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Supposedly a Science Fiction Masterwork. I can see why, but I'm not sure I agree. It depicts a very realistic future with scarce resources, where you are either very rich and live a luxury life, or are very poor and live a hard-working life in mines etc. One way to escape the poor life is to volunteer for a possibly very rewarding exploration of the universe in recently discovered alien spaceships, of which nobody knows how they work or where they go. This is galactic russian roulette though: you may come back with riches from another planet, you may come back with nothing, you may come back dead, or you may not come back at all. In the story it becomes clear that life as a space-explorer isn't great: you have to live on a desolate, boring spacestation, you have to pay your bills and food, and the only way to earn money is to gamble your life on an alien spaceship and hope to return with valuables. Otherwise you'll have to gamble your life again and again. The only distractions from constantly living in fearful anticipation of the next (potentially deadly) exploration are sex, drugs, alcohol and gambling. The story starts off slow, focusing on Bob's lifestory. In one storyline we see his story develop chronological, in the other storyline we see Bob discuss his lifestory in the future with his robotic psychiatrist. From the first page you know Bob is troubled by some experience in his life, but he somehow ended up rich. The chronological storyline and the psychiatrical storyline slowly work towards a combined climax, you can see this climax coming from page one. This helps to drive the point of the author home; life as space-explorer is extremely boring and almost hopeless; hardly anything happens, it only exist out of fearful anticipation and distractions, and like with gambling you know you're probably going to end up pretty bad. The main character isn't likeable, he is just an ordinary egocentric guy, that behaves much like anybody would do in such a situation. Try to make the best of it and procrastinate a lot. All in all, not much happens in the story, it moves very slowly and at times it's almost boring. But since you know (from the psychiatric storyline) that something dramatic will happen, you read on. Eventually you get to the climax, and by then you'll have an understanding (maybe even sympathy) for the characters, you'll have 'experienced' how boring and hopeless life is for them, you can feel their anticipation; waiting for that one lucky gamble, just as you're waiting for that one moment of climax. And I have to admit that I read the last ten pages three times over, just to try to grasp the "dramaticness" of the climax. This might be the most dramatic ending to a (love)story I have ever read. It is odd to have read 200+ pages without really caring about any of the characters or events, and then to read the last ten pages in absolute disbelief. If I could, I would only recommend to read the last few pages of the book, since they are an amazing dramatic ending. However, they would mean nothing without the very slow and boring buildup from the other pages. Now, I can only advise you to be prepared for a long, slow story, which at times feels rather outdated and doesn't feature very likeable characters. However, it is an excellent imagining of how a capitalistic system would handle space-exploration and how an individual person would be valued in that system.

2022-09-01 18:41