Book review: Seed of Stars

I remember reading this, or rather I have memories related to reading this, way back when I were a lad. Mostly I remember the naughty bits; there is rather more unrestrained - though non-graphic - sex than most scifi manages.

The plot is somewhat more carefully thought through than immeadiately appears. For example, early on, Our Starship rescues some freighter from Kepler VI - their destination planet - which has been hit by a meteor, and there's some surgery and stuff, all very conventional-space-rescue stuff. But in the end it turns out that Our Hero has thereby contracted the Space Disease that does Terrible Things to embryos.

Having been written in the 1970's, the "space ship" is fully isomorphic to a battleship in its mode of motion, command structure, relations between officers and enlisted, and men and women. And actually most of the plot ditto; the aliens only come in right at the end, and they are kept at a safe distance. The aliens, having (as I gather) in the previous book tried to surgically alter humans into aliens are now trying to genetically engineer them; this seems like a hopelessly roundabout way of behaving (can you imagine us taking octopus-type aliens and trying to get them to give birth to humans?) and indeed it doesn't end up working, because when the humans give birth to monsters they, errrm, aren't very happy about it. Note incidentally that medical tech in the far-distant starfaring era hasn't advanced as far as ultrasound scans, obvs.

I can't really recommend the book. I only got it because of my vague memories and my curiousity as to how the book would match up.