The Wreck of the River of Stars.

The Wreck of the River of Stars

Michael Flynn 

Tor/Forge

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While trading in Middle System out past Jupiter, the aging craft, The River of Stars, is plagued by a tragedy of errors. For years, she's courted crisis, surviving on a shoestring budget, minimal supplies and equipment, carrying whatever cargo and passengers are to be had. Captain Hand has assembled a crew of misfits introduced first by their work designations. This is largely a novel of character. Ship's ghosts, human and otherwise, also play a central role. Hand is soon one of the ghosts, joining the list of dead mates and enemies and the long lost years of elegant travel under the outdated 'magnetic sails' of the ship's 'glory days'.

A series of technical failures might be overcome or prevented by a functional crew. Instead nostalgia and personal triumphs or failures from the past control their actions. Previously managed by Hand, the crew's flaws are destructive under his successor, the self-absorbed First Officer Gorgas. Two of the four 'new' Farnsworth engines malfunction and there is barely enough time, material or people to repair them. Precious resources are cannibalized in an ill-conceived attempt to also 'resurrect' the magnetic sails. The ships navigational systems can't account for the sails, resulting in costly course corrections.

Flynn layers the personalities and disasters in this complicated story with his usual attention to detail. One can find the precise, if understated, point at which this or that tragedy could have been avoided and who was at fault. Finally, it is inevitable that no one is making reasonable decisions. The sum is a sad but fascinating series of character studies and explosive (literally) group dynamics in an arena where technology is critical to human life.

Flynn is a very accomplished writer, capable of creating both a detailed and a fast-paced story. This book includes many technological references, both to 'future' technologies provided in very realistic detail and to the science behind them. There are many mysteries about characters, their relationships past and present, the physical sources of disasters and the crews' many oversights and errors. But each of these is eventually 'tied up' with an explanation that emerges usually in a conversation about something else. For example, we find out why the cable on the magnetic sail was cut by engineer Bhatterji several chapters after it has killed another unsuspecting crewmember. And like many other tragedies in this story it is the result of inattention and lack of communication rather than outright maliciousness.

Each of the characters is fascinating as a study of fortitude but also of self-destructive tendencies. In fact, this is one of the best pictures of 'office politics' gone awry that I've read in a long time. The infighting and blind spots are so typical of many human organizations that most readers will experience a little deja-vu, despite the alternative time-space of the actual events. The mysteries keep the reader's attention as much as the technical details of the ship's history and problems. On the other hand, while the work as a whole is very enjoyable, parts of it are dragged down by details of character development and the novel shows some evidence of sloppy editing, for example, the extremely colloquial phrase, 'isn't in it' or 'wasn't in it' appears far too often. The work will appeal to the more cerebral end of the SF reading community, as it's little action-adventure and lots of character analysis.