The Wreck of the River of Stars, despite winning the Heinlein award, is a book well suited to it’s title. It bears the unfortunate stigma of a tragedy with little impact, a disaster with little meaning. It lacks impact. If one is to consider the obvious parallels, it is a failure of Titanic proportions.
There are many reasons for this. The writing is extremely awkward at times; unfocused and peppered with authorial asides and pointless digressions. The characters and their interactions with one another are complex, but unrealistic, bordering on the dysfunctional even before things start to go wrong. Subplots meander about the novel with little connection to one another and little conclusion by the end. But perhaps most damning, the tale promises at least a temporary glory, a romantic ideal of a ship sailing the solar wind, yet fails even to deliver that. The entire exercise is tawdry and futile.
The premise is simple: ships fly between the planets by means of a traditional “fusion torch” or the somewhat more elegant “solar sail” (formed with a ring of superconductive material and a magnetic field). The sailing ships harken back to the days of ships sailing the oceans of earth, complete with islands to avoid, currents to navigate, and rigging to tend… and just like the steamships on Earth, ships with the “fusion torch” drive rendered the entire technology obsolete.
The River of Stars is a hybrid vessel, carrying both a solar sail and a retrofitted fusion torch drive. The ship was once well-known, the most famous of the solar sail spacecraft, but the new drive system brought about a dramatic reversal of fortune; with its sails permanently stowed, the River of Stars limps from port to port, slowly descending into obsolescence.
Until the fusion torch drive fails midway to Jupiter.
While the chief engineer struggles to repair the fusion torch, the token solar sail crew plot to unfurl their sails and ride into port upon the solar wind. They hope that one last, desperate gesture will save their lives and restore the glory of their ship in its day.
It’s a compelling summary, but unfortunately the implementation doesn’t reach any of those lofty heights. This one’s not worth it.
