My favorite science fiction books are usually "idea" driven. By this, I mean that characters are introduced only to move the story along. Authors that come to mind are Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Greg Egan etc.At the other end of the spectrum are authors like Robert Charles Wilson, Frank Herbert and Ursula K. LeGuin who start with a "what if?" scenario and study how it effects the lives of the people in the book. While I don't dislike these kinds of books, I generally tend to forget them rather quickly. I find bizarre aliens and physics much more interesting in their own right than case studies in how people come to terms with "The Big Questions". So, what does this have to with "The Dark Beyond the Stars"? Well, I would place this novel almost entirely in the second category above, with the big difference being that 5 months after I finished it, I still vividly recall many scenes from the book.A lot of the book revolved around the day to day lives of the crew of a generational ship, which I found extremely well written. None of motivations or actions of any of the characters felt forced.I also really liked that the question of whether or not the crew actually encountered alien life was left open (mostly!). A lot of times, an author runs the risk of over explaining things, but not here!In summary, this book really is the best of its kind. You would be doing yourself a great disservice to pass this up!
There seem to be two main subgenres in SF: action packed or meditative.This work belongs to the second and has many merits but, after reading a couple of them, I really begin to think they hardly make for good reads: their quality may differ -here it is definitely high- but in the end they always end by being gloom, bleak, depressing; the evil innate in human society is usually a relevant theme.In this book plot is tight, writing fine and always to the point; a perfectly believable social structure is outlined and peopled by magnificent characters, extremely well rounded.A collateral but interesting aspect of this novel is the description of sexual mores on spaceship Astron: sex is considered an ideal way to release the pressure of a monotonous life; every member of the crew feels free to mate with anyone else on bord and the gender of the occasional companion is not an issue. More permanent relationships may involve two, three or even small groups of people.These colourful details aside, after finishing this book I was left with nothing but a deep sense of sadness. If you love hard SF at his best you cannot miss it; if you look for pure entertainment just skip it.
Do You like book The Dark Beyond The Stars (1997)?
SF. Sab told me she was reading a book where this guy wakes up with amnesia and starts having lots of gay sex in space. Doesn't that sound like a great story? I thought so. Sadly, it's only a small part of this one. There's a lot of casual, same sex fooling around, but it's in a culture where "gay" doesn't have any meaning and sex has no taboos attached, so there's no sense of tension. It's barely even gay. I wanted more of an exploration of the sexual politics of the spaceship's closed society, a society where the occupants must occasionally breed or die out, but this wasn't that book. It was the book where you're on a giant spaceship commissioned to seek out new worlds and your narrator's suffering from a wicked case of deja vu and being kind of annoying because you know there's something important he needs to remember, but he's too busy deluding himself and avoiding the subject to remember it. Overall, I give this a meh, but I liked it enough that I'm interested in trying something else by Robinson. Three stars for atmosphere -- a working, vaguely doomed spaceship and its crew, with a nice mix of sociology and science.
—Punk
I loved this book. I was eager to hear what was going to happen next, it reminds me of the Heinlien Juvenile books.As usual, William Dufris' narration was spot on.I did have a couple of complaints about the book, one of which is a spoiler (marked as such).The book features way too much homosexuality. This mental disorder adds nothing to the story and is repulsive.(view spoiler)[The alien ship at the very end felt so tacked on. Sparrow sounds excited about it, but for all he knows the aliens are the reason there are no longer any cities (humans?) on Earth. (hide spoiler)]
—J.
Good hard SF. Moby Dick meets Star Trek with a dash of Wandering Jew.The basis premise is flawed, though. The "Dark" is pictured as the starless void between two arms of the Milky Way which the multi-generational explorers must cross to find a richer area to search. But that's exactly where the earth is. The less crowded neighborhood between the arms may be the best place to look. Like Star Trek, Robinson commits the error of picturing it as having an "edge" with lots of starts on one side and a black void beyond.Oh, and they recycle bodies to recapture "trace elements" and "mass", yet they land on barren planets with sulfur and iron. All the trace elements and mass are there for the taking.
—Ron
