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Author Topic:   Tau Zero
Alien Investor
Alpha Geek

Posts: 349
From: New York City
Registered: Jan 2000

posted February 10, 2002 00:09     Click Here to See the Profile for Alien Investor   Click Here to Email Alien Investor     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I know already that at least one other AY2K'er has read this book!

_Tau Zero_ by Poul Anderson was published in 1970. But it feels more like 1950, solidly in the middle of the golden age (started with Campbell, ended with Ellison). That's fine with me; I dig that era.

There is one clue that it's post-1965: the sexual mores on board the starship. That part of the book reminds me of the later Heinlein novels, with many TTB's making countless offers to all the male characters. Sometimes it's poignant and moving but usually it seems superficial to me.

The protagonist of the book is a security chief. He is effective but not likeable. I enjoyed this aspect of _Tau Zero_ quite a bit. Anderson gets into the character of a man who is different from me, probably different from most science fiction readers, and shows this man in operation, working to save the ship. Anderson challenges the reader to face the dichotomy of this man's bad personality and good character.

The scientific proposition of _Tau Zero_ was new to me (not relativity itself, geesh, everybody knows about time dilation and length contraction -- but the speculation that Anderson built on the relativistic voyage). Two weeks after reading the book, I find that it has grown on me. It's a genuinely new approach to an issue of life and death; a new vector in the basis set of things that I think about the universe.

The plot is so large, though, that Anderson has trouble handling it. At the beginning of the story he has concrete distances and speeds and tau factors. As the story progresses, he writes less quantitatively, and eventually slides into the Doc Smith Lensman school of super-mega-this yielding to ultra-giga-that giving way to hyper-tera-other-thing.

I think this comes from a mismatch: the scientific arc of the story demands a certain scale. But over this scale, there are not many actual events, and there are long stretches where the characters can do nothing except wait for the next event. Unfortunately the plot development becomes as monotonous to the reader as it does to the characters.

Anderson could remedy this by working harder on the character development and character interaction during this time. There is one plot here about the security chief's operations on the ship. I liked this, but it wasn't enough to fill up a dozen chapters. There were a couple of sub-stories about projects on the ship and personal relations on the ship. These bits of stories about the ship didn't engage me, and they didn't seem to engage the characters on board, either. Projects such as the hydroponic garden project or the alien biology project didn't ever resolve.

Overall, _Tau Zero_ felt like an old golden age novelette, where the characters are there in order for the plot to operate. This is fine in a novelette but it doesn't sustain a novel.

I read _Tau Zero_ on a flight from Chicago to San Jose in the evening, after dark. I had two empty seats next to me. I was able to lie down across all three seats in the dark, turn the overhead spot onto the book, and read about the voyage of the <i>Leonora Christine</i> while I listened to the rumble of jet engines push me as fast as a civilian on this earth can travel to a place where I didn't really want to go. I found these conditions to resonate with _Tau Zero_ very nicely.

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quantumfluff
Highlie

Posts: 672
From: the ether
Registered: Jun 2000

posted February 10, 2002 10:20     Click Here to See the Profile for quantumfluff   Click Here to Email quantumfluff     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
quote:
Originally posted by Alien Investor:
... As the story progresses, he writes less quantitatively, and eventually slides into the Doc Smith Lensman school of super-mega-this yielding to ultra-giga-that giving way to hyper-tera-other-thing. ...

Hey, no knockin' E.E. Doc Smith! He may not have had the science part of SF down, but he did get that swash-buckling adventure going. I wanted to be a vortex blaster when I grew up.

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Evilbunny
Highlie

Posts: 614
From: A Calculus book near you...
Registered: Nov 2001

posted February 10, 2002 16:23     Click Here to See the Profile for Evilbunny   Click Here to Email Evilbunny     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Hey! Did TauZero hear about this?

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macadddikt18
SuperBlabberMouth!

Posts: 1126
From: In a world beyond your understanding
Registered: Jan 2002

posted February 11, 2002 05:32     Click Here to See the Profile for macadddikt18   Click Here to Email macadddikt18     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
That must be where he got his name from. It has to be.
Nayt

------------------
Through out your life you will wonder who THEY are. Then you find out who THEY really are. From then on you live you life in fear of THEM and you wish you never knew who THEY were.

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Tau Zero
BlabberMouth, the Next Generation.

Posts: 1685
From:
Registered: Jan 2000

posted February 11, 2002 10:59     Click Here to See the Profile for Tau Zero     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Of course it is.� I've been a Poul Anderson fan for a very long time.

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Swiss Mercenary
BlabberMouth, the Next Generation.

Posts: 1461
From: All the way from the land of Chocolate, Cheese and Cuckoo Clocks.
Registered: Feb 2000

posted February 13, 2002 07:36     Click Here to See the Profile for Swiss Mercenary   Click Here to Email Swiss Mercenary     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Ahh, Tau Zero, the first book I ever read by Poul Anderson.

My first intro into sci-fi was through E.E. Doc Smith, with the Lensmen and Skylark series as well as the other series about the brother and sister heavy worlder secret agents (who were circus artists).

It you can, read Space Viking by H.Beam Piper, as a matter of fact, read anything by H.Beam Piper.

Favorite book by Anderson still has to be 'Three Hearts and Three Lions'.

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