Joe and Jack Haldeman’s “There Is No Darkness” (1983) has features that have a lot to do with how much of science fiction has been traditionally been marketed. It is a revised and retitled edition of a book titled “Starschool” (1979)—which was a better title than the Shakespearean tag used in the revision. Pieces of “Starschool” originally appeared as stories in three different magazines. These stories have a common set of characters, which permits the common strategy for turning short magazine fiction into novel-length books. Since novels always sell better than short story collections, such works are almost always called novels rather than short story collections. Grafting these stories together is not always smooth, and one keeps thinking that Heinlein could have done it better and, in fact, did do it better in several places. All that being said, the stories are entertaining, and I give the Haledmans credit for their depiction of an interesting multispecies space habitat.
