinced of that world. Again, so with the Wreck of the River of Stars. If you like Tales, and all that that term implies, and an immersive, moving experience from your Science Fiction, count on two things: one, that you will be chronically disappointed. Two, you will love this book. I have been an Amazon member for ten years, and have bought more books than I care to acknowledge. This is the first review I felt moved to write. I hope Mr. Flynn has more gems in store for us.

I'm not often compelled to write a review of any book, much less a science fiction title, since this is a genre I generally turn to only seeking light entertainment. I know there is much more, but I don't spend a lot of time looking... but this is really a great book by any standard.

The story of The Riv' is not about adventure, but about how people interact, respond, live, love, grow, and-- yes-- die, in the hermetic crucible of a dying ship and a dying tradition of sailing. I was skeptical that Flynn could make some of the characters real-- the cast-offs that operate The River of Stars are a motley lot-- but before long I was entranced and deep in Flynn's spell.

Flynn is not an author who shies away from the opportunities for philosophy and judgement that come with a third-person, omniscient storyteller. The tone of the narrative borders on the mystical, and while there are moments which are a bit overwritten, I found myself enjoying his often deep insights into the human condition and how the characters live their lives (and how we live ours). Great stuff, even if it is-- as Flynn himself promises in the beginning-- an unabashed tragedy.

This is the best SF novel I've read in a long time, it's probably the best space opera I've ever read. The only recent SF novel I've enjoyed nearly as much was M. John Harrison's LIGHT. I can't believe it "only" won the Heinlein prize, it should have cleaned up the Hugo and Nebulas as well.

The characters are involving (Ship is just great!) and well thought out, the story is wonderfully constructed and has it's share of surprises. The narrator's expansions on the character's motivations, misunderstandings and personalities throughout the text are witty, wise and throughly involving. The author's evocation of a romantic future "age of sail" in space, and it's replacement by a more efficient, but more prosaic, technology is well done and emotionally nuanced as well as scientifically accurate.

This is the book to restore your faith in hard SF and beat off the flood of multi-volume fantasy garbage that is threatening to overwhelm us.

I started reading "The Wreck of the River of Stars" because someone on Amazon said it read like Jane Austen and that intrigued me.

The book by Michael Flynn wouldn't automatically make you think of Jane Austen. It's set aboard a former luxury liner the MS The River of Stars that plied the Earth-Mars route on solar sails. But the Farnsworth engine removed the need for sail and the once glorious ship has been turned into a hybrid tramp freighter that retained it MS designation -- Magnetic Sail -- only as an afterthought. The ship still carries its sails, almost forgotten and unused for years, but which may save the ship when the Farnsworth engines fail en route to Jupiter.

It's a ship of ghosts and the most recent ghost is Captain Evan Dodge Hand, who dies at the beginning of the book but whose presence, and most keenly his absence, is felt throughout the book. Captain Hand has assembled a crew of misfits, from the acting captain Stepan Gorgas to the engineer Ramakrishnan Bhatterji to the third in command Eugenie Satterthwaite. There are so many ghosts in this book, from all the captains of The River of Stars to the previous engineer who never it made to the ship after an EVA to the ship's artificial intelligence seemingly on the brink of self awareness.

There are few innocents on board and most of the characters are so damaged and so carefully examined by the omniscient narrator that there is no hero or heroine. I found it difficult to read and yet I read this 480 page novel in a few nights because beyond the Austen comparisons, and yes I will explain that, it evokes so many other wonderful stories. I've always had a fondness, you see, for the Great Eastern, the giant ship built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the engineering genius of the Victorian era. It was supposed to be so large that it could easily reward its investors by ferrying the emigrant trade to America, but a series of disasters brought it low until it ended its days as little more than a giant floating billboard, although it had one shining moment laying the trans-Atlantic cable that bridge the Old World and New. There is such a beautiful sadness in a ship made obsolete by time and technology.

And I've always had a fascination with sea stories that almost end in tragedy because good people fail to communicate, such as "The Caine Mutiny," or where obsession leads inexorably to tragedy, like "Moby Dick." In Flynn's book, the now first officer 'Abd al-Aziz Corrigan begins the tragedy when he thinks to use some of the long stowed solar sails to buy time until the Farnsworth engines can be repaired, but then Satterthwaite and cargo master Moth Ratline complicate matters when they suggest bringing the ship safely to port under full sail. And they carry their plans out in secret, not telling acting captain Gorgas who is too lost in memories of his lost wife and his lost career and drowning his sorrows not in drink but in endlessly replaying historical battles with the ship's artificial intelligence. And they fail to tell the engineer, who has no truck with sails, of their plans. And because they do not work openly, they work long hours in secret exhausting themselves.

Now as to Jane Austen: this book obviously isn't a Regency England costume drama, but the characters all suffer from an excess of pride and prejudice and sense and sensibility. Jealousy and anger and resentment and compassion and love fuel the dynamics of the people on the ship just as if they were in a Regency house party. Admittedly, the price of failure in Austen generally means you spend your life as a spinster instead of being doomed to a hyperbolic orbit that sends you out of the solar system.

All the characters here make incorrect assumptions. The crew believes that if the acting captain really wants something, like the position of a asteroid, he'll ask for it repeatedly. A young girl feels rejected by the engineer Bhatterji, unaware his taste tends more to young boys. The ship's only passenger falls for the awkward ship's doctor, unaware that it's a chemical romance.

It's tragedy and I hate tragedy and yet some of the best lines in literature come from tragedy. One of the great lines in this book, and the most Austen like, is: "She was the sort of person who, like God, creates others in her own image and, when they fail to behave as the image ought, labels them as disingenuous." This line sums up the tragedy of the book rather neatly. Everyone has an image they think they project but it's rarely the image that others perceive.

It almost makes you believe that any group of people can't help but fail in any endeavour, especially when you realize the roots of the tragedy can be traced all the way back to the dead captain Hand, who brought together a crew of damaged souls but like a king who fails to plan for his succession, fails them by dying.

I would highly recommend reading "The Wreck of the River of Stars" and I highly suspect you will feel rewarded for having read it. I can only warn you that I will likely never re-read it because I hate tragedy.