Product Description

Fifty men and women set out in the twenty-third century from Earth aboard an interstellar craft to travel to a planet some thirty light-years away. The ship will approach the speed of light and so (as Einstein predicted) subjective time on board will slow and so the journey of several decades will be of much shorter duration for the crew. But the ship's deceleration system is irreparably damaged when it hits a cloud of interstellar dust and acceleration continues toward light speed, tau zero. Soon the ship is speeding through galaxies and eons are passing on board the ship in the blink of an eye . . .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52282 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-09
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Synopsis
Fifty men and women set out in the twenty-third century from Earth aboard an interstellar craft to travel to a planet some thirty light-years away. The ship will approach the speed of light and so (as Einstein predicted) subjective time on board will slow and so the journey of several decades will be of much shorter duration for the crew. But the ship's deceleration system is irreparably damaged when it hits a cloud of interstellar dust and acceleration continues toward light speed, tau zero. Soon the ship is speeding through galaxies and eons are passing on board the ship in the blink of an eye ...

About the Author
Poul Anderson (1926-2001) was born in Pennsylvania of Scandinavian stock. He started publishing science fiction in 1947 and became one the great figures in the genre, serving as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America, winning many Hugo and Nebula awards, and also winning the Gandalf (Grand Master) Award.

Customer Reviews

Dull prose, flat characters, with tiny gems here and there.
Having read several Sci-Fi Masterworks like the beautiful "The Stars My Destination and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I approached this short novel with a curious and open mind. The story is about 25 male and 25 female scientists that go on a journey to find (and potentially occupy permanently) a new planet in the Virgo cluster.

During the voyage an accident occurs, and they find themselves unable to decelerate and, reaching closer and closer a speed near the speed of light, time outside the spaceship passes incredibly fast, due to relativistic effects. Eventually time is slowed down inside the spaceship, that billion of years pass on the outside, and eventually the whole Universe dies out, and they find a way to decelerate at the onset of the next Big Bang, setting on a planet similar to Earth.

Even if the story outline sounds intriguing, the problem is that it's a 190 pages long book in which the charactes and the events are really dull and uninteresting for the first 110 pages. The characters are mostly female nymphos or male sicophants acting like children at best. After page 110 or so things do get better, since things on the spaceship the characters are on start malfunctioning and things get nasty and they have to keep it together (and here takes charge a nazi-type guy telling everyone what to do, but it's presented well, with some psychological insight). Some characters start having a purpose instead of just being a name.

After 50 pages or so, the story goes downhill again , and Poul Anderson fails to create any action or suspense or introduce ideas in an interesting way. Instead, the universe collapses into a non-dimensional non-spatial point of nothing-ness (the Author fails to explain this) out of which the spaceship waits for it to re-enter the Big Bang phase (which honestly makes no sense at all, since there is no space out of the singularity). Finally the ending is rushed in, and the people on the spaceship find an Earth-like planet to settle in.


The only good thing about this book is the explanation of relativistic effects, wich is unfortunately done in a somehow uninteresting way, especially if you already know about special relativity.

So, what remains? very little unfortunately. 2 Stars

Hard sf with a soul
The fifty-strong crew of a colonisation starship hit a technical problem - they can't shut the drive off, so the ship will keep accelerating towards lightspeed, where the relativistic factor tau approaches zero (hence the title). Although this is billed as one of the hardest of sf books, I suppose because of the importance of the Bussard ramjets to the plot, I found the treatment of the relationships between the crew members very sympathetic and believable, and indeed it's really a story about them than about the technology (which to me moves it off the hard end of the sf spectrum). It's certainly way better than the Heinlein/Robinson Variable Star, which at one point features a similar situation.

Although the crew leave Earth at the very beginning of the book, there too Anderson has designed an interesting background, a post-nuclear war world in which the rest of humanity has agreed to put Sweden in charge (I think he refers also to this setting in There Will Be Time). So the leading members of the crew are Scandinavian and occasionally mutter in Swedish to each other.

Grand in scale... almost visionary.
This story is quite large - not in pages - but in idea. At first I wasn't sure I could get past the first few pages, it was a bit dry and I was finding it a bit difficult to get involved with the couple of characters we'd been introduced to. However, I did pick the book up again and persevered... what followed was yet another late night... one of a few actually.

This book brings you to the edge of all-encompassing desperation as you read on and on and hope that the crew of the ship have a future. You realise, as they do, that they're completely alone and you expect more of them, than do, would go mad and 'lose it' in a tin can zooming through interstellar space at speeds almost nearing incomprehension. Understanding that the further and the faster they go... the more time passes at an accelerated pace on Earth and it's not long before millions of years have passed and everyone realises that there really is no chance of them ever getting 'home' and really no home to speak of - none that would hold any relevance anyway.

And then, after a few years on board the ship, hurtling through and past entire galaxies, the Universe stops expanding and then starts to contract...