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Michael Flynn has written the best SF in the tradition of Robert A. Heinlein of the last decade. His major work was the Firestar sequence, a four-book future history. "As Robert A. Heinlein did and all too few have done since, Michael Flynn writes about the near future as if he'd been there and was bringing back reports of what he'd seen," said Harry Turtledove. Now, in this sweeping standalone epic of the spaceways, Flynn grows again in stature, with an SF novel worthy of the master himself. Indeed, if Heinlein's famous character, the space-faring poet Rhysling, had ever written a novel, this would be it. This is a story of the glory that was. In the days of the great sailing ships in the mid-21st century, when magnetic sails drew cargo and passengers alike to every corner of the Solar System, sailors had the highest status of all spacemen, and the crew of the luxury liner "The River of Stars," the highest among all sailors. But development of the Farnsworth fusion drive doomed the sailing ships and now "The River of Stars "is the last of its kind, retrofitted with engines, her mast vestigial, her sails unraised for years. An ungainly hybrid, she operates in the late years of the century as a mere tramp freighter among the outer planets, and her crew is a motley group of misfits. Stepan Gorgas is the escapist executive officer who becomes captain. Ramakrishnan Bhatterji is the chief engineer who disdains him. Eugenie Satterwaithe, once a captain herself, is third officer and, for form's sake, sailing master. When an unlikely and catastrophic engine failure strikes "The River," Bhatterji is confident he can effect repairs with heroic engineering, but Satterwaithe and the other sailors among the crew plot to save her with a glorious last gasp for the old ways, mesmerized by a vision of arriving at Jupiter proudly under sail. The story of their doom has the power, the poetry, and the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. This is a great science fiction novel, Flynn's best yet.… (more)
User reviews
Flynn's tale is of a ship that sailed the solar winds majestically and with pride and panache... but the time for sailing that way, for not using engines, is long past. Now the ship has been retrofitted, but instead of being a grand liner, it's now just a cargo ship, and the crew is much reduced from its heyday. Even just summarizing the setup gives you a sense that the story's tone and style is all elegiac, with some tongue-in-cheek humor and puns thrown in to leaven the mood a little.
Of course, when the engines encounter a problem, and the old sailors see a chance to revisit their old glory, the situation slowly falls apart. And it is slow, and all of the dozen characters or so have their flaw: one is too officious, one too secretive, one too insensitive, etc. The book spins out and lets you see how each one in turn allowed for matters to get worse, until the ship was doomed.
I felt for the characters, who I thought were well-written, honest and interesting, and the sci-fi parts of it were pretty well worked out, too. This was the most satisfying read for the genre I've had in a while, and I would certainly recommend it to others, even non-sci-fi fans. The story's that strong, as long as you're willing to accept the sci-fi elements.
Then her latest captain, Evan Dodge Hand, died while en route from Mars to Jupiter. And then her luck turned bad.
When two of her four Farnsworth engines are wrecked by a freak encounter with an asteroid (even in the asteroid belt, space is mostly empty), the crew, minus Evan Hand, has to get her fixed quickly or they'll miss turnover and not reach Jupiter orbit when Jupiter's there. Unfortunately, the crew minus Evan Hand is a disaster waiting to happen. Some of them are survivors of the old sailing days, and regard engines as an abomination. Some of them are of the generat ion that grew up regarding sails as old-fashioned and obviously inferior, while the cargo wranglers and the engineer's mate, Miko, are too young to regard sails as anything but stories out of a romantic past. Stepan Gorgas, the new acting captain, is obsessed with detail and contingency, and very slow to make decisions. He tends to assume that everyone has worked out the contingencies as thoroughly as he has, and that therefore when he gives order, it will be followed immediately without need for further explanation or follow-up. Most of the crew has come to assume that if Gorgas really wants something, he'll ask again. The engineer, Ram Bhatterji, is a firm believer in spontaneity and inspiration, not careful and detailed planning. 'Abd al-Aziz Corrigan, the second officer, is rigidly by-the-rules, hates the unexpected, and finds Gorgas and Bhatterji about equally incomprehensible. The third officer, Eugenie Satterwaithe, is also the sailing master (required by the ship's hybrid designation), and was briefly the captain of The River in the last of her sailing days and when she was converted to fusion drive. This explains why the cargo master, Moth Ratline, the longest-serving member of the crew (he came aboard as a cabin boy in the luxury liner days), tends to address her as "captain", to the ever-lovin' delight of Gorgas and Corrigan.
From there on down the characters start to get strange.
It's important to note that this mismatch of characters apparently worked, under Evan Hand. He chose his crew based on the potential he saw in them, put the effort forth to make sure he got that potential out of him while he was in command, and didn't properly think through what would happen if he weren't there.
None of the crew is incompetent. Not one of them intends to be irresponsible. They're all trying to do their best to save the ship--but in the right way, their way. And Bhatterji and Satterwaithe, in particular, aren't really trying to save the same ship.
The old sailors of the crew--Corrigan, Satterwaithe, Ratline (and Hand until he died)--meet for dinner every Thursday night, and are joined from time to time by other officers or senior crew and, on this trip, the passenger, Bigelow Fife. When Bhatterji's repairs start to look like taking too long and not being especially carefully planned, this little group starts to think about the sails, and decide to check them out and do whatever repair work is necessary so that, when the time comes, they can present Gorgas with another option, sailing The River into port one last time. And so begins a great struggle for resources, on the mundane level, and, on another level, the soul of the ship.
It's no spoiler to say what the title says: this is a tragedy. What's important is that it's a well-done tragedy; no one here does anything stupid just because the plot requires it. These characters, with their mix of virtues and flaws and virtues that are flaws would make just these kinds of mistakes. You might want to whack them on the head with the book, but you won't want to whack Flynn on the head with it.
This is a good read, well worth a few hours' time.
I love this novel. There, I’ve said it. Having been tempted by
Why do I love this book? Wellll ….
1) It’s about so much more than (wait for it) the wreck of the MSS River of Stars, the formerly fabulous luxury liner that used to ferry the great and the good back and forth between the planets, asteroids and artificial habitats of the inner Solar System. This novel is about every toxic workplan, and failed venture; how it got that way, and what might have been done to make it different. As Flynn tells it, this is something of a ghost story, and the catastrophe of the title results on one crucial absence (which commences on page 4 of my edition) and gradually, slowly, inexorably develops as a disparate bunch of misfits follow their own agendas, misunderstand their colleagues motivations, and just don’t listen. If that doesn’t sound familiar, you have never had to work with other people. If you are recently emerged from a bad working situation, you might have to read River as you’re hiding behind the sofa, peeping through the fingers held to your horrified eyes. This will be hard, but worth it.
2) I love Flynn’s style. Yes, sometimes (often ... always …) he gets a bit carried away with himself. In the immortal words of Prime Minister Benjamin Disreali, he can be “inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.” So what? When the verbosity is this exuberant, when the asides are this snarky – what’s not to love? And Flynn is comfortable with poking fun at himself ...
English, ‘Kiru decided, had too many words, and its speakers felt obliged to play with the extra ones.
3) The worldbuilding is fabulous. Flynn constructs a history. There is technology, there are societies, each with every different, and very plausible, norms and outlooks. There is biology, and prejudice. There are recipes, and sea chanties. There are great names, names that are so almost not weird, but still very SF … I want my next grandchild to be named The Lotus Jewel, but I don’t think my daughter and her partner will buy it …
I also love the way that Flynn plays with the tropes of other genres – this is, as I suggest above, a ghost story. It’s also SF’s answer to Patrick O’Brien and Horatio Hornblower. It could also be used as a textbook in a (very forward looking and imaginative) MBA as a guide to how not to organize a major project. It’s a future history, but it’s also an alternative history, with its clever nods and winks to Titanic, the near cousin to MSS River of Stars, both in its glorious launch and great prospects and its Olympian, stuff-myths-are-made-of downfall. But River of Stars is what Titanic would have been had it survived that maiden voyage, and completed hundreds of Atlantic crossings, until the paint start to chip, the fabulous fittings were damaged, or sold off, and (like Titanic’s sister ship, Olympic), she became a hospital ship and was torpedoed ignominiously in a forgotten episode of WWI.
Flynn’s lowering sense of a catastrophe about to happen even echoes Thomas Hardy’s wonderful poem on Titanic, “The Convergence of the Twain” …
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
I love this novel.
There are, perhaps, two “elephants in the room” of my 5-star rating that I feel I have to address. I can love this novel, and give it a 5-star review, and still admit that it’s not perfect. (In my rating system, a novel doesn’t have to be perfect to get 5-stars: it just has to be better than it needed to be, and memorable in a way that I know I will never forget … )
First, are there times when reasonable people can agree that Flynn may have gotten carried away, and The Wreck of The River of Stars could have benefited from a tuck and a trim? Well … no. One of the things I enjoyed is the way that the inevitable seems to happen in real time – day by day at first, and then, as the catastrophe reaches its climax, minute by minute. I loved the detail. I loved the backstories, I loved the technology (and I am not a natural techie …).
The other aspect of the novel, which I had forgotten, but now makes me uncomfortable, is the story arc of the character of Miko, the apprentice engineer. She’s a teenage girl who has escaped a traumatic, abusive childhood, and emerged from that experience with a burning, obsessive desire to lose her virginity to an unprepossessing middle age man. Eye roll ... Flynn would probably object to that description, but hey, I call ’em as I see ‘em. Her relationships with the three men on the River of Stars who are in positions of authority over her, who know her tragic backstory, and who ought to know better run the gamut from plausible (if still very wrong), to exploitative, to downright creepy wish-fulfilment . This is a great shame in a novel that, otherwise, depicts a future that is realistically diverse, and still sensitive to the pressure of that diversity.
Still, highly recommended.
You know, upon reflection, I disliked Gone Girl for