You start to wonder how worse things can get and what the end will be like. The storyline has a very interesting parallel development: as the eternal acceleration problem gets more extreme, the tensions on board the ship start to grow too. In the end, Poul lets it evolve into stable relationships. The female characters are sleeping around and the male characters have more traditional values and get upset.
Also, everyone in the book is having sex with each other under the name of open-minded feminism and romanticism, and it is causing all sorts of relationships problems and drama on board. A book published in the 70s in the US, and the only American in the book on board of the Leonora Christine is loud and violent, and can’t handle that the US is no longer the powerful hegemon among humanity.
Poul Anderson decided to kick against a couple of shins. The characters are all struggling with saying goodbye to Earth. There’s lots of science talk at the start to underscore the tone of the book.
Except, this Star Trek show goes the furthest away in time and space as is possible. 25 men and 25 women, a colonization mission to a planet 30 lightyears away. We meet the ship and its crew and the facilities on board. By some seen as the quintessential hard-SF book, the science drives the plot while the characters merely try to cope with what’s happening.Īt the start of the novel, a Star Trek like surrounding is sketched. A handful of his best have always remained in print, and Tau Zero is one of them. This was at a time when science fiction books were still around 200 pages, but a staggering bibliography nonetheless. Poul Anderson was a prolific SF and fantasy author, producing about a 100 books in 50 years’ time. As the ship approaches light speed, time slows down on board and the crew witness eons and galaxies go by, all the way up to the dissolution of the universe. The space ship Leonora Christine gets irreparably damaged and now can’t stop accelerating.
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