The Wreck of the River of Stars (Hardcover)

by Michael Flynn (Author) "They called her The River of Stars and she spread her superconducting sails to the solar wind in 2051..." (more)
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
In his excellent novel The Wreck of The River of Stars, Michael Flynn looks back on the romantic Age of Sail: the second, high-tech Age of Sail, when spaceships with vast magnetic sails rode the solar winds across the immense ocean of space, and the greatest of the luxury spaceliners was The River of Stars. But the second Age of Sail is dead: the magnetic sails all were struck, and the spaceships all were retrofitted with the new Farnsworth fusion drive. Once a legend, The River of Stars is now a tramp cargo freighter, plying the outer planets with a scanty crew of men and women with questionable pasts, private agendas, and more than a little interpersonal friction.

When a bizarre failure disables the Farnsworth engines driving The River of Stars, the crew has a problem no Earthly sailor ever faced: their ports don't stay put. If The River of Stars doesn't arrive on schedule, Jupiter will be somewhere else in its enormous orbit. That means the damaged ship will speed out of the solar system and drift forever among the stars. The crew's only hope appears to be the magnetic sail. But recreating a long-gone high-tech sail isn't the worst problem this motley crew faces. To survive, they must achieve something even more herculean: they must overcome their own intricately entangled fears, hatreds, power struggles, and romantic disasters. --Cynthia Ward

From Publishers Weekly
The accomplished Flynn (In the Country of the Blind) offers more character analysis than action and adventure in this stand-alone novel, which fans of more cerebral SF will find thoroughly absorbing. Late in the 21st century, The River of Stars, an aging tramp freighter whose magnetic sails once plied the entire solar system, is reduced to trading in the Middle System past Jupiter. Personality conflicts exacerbate technical problems among the misfit crew, operating on a shoestring budget. After the death of beloved Captain Hand, his successor, self-absorbed First Officer Gorgas, quickly loses control. When two of the River's four fusion-powered engines malfunction, precious resources are cannibalized in an ill-conceived attempt to get the magnetic sails working again. The inability of the ship's navigational systems to account for the sails leads to costly course corrections. Flynn layers the personalities and disasters in this complicated story with his usual attention to detail. One can find the precise, if understated, point at which this or that misjudgment results in tragedy that might otherwise have been averted. Inevitably, no one in command is able to make reasonable decisions. This is a sad but compelling study of (literally) explosive group dynamics in an arena where technology is critical to human life.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765300990
• ISBN-13: 978-0765300997
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #466,113 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Top-notch science fiction, January 19, 2004

By	Cynthia S. Froning "astrocyn" (Longmont, CO United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best hard-SF tragic novel of character yet written., November 10, 2003

By	Peter D. Tillman (Taos, NM USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Requires HUGE Patience but Rewards, August 12, 2004

By	Inchoatus.com "Inchoatus.com" (Greeley, CO United States) - See all my reviews

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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