shanelleb

Holy crap is this a hard book. So much advanced math it makes my head hurt. At only 200 pages, I thought I’d be able to read this puppy in twenty-four hours. Ha! Fat chance. It took me three summer days to slog through this classic. (No wonder the poor book is out of print.) The premise is so cool, though: a small colonist spaceship breaks its brakes and accelerates towards the speed of light and the end/beginning of time! And all based on real physics (for the time). But then the author goes and ruins it by populating his book with characters, the most inhuman collection of humans a starship has ever collected. What a bunch of robots. The characters are thin and often embarrassing to read about, awkward reminders of how the sixties expected men and women to act. And the amount of free love and sex the characters engage in...well, I assume the backup title was The Super-Speedy Horizontal Spaceman Merry-Go-Round of Love. Someone needs to reboot this book, because the basic idea is awesome, and the potential for real character growth and conflict is unlimited. Actually, you know who would make a great reboot would be Alastair Reynolds, with a touch of Stephen King’s people-trapped-in-small-places-going-crazy-on-each-other-isms. That would be a great book. Well, at least I knocked off one more book from my SciFi to-read list. Here’s hoping the next classic stands the test of time just a little bit better.

2023-07-22 00:01