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Lagrange #4
Trojan Orbit
[From the Baen Book edition]
Island One, the U.S.'s first space colony and symbol of an American Renaissance, is in trouble. Low morale, shoddy workmanship, unexplained malfunctions and avoidable accidents have become a way of life. Is it the Russians? Home-grown anti-technologists? Arabs afraid of cheap solar power from Space--or something even more sinister? When the President ordered secret agent Peter Kapitz to find out what was going on, Peter's first discovery is that the Soviets are indeed involved. His second is that they are not alone.
He will probably not live to make a third.
Island One, the U.S.'s first space colony and symbol of an American Renaissance, is in trouble. Low morale, shoddy workmanship, unexplained malfunctions and avoidable accidents have become a way of life. Is it the Russians? Home-grown anti-technologists? Arabs afraid of cheap solar power from Space--or something even more sinister? When the President ordered secret agent Peter Kapitz to find out what was going on, Peter's first discovery is that the Soviets are indeed involved. His second is that they are not alone.
He will probably not live to make a third.
- GenresScience FictionFiction
384 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1985
1 person is currently reading
30 people want to read
About the author
Mack Reynolds
508 books42 followersDallas McCord "Mack" Reynolds was an American science fiction writer. His pen names included Clark Collins, Mark Mallory, Guy McCord, Dallas Ross and Maxine Reynolds. Many of his stories were published in "Galaxy Magazine" and "Worlds of If Magazine". He was quite popular in the 1960s, but most of his work subsequently went out of print.
He was an active supporter of the Socialist Labor Party; his father, Verne Reynolds, was twice the SLP's Presidential candidate, in 1928 and 1932. Many of MR's stories use SLP jargon such as 'Industrial Feudalism' and most deal with economic issues in some way
Many of Reynolds' stories took place in Utopian societies, and many of which fulfilled L. L. Zamenhof's dream of Esperanto used worldwide as a universal second language. His novels predicted much that has come to pass, including pocket computers and a world-wide computer network with information available at one's fingertips.
Many of his novels were written within the context of a highly mobile society in which few people maintained a fixed residence, leading to "mobile voting" laws which allowed someone living out of the equivalent of a motor home to vote when and where they chose.
He was an active supporter of the Socialist Labor Party; his father, Verne Reynolds, was twice the SLP's Presidential candidate, in 1928 and 1932. Many of MR's stories use SLP jargon such as 'Industrial Feudalism' and most deal with economic issues in some way
Many of Reynolds' stories took place in Utopian societies, and many of which fulfilled L. L. Zamenhof's dream of Esperanto used worldwide as a universal second language. His novels predicted much that has come to pass, including pocket computers and a world-wide computer network with information available at one's fingertips.
Many of his novels were written within the context of a highly mobile society in which few people maintained a fixed residence, leading to "mobile voting" laws which allowed someone living out of the equivalent of a motor home to vote when and where they chose.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 12, 2019
Interesting story but the final chapter! Blurgh
September 17, 2024
review of
Mack Reynolds & Dean Ing's Trojan Orbit
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 16, 2024
"Before his death in 1983 after a long illness, Mack Reynolds had taken several novels to first-draft stage and then, perhaps driven by a sense of mortal urgency, gone on to the next. When it became clear that Mack would be unable to bring them to completion, I, with Mack's and later his estate's approval, commissioned Dean Ing to take the entire group to a fully polished state. Dean's purpose has not been to collaborate posthumously, but to finish them exactly as Mack Reynolds writing at the utter top of his form would have done." - p -ii
Keeping in mind the above explanation, I've read 2 of Ing's completions of Reynolds's 1st drafts: Deathwish World & The Other Time. Then I read Ing's own The Big Lifters out of curiousity of what his writing was like independent of Reynolds. The Big Lifters was more of a standard thriller &, yes, in the 2 cases I'd read of Ings finishing Reynolds they struck me as "exactly as Mack Reynolds writing". HOWEVER, Trojan Orbit seemed to have a bit more of the Ing thriller style to it so maybe there was more rm for Ing to play in in the ms to be completed.
This story takes place on the L5 space satellite. I've read & reviewed one other bk by Reynolds on the same subject from a different POV: Lagrange Five (the truncated review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... - the full review is no longer online). To quote from the review of that:
"There's an "Introduction" that begins:
""The Lagrange Five Project is developing so rapidly that it is all but impossible to keep up. New possibilities manifest themselves monthly, or even more often. There are even three newslatters devoted to space colonization and exploration. So it is that the reader must understand that this story is based upon the information available in the winter of 1976-1977. The present writer realizes that some of his background material will be antiquated before Lagrange Five can be rushed into print." - p -ii
"Given that this bk was copyrighted in 1979, it's not as if the author was wishful-thinking about a distant future that he was hoping wd come into existence; instead, it's more like he was imagining that such a thing cd've been possible in his own day & age."
What I didn't realize is that, apparently, Reynolds was writing about something actually incipient:
"L5 is the fifth Lagrangian Libration point. But what are libration points? They are locations where a spacecraft may be placed so as always to remain in the same position with respect to the Earth and the Moon.
"The French mathematician, Lagrange, in 1772, showed that there are five such points. Three of them lie on a line connecting the Earth and Moon; these are L1, L2, and L3. They are unstable; a body placed there and moved slightly will tend to move away, though it will not usually crash directly onto the Earth or Moon. The other two are L4 and L5. They lie at equal distance from Earth and Moon, in the Moon’s orbit, thus forming equilateral triangles with Earth and Moon. The Sun is in the picture, and it disturbs the orbits of spacecraft and colonies. It turns out (from an extremely messy calculation done only in 1968) that with the Sun in the picture, a colony could be placed not directly at L4 or L5, but rather in an orbit around one of these points. The orbit keeps the colony about 90,000 miles from its central libration point.
"But what has people excited is not what orbit might be used, but rather what could be done there. Space industries in high Earth orbits could manufacture solar power satellites (SPS) from lunar or asteroidal resources. Each SPS could deliver twice as much low cost, environmentally safe energy to Earth, via microwaves, as the Grand Coulee Dam, and forty five of them could meet the total present electrical power needs of the U.S.
"This activity would create tens of thousands of jobs in space as well as on Earth within as short a time as 15 years, and getting tens of thousands of us living and working in space is the goal of the L5 Society." - https://nss.org/what-is-l5/
For more information go here: https://nss.org/l5-news/ .
In Lagrange Five there's the following:
The central character is a detective brought from Earth to Lagrange Five, an idyllic small artificial planet, to search for a missing public figure.
"Rex turned abruptly to the chairman and snapped, "What did the police discover?"
""We have no police," Hans Ober said.
""Well, security, or whatever you call it."
"Ober shook his head. "We have no police of any kind connected with the Lagrange Five Project, nor any other kind of appurtenances of the State such as jails, or even courts in the ordinary sense of the word. We're civilized, Mr. Bader. Crime in the ordinary sense is unknoen in Lagrangia."" - p 28
In Trojan Orbit there're something like 200 police who turn out to be gangsters (of course many people say that police are already gangsters).
Coincidentally, while I was reading Trojan Orbit I was also reading the 4th issue of the anarchist journal Oak & I came across this in Jason Rodgers's article entitled "Escapism":
"Robert Anton Wilson was a major advocate of space migration. He adopted Tim Leary's acronym SMILE, which he explained as "Space Migration plus Increased Intelligence plus Life Extension means expansion of humanity into all space-time" (Wilson Cosmic 217). One of the more realistic applications of this concept was the L5 society, an advocacy group for the building of self-sustained space stations. According to Robert Anton Wilson, Lyndon LaRouche accused the L5 Soicety of being a "Gnostic cult" (Wilson Everything 280). Kenn Thomas brought up a strange fact related to claims of this sort. A group that merged with the L5 Society was the National Space Institute, a group founded in part by Werner Von Braun, a Nazi rocket scientist" - "Escapism", Jason Rodgers, Oak Journal, issue 4, p 48
The opening scene has a jewel thief approaching a forger in Mexico to try to get the papers necessary for him to escape Earth to hide-out in L5 after having pulled off a big theft.
"You weren't allowed to build in San Miguel other than in accord with the 17th and 18th century local architecture." - p 3
I don't know if it was Reynolds's or Ing's touch but the town where "Rocks", the jewel thief, goes is actually where Reynolds lived in Mexico:
"In 1953, the Reynoldses moved to San Miguel de Allende, in Guanajuato, Mexico" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mack_Re...
Cut to another main character, a Russian scientist, who's approached by a man from CHEKA:
"He said now, with all due respect in his voice, "The Komissya was never truly dissolved, Comrade Academician. You might say that it went underground in the face of popular disgust at that period some named Yezhovshchina, the same period in which your illustrious grandfather, Alexei Suvorov, the right arm of Lenin, uh, disappeared into Stalin's Lefortovo Prison."" - p 22
"Soviet politicians who opposed or criticized Stalin were removed from office and imprisoned or executed by the NKVD. Eventually, the purges were expanded to the Red Army and military high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society: intelligentsia, wealthy peasants —especially those lending out money or wealth (kulaks)—and professionals. As the scope of the purge widened, the omnipresent suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries began affecting civilian life. The purge reached its peak between September 1936 and August 1938 under the leadership of Nikolai Yezhov, hence the name Yezhovshchina." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_P...
Each chapter is preceded by an epigraph. Here's an excerpt from the one before chapter 3:
"["]The security groups of the Third Industrial Revolution will also be an interesting human institution to watch develop. They may begin as private groups. Or as mercenaries . . ."
"—G. Harry Stein, The Third Industrial Revolution." - p 31
Some of the epigraphs seem fictitious to me. In this case, there is a bk by a "G. Harry Stine" (note the slight difference in spelling) called The Third Industrial Revolution from 1979, the time when Lagrange Five was written. Stine's bk was published as SF by Ace. On its back cover is written:
""The first industrial revolution was ushered in by the steam engine and the second by the computer. The third, says Stine in this optimistic look into the future, has already been started by man's first halting steps into space. . .["]" - https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/lu...
This interests me b/c a mere 40+ yrs later the idea of the 3rd Industrial Revolution is no longer centered around an exodus off Earth but is centered instead around how the near omnipresence of computers & the internet & the decentralization of workers moving from office bldgs to work-at-home. This latter having been largely achieved by what is to some a 'necessity' during a 'pandemic' & to others a medical police state lockdown justified by a fear-mongering campaign. Given that the Spinning Jenny began a process of devaluing individual & somewhat independent labor & forcing it into a more subservient & dependent position controlled by an oligarchy it seems that this most recent 'industrial revolution' (if it can be accurately called that) forces labor into an even more extreme servitude by enforcing homogeneity thru what I call "PEER PRESSURE COOKERS" of social media. Hence the appearance of independence can be created while its opposite is imposed by subtext & unwritten laws of conformity.
"The other said politely, but not too politely, "You have to have a pass from Security before you can go out on your own, Mr. Carter."
""See here," Bruce told him, putting on an air of indignation. "I was invited to Island One by Doctor Ryan. I'm a journalist. I came up to do some articles. I'll go wherever I damn well please."" - p 81
Here's a detail that appeals to me, it's something I've imagined for decades:
"There were no signs. Obviously there was no need of them. Members of the community would know if they were restaurants, movie houses, stores, or whatever. As a matter of fact, that was one of the few desirable attributes of Lagrange City. No signs. They were a pet abomination of his back home." - p 84
"Rick had been eyeing the buildings they passed and decided that the only word was grim. Come to think of it , so were the expressions on most of the pedestrians they passed." - p 133
That contrasts w/ the description in the earlier Lagrange Five where the environment had been much more successfully sculpted to be pleasurable.
""They used to say we Hungarians were the only people in the world who could put a dime in a pay toilet and hit the jackpot["]" - p 183
But, no, even the Hungarians on L5 are losing out. It ain't living up to the hype.
""You know," Miller told him, "in all the reading I did before coming up here, and in all the Tri-Di shows I saw about the Lagrange Five Project, I never saw anything about the Security police. There's no mention of it in the public relations propaganda that Ron Rich puts out."" - p 191
The inspirational & affable figurehead of L5 is known for the bk where he put forth the vision. But, oh no!, don't tell us it was ghost-written!
"Bruce sighed. "Adam," he said, "whenever you see a well-written book with a non-pro's name on it as author, you can be sure it was ghosted by an old-timer. It takes years, plenty of them, to learn the tools of the trade in the writing game. President Eisenhower's Crusade was written by Quentin Reynolds. Prsident Nixon's Six Crises was done by a ghoset named Berlin. And did you think Mohammed Ali's autobiography was written by a doggerel-spouting boxer? Or that Lindberg wrote We? They might all have been capable men in their own fields, but they were not writers."" - p 200
"Adam Bloch took over again, "Gentlemen, what it amounts to is that Solomon Ryan and his closest associates at the first projections of the space colonization scheme were wide-eyed, enthusiastic dreamers, as impractical as the most unworldly college professors. They were physicists, mathematicians, chemists, and engineers who taught engineering rather practicing it. What is the old truisn? Those who can, do; and those who can't, teach." - p 276
Yep. I'm reminded of a job I had once where an architecture professor gave me a drawing to bring into existence as an installation. When I pointed out to her that she had 2 objects occupying the same space she didn't seem to understand what I meant.
Mack Reynolds & Dean Ing's Trojan Orbit
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 16, 2024
"Before his death in 1983 after a long illness, Mack Reynolds had taken several novels to first-draft stage and then, perhaps driven by a sense of mortal urgency, gone on to the next. When it became clear that Mack would be unable to bring them to completion, I, with Mack's and later his estate's approval, commissioned Dean Ing to take the entire group to a fully polished state. Dean's purpose has not been to collaborate posthumously, but to finish them exactly as Mack Reynolds writing at the utter top of his form would have done." - p -ii
Keeping in mind the above explanation, I've read 2 of Ing's completions of Reynolds's 1st drafts: Deathwish World & The Other Time. Then I read Ing's own The Big Lifters out of curiousity of what his writing was like independent of Reynolds. The Big Lifters was more of a standard thriller &, yes, in the 2 cases I'd read of Ings finishing Reynolds they struck me as "exactly as Mack Reynolds writing". HOWEVER, Trojan Orbit seemed to have a bit more of the Ing thriller style to it so maybe there was more rm for Ing to play in in the ms to be completed.
This story takes place on the L5 space satellite. I've read & reviewed one other bk by Reynolds on the same subject from a different POV: Lagrange Five (the truncated review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... - the full review is no longer online). To quote from the review of that:
"There's an "Introduction" that begins:
""The Lagrange Five Project is developing so rapidly that it is all but impossible to keep up. New possibilities manifest themselves monthly, or even more often. There are even three newslatters devoted to space colonization and exploration. So it is that the reader must understand that this story is based upon the information available in the winter of 1976-1977. The present writer realizes that some of his background material will be antiquated before Lagrange Five can be rushed into print." - p -ii
"Given that this bk was copyrighted in 1979, it's not as if the author was wishful-thinking about a distant future that he was hoping wd come into existence; instead, it's more like he was imagining that such a thing cd've been possible in his own day & age."
What I didn't realize is that, apparently, Reynolds was writing about something actually incipient:
"L5 is the fifth Lagrangian Libration point. But what are libration points? They are locations where a spacecraft may be placed so as always to remain in the same position with respect to the Earth and the Moon.
"The French mathematician, Lagrange, in 1772, showed that there are five such points. Three of them lie on a line connecting the Earth and Moon; these are L1, L2, and L3. They are unstable; a body placed there and moved slightly will tend to move away, though it will not usually crash directly onto the Earth or Moon. The other two are L4 and L5. They lie at equal distance from Earth and Moon, in the Moon’s orbit, thus forming equilateral triangles with Earth and Moon. The Sun is in the picture, and it disturbs the orbits of spacecraft and colonies. It turns out (from an extremely messy calculation done only in 1968) that with the Sun in the picture, a colony could be placed not directly at L4 or L5, but rather in an orbit around one of these points. The orbit keeps the colony about 90,000 miles from its central libration point.
"But what has people excited is not what orbit might be used, but rather what could be done there. Space industries in high Earth orbits could manufacture solar power satellites (SPS) from lunar or asteroidal resources. Each SPS could deliver twice as much low cost, environmentally safe energy to Earth, via microwaves, as the Grand Coulee Dam, and forty five of them could meet the total present electrical power needs of the U.S.
"This activity would create tens of thousands of jobs in space as well as on Earth within as short a time as 15 years, and getting tens of thousands of us living and working in space is the goal of the L5 Society." - https://nss.org/what-is-l5/
For more information go here: https://nss.org/l5-news/ .
In Lagrange Five there's the following:
The central character is a detective brought from Earth to Lagrange Five, an idyllic small artificial planet, to search for a missing public figure.
"Rex turned abruptly to the chairman and snapped, "What did the police discover?"
""We have no police," Hans Ober said.
""Well, security, or whatever you call it."
"Ober shook his head. "We have no police of any kind connected with the Lagrange Five Project, nor any other kind of appurtenances of the State such as jails, or even courts in the ordinary sense of the word. We're civilized, Mr. Bader. Crime in the ordinary sense is unknoen in Lagrangia."" - p 28
In Trojan Orbit there're something like 200 police who turn out to be gangsters (of course many people say that police are already gangsters).
Coincidentally, while I was reading Trojan Orbit I was also reading the 4th issue of the anarchist journal Oak & I came across this in Jason Rodgers's article entitled "Escapism":
"Robert Anton Wilson was a major advocate of space migration. He adopted Tim Leary's acronym SMILE, which he explained as "Space Migration plus Increased Intelligence plus Life Extension means expansion of humanity into all space-time" (Wilson Cosmic 217). One of the more realistic applications of this concept was the L5 society, an advocacy group for the building of self-sustained space stations. According to Robert Anton Wilson, Lyndon LaRouche accused the L5 Soicety of being a "Gnostic cult" (Wilson Everything 280). Kenn Thomas brought up a strange fact related to claims of this sort. A group that merged with the L5 Society was the National Space Institute, a group founded in part by Werner Von Braun, a Nazi rocket scientist" - "Escapism", Jason Rodgers, Oak Journal, issue 4, p 48
The opening scene has a jewel thief approaching a forger in Mexico to try to get the papers necessary for him to escape Earth to hide-out in L5 after having pulled off a big theft.
"You weren't allowed to build in San Miguel other than in accord with the 17th and 18th century local architecture." - p 3
I don't know if it was Reynolds's or Ing's touch but the town where "Rocks", the jewel thief, goes is actually where Reynolds lived in Mexico:
"In 1953, the Reynoldses moved to San Miguel de Allende, in Guanajuato, Mexico" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mack_Re...
Cut to another main character, a Russian scientist, who's approached by a man from CHEKA:
"He said now, with all due respect in his voice, "The Komissya was never truly dissolved, Comrade Academician. You might say that it went underground in the face of popular disgust at that period some named Yezhovshchina, the same period in which your illustrious grandfather, Alexei Suvorov, the right arm of Lenin, uh, disappeared into Stalin's Lefortovo Prison."" - p 22
"Soviet politicians who opposed or criticized Stalin were removed from office and imprisoned or executed by the NKVD. Eventually, the purges were expanded to the Red Army and military high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society: intelligentsia, wealthy peasants —especially those lending out money or wealth (kulaks)—and professionals. As the scope of the purge widened, the omnipresent suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries began affecting civilian life. The purge reached its peak between September 1936 and August 1938 under the leadership of Nikolai Yezhov, hence the name Yezhovshchina." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_P...
Each chapter is preceded by an epigraph. Here's an excerpt from the one before chapter 3:
"["]The security groups of the Third Industrial Revolution will also be an interesting human institution to watch develop. They may begin as private groups. Or as mercenaries . . ."
"—G. Harry Stein, The Third Industrial Revolution." - p 31
Some of the epigraphs seem fictitious to me. In this case, there is a bk by a "G. Harry Stine" (note the slight difference in spelling) called The Third Industrial Revolution from 1979, the time when Lagrange Five was written. Stine's bk was published as SF by Ace. On its back cover is written:
""The first industrial revolution was ushered in by the steam engine and the second by the computer. The third, says Stine in this optimistic look into the future, has already been started by man's first halting steps into space. . .["]" - https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/lu...
This interests me b/c a mere 40+ yrs later the idea of the 3rd Industrial Revolution is no longer centered around an exodus off Earth but is centered instead around how the near omnipresence of computers & the internet & the decentralization of workers moving from office bldgs to work-at-home. This latter having been largely achieved by what is to some a 'necessity' during a 'pandemic' & to others a medical police state lockdown justified by a fear-mongering campaign. Given that the Spinning Jenny began a process of devaluing individual & somewhat independent labor & forcing it into a more subservient & dependent position controlled by an oligarchy it seems that this most recent 'industrial revolution' (if it can be accurately called that) forces labor into an even more extreme servitude by enforcing homogeneity thru what I call "PEER PRESSURE COOKERS" of social media. Hence the appearance of independence can be created while its opposite is imposed by subtext & unwritten laws of conformity.
"The other said politely, but not too politely, "You have to have a pass from Security before you can go out on your own, Mr. Carter."
""See here," Bruce told him, putting on an air of indignation. "I was invited to Island One by Doctor Ryan. I'm a journalist. I came up to do some articles. I'll go wherever I damn well please."" - p 81
Here's a detail that appeals to me, it's something I've imagined for decades:
"There were no signs. Obviously there was no need of them. Members of the community would know if they were restaurants, movie houses, stores, or whatever. As a matter of fact, that was one of the few desirable attributes of Lagrange City. No signs. They were a pet abomination of his back home." - p 84
"Rick had been eyeing the buildings they passed and decided that the only word was grim. Come to think of it , so were the expressions on most of the pedestrians they passed." - p 133
That contrasts w/ the description in the earlier Lagrange Five where the environment had been much more successfully sculpted to be pleasurable.
""They used to say we Hungarians were the only people in the world who could put a dime in a pay toilet and hit the jackpot["]" - p 183
But, no, even the Hungarians on L5 are losing out. It ain't living up to the hype.
""You know," Miller told him, "in all the reading I did before coming up here, and in all the Tri-Di shows I saw about the Lagrange Five Project, I never saw anything about the Security police. There's no mention of it in the public relations propaganda that Ron Rich puts out."" - p 191
The inspirational & affable figurehead of L5 is known for the bk where he put forth the vision. But, oh no!, don't tell us it was ghost-written!
"Bruce sighed. "Adam," he said, "whenever you see a well-written book with a non-pro's name on it as author, you can be sure it was ghosted by an old-timer. It takes years, plenty of them, to learn the tools of the trade in the writing game. President Eisenhower's Crusade was written by Quentin Reynolds. Prsident Nixon's Six Crises was done by a ghoset named Berlin. And did you think Mohammed Ali's autobiography was written by a doggerel-spouting boxer? Or that Lindberg wrote We? They might all have been capable men in their own fields, but they were not writers."" - p 200
"Adam Bloch took over again, "Gentlemen, what it amounts to is that Solomon Ryan and his closest associates at the first projections of the space colonization scheme were wide-eyed, enthusiastic dreamers, as impractical as the most unworldly college professors. They were physicists, mathematicians, chemists, and engineers who taught engineering rather practicing it. What is the old truisn? Those who can, do; and those who can't, teach." - p 276
Yep. I'm reminded of a job I had once where an architecture professor gave me a drawing to bring into existence as an installation. When I pointed out to her that she had 2 objects occupying the same space she didn't seem to understand what I meant.
June 16, 2023
Unfortunately despite being published in 1985, this book reads like something published twenty years earlier. It's hackneyed, it's tired, and despite an interesting premise the result isn't worth it.
So the plot is basically that the Mafia has decided to set up a corporation to build a space colony, milk that for everything it's worth, run it into the ground, and then turn it into an extralegal zone where anything goes. Honestly, if the villains had just been corporate flacks who were doing usual corporate shenanigans I would have thought this was more interesting.
Like, you have to understand this book is -filled- with cliches and other nonsense. The high-ranking woman who's practically in charge of the project and has a doctorate in physics? Well she's just a crazy women's libber. Incidentally her job is secretary and most of the time she hands out drinks to the men. There's a scene of violence against women I found distasteful. And that barely scratches the surface.
And worst of all there's a final scene where the chief bad guy does the whole "Well, I'm going to kill all of you anyway so I may as well reveal my evil scheme in all its entirety." Like, even for the 80s monologuing was pretty cliche, right? Maybe that's a more recent thing.
Ultimately most of this book wasn't very good and the best quote was of course from somebody else:
The space colony project is offered as the solution to virtually all the problems rising from the limitations of our earthly environment. That it will solve all of these problems is a possibility that one may legitimately doubt. What cannot be doubted is that the project is an ideal solution to the moral dilemma of all those in this society who cannot face the necessities of meaningful change. It is superbly attuned to the wishes of the corporation executives, bureaucrats, militarists, political operators, and scientific experts who are the chief beneficiaries of the forces that have produced our crisis...It avoids the corporate and governmental big-dealing that will be bound to accompany the expenditure of a hundred million dollars.
Wendell Berry
So the plot is basically that the Mafia has decided to set up a corporation to build a space colony, milk that for everything it's worth, run it into the ground, and then turn it into an extralegal zone where anything goes. Honestly, if the villains had just been corporate flacks who were doing usual corporate shenanigans I would have thought this was more interesting.
Like, you have to understand this book is -filled- with cliches and other nonsense. The high-ranking woman who's practically in charge of the project and has a doctorate in physics? Well she's just a crazy women's libber. Incidentally her job is secretary and most of the time she hands out drinks to the men. There's a scene of violence against women I found distasteful. And that barely scratches the surface.
And worst of all there's a final scene where the chief bad guy does the whole "Well, I'm going to kill all of you anyway so I may as well reveal my evil scheme in all its entirety." Like, even for the 80s monologuing was pretty cliche, right? Maybe that's a more recent thing.
Ultimately most of this book wasn't very good and the best quote was of course from somebody else:
The space colony project is offered as the solution to virtually all the problems rising from the limitations of our earthly environment. That it will solve all of these problems is a possibility that one may legitimately doubt. What cannot be doubted is that the project is an ideal solution to the moral dilemma of all those in this society who cannot face the necessities of meaningful change. It is superbly attuned to the wishes of the corporation executives, bureaucrats, militarists, political operators, and scientific experts who are the chief beneficiaries of the forces that have produced our crisis...It avoids the corporate and governmental big-dealing that will be bound to accompany the expenditure of a hundred million dollars.
Wendell Berry
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 15, 2024
One of the books I have never finished. As others said, it is kind of dated. However, what put me off was the attitude towards women. I got about a 1/3rd in and all the women were either beautiful and brainless, or drab and smart. Just didn't set right with me. In many ways this reminded me of a 1950's crime noir pot-boiler. But without the quality of a Dashiell Hammett.
August 22, 2017
Meh.
This falls into a class of books from the 80's that borrowed too heavily from contemporaneous history for back story and whose shelf life suffered following the political and economic changes by the end of the decade.
This falls into a class of books from the 80's that borrowed too heavily from contemporaneous history for back story and whose shelf life suffered following the political and economic changes by the end of the decade.
October 15, 2013
Written in 1983, this book provides insight into some of the problems inherent in trying to build a closed and self-sufficient system in space, revolving around a story of high criminals, police both loyal and deeply corrupt, politicians and the common man. The book doesn't take itself too seriously, and the characters are strong but interesting caricatures, making it an amusing and light read, though perhaps not a memorable one.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews