Book review: the Enemy Stars

Poul Anderson. Not Tau Zero (which you should read, if you haven't yet), but perhaps somewhat similar. Except, darker. Perhaps too dark: it gets rather knotted up in people striving for exploration - the stars - even in the face of tragedy and death, as though that was controversial. People die on mountains all the time and people don't get so tied up about it.

The beginning is kinda nice, reminiscent of "the planters" of Engine Summer; but he fumbles it; instead of a vista of time, we're just swept forwards a bit to another sort of society with no particularly interesting properties. So his spaceships have (somehow) been accelerated to half light speed - this is neither plausible nor necessary - and are not permanently crewed, but instead there's a "mattercaster" which allows people to show up for one-month-long tours of duty. This is convenient for the story but doesn't make much sense; you'd leave them uncrewed for most of their time, no? And if you have a "mattercaster" why have fuel tanks? Why not cast the fuel? Nevermind; this is only pretending to be hard sci-fi.

Also somewhat implausible is the idea that this ship's voyage is so long; there are plenty of much closer stars. Or that they would even see the "dead star" much less want to or be able to divert to it. Again, never mind.

After that we're in "human" terrain which - to be 'onest wiv yer guv - isn't the strong point of sci-fi and not what I want to read it for, either. But the connection to Kipling is well done, and mostly rescues that bit.