PREMIO ROBERT A. HEINLEN 2003

I really did not like this book. I expected to like it -- could not stand it. I gave up halfway through and skimmed through to the end to see what happened; I felt like the book just kind of meandered its way without any real impetus to the story.

You know, upon reflection, I disliked Gone Girl for the same reasons I disliked this book. Entirely too much navel gazing and too little story. ( )

Second reading, and it’s just confirming my first impressions that this is a beautifully contrived and beautifully written novel that resonates much more deeply than its space opera subject matter and its jaunty tone might suggest.

I love this novel. There, I’ve said it. Having been tempted by its “Spoiler Alert” title, when I first read it about 15 years ago, I remember being impressed by the way that Flynn cleverly strips away the artifice, and still manages to create almost unbearable suspense. He tells you exactly what’s going to happen. Much of the time, he tells you exactly what’s going on in the minds of each character, and exactly how they are fatally misreading what going on in the minds of any other given character. He creates a premise that requires massive infodumps – technical, historical, personal – to work. And IMHO, not only does it work, but it’s a delight. And not only is it a delight, it has fascinating depths and insights – insights into human nature, insights into how endeavours (personal, professional, perhaps even societal) work, or more crucially, don’t work. Insights into how one person can make a crazy, complicated system (again personal, professional, perhaps even societal) work, and how taking him/her away can result in the whole dam’ pack of card collapsing.
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.
( )

The River of Stars used to be one of the grand ships of the space lanes, a luxury magnetic sail passenger liner. Then she got older, and got demoted to carrying colonists to Mars. Then the fusion drive was developed, and The River lost a race, and started losing money, and a fusion drive was installed, and she became, of ficially, a hybrid ship. In reality, the sails and rigging were never used again. Eventually, a consortium bought her to keep her from being scrapped, and she became a tramp freighter.

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've got mixed emotions about the rating (4) I gave it ... maybe 3-1/2 might be closer to how I feel about it.
The prose is a lyrical thing of beauty, that's for sure (give it 5 for that). The plot is, well, a bit wandering. It seems to be more about the journey than the destination, and tends to be a bit slow-paced.
Don't read this when you're in the mood for fast-paced action! This is something to be savoured when you've got the time to sit and read. ( )