Starchild

Starchild #2

by Frederik Pohl, Jack Williamson

Starchild

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Novels

191 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published September 26, 1965

About the author

Frederik George Pohl, Jr. was an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning over seventy years. From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy magazine and its sister magazine IF winning the Hugo for IF three years in a row. His writing also won him three Hugos and multiple Nebula Awards. He became a Nebula Grand Master in 1993.

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange, poetic SF nightmare with some wonderful images. The cruel Planner's machines are tended by a class of priestesses who speak to them in Mechanese, a staggeringly complex tone language which demands perfect pitch and unwavering life-long discipline. Pyropods, a kind of animate spaceship, cruise between the Reefs of Space far out towards the fringes of the Solar System. Somehow, the rebels who oppose the Plan of Man have learned how to switch off the Sun at will...

[Alain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Les humains ont trouvé un moyen pour contrer leurs tendances autodestructrices, se laisser diriger par une machine toute puissante, la machine planificatrice. Ne se sentant plus capable de vivre sans et pour pallier à tout problème sur cette sacro-sainte machine servie par des personnes spécialement choisies et entraînées, les humains en ont réalisé une seconde, mise à bord d'un vaisseau qui a étrangement disparu. Mais lorsque d'étranges phénomènes non planifiés apparaissent surgissent des rumeurs à propos d'un Enfant des étoiles capable de rivaliser avec ces machines et de remettre en cause l'ordre établi. Nous allons donc suivre dans ce roman quelques personnes qui vont essayer d'éclaircir tous ces mystères.

Ce roman est le second de la série "La paix des étoiles", mais étant tombé dessus un peu par hasard je l'ai lu sans avoir lu le premier. Et le départ m'a assez surpris pour que je me demande si ce n'était pas une erreur avant de comprendre qu'il avait en fait une construction plutôt originale et que finalement il pouvait bien se lire seul.

Un roman bien dans la ligne de la SF des années 60 avec beaucoup de questionnements sur la technologie et l'avenir de l'humanité. Et si j'ai eu du mal au début j'ai finalement apprécié sans être transporté au point de vouloir absolument lire des deux autres tomes.

[Lars Dradrach · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Second novel in the Star Child Trilogy - Still entertaining - Still old school and cartoonish

Set in the same universe as The Reefs of Space some centuries later, humans has expanded beyond the earth, but are still bound by THE PLAN which controls every aspect of human life, mastered by a massive computer and it's more or less corrupt managers.

Entering the Star Child a mythic creature able to turn stars on and off, demanding the Plan to be disabled and humans set free.

It's fast paced, entertaining and brimming with ideas and new concepts, without explaining to much or picking up too many loose ends, still written in a slightly ironic cartoon style "wink wink, nod nod, don't take this to seriously" or maybe it's just how it was done in the sixties ?.

[Susanna Neri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Affascinante, questo libro ha tanti temi che sono diventati un classico della fantascienza, il predominio delle macchine, i corpi usati come ricambi, la spinta dell'uomo ad andare oltre non solo nello spazio ma n ella proprio crescita personale.

[Sandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

By the end of Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson's 1963 novel "The Reefs of Space," all of the reader's many questions had been answered, and all of the loose ends tied up in a neat bow...at least, so we would have thought. The book could very easily have stood on its own, so perhaps it came as something of a surprise when the authors came out with a sequel two years later. In the first book, set some 200 years in the future, we'd been shown how a vast underground computer system, aka the Machine, was in charge of the so-called Plan of Man, and regulated every facet of the lives of Earth's 13 billion people. And we'd also been given a glimpse of those titular Reefs of Space...planetoids composed of the minute fusorian life-forms that were able to condense hydrogen and convert it into living matter; an area now sparsely populated by those Terran folks who were in defiance of the Machine and its human representative, the Planner. The novel had been as colorful and event filled as any reasonable reader could expect, and had ended on a note of hopefulness as the Machine had suddenly allowed mankind access to the previously proscribed Reefs. Who could have guessed that Pohl & Williamson's sequel, entitled "Starchild," would not only be more colorful and action packed than Book #1 had been, but more mind-blowing, as well? Unfortunately, that did not necessarily result in something better than the original, as will be seen.

Like "The Reefs of Space," "Starchild" first saw the light of day as a three-part serial in the digest-sized magazine "If" (for which Frederik Pohl served as managing editor from 1962 to '69); in this case, the January, February and March 1965 issues. (I'm not sure why my 1977 Doubleday hardcover--which includes both novels as well as the third novel, "Rogue Star," in this so-called STARCHILD TRILOGY--says that Starchild originally appeared in "Galaxy" magazine, for which Pohl was also editor at the time.) The book would be reprinted as a 50-cent Ballantine paperback later in '65, and then as a $1.25 Ballantine paperback in '73 (that's inflation for you in a nutshell!). Internationally, "Starchild" would see editions in Italy ('65, '77 and 2001), the U.K. ('66 and '70), France ('66 and '76), Germany ('67 and '82) and Portugal ('70). For the savvy shopper today, all three books in the STARCHILD TRILOGY can be had in one giant volume from such publishers as the aforementioned Doubleday, Pocket Books ('77), Penguin ('80) and Baen ('86). The bottom line is that all three novels should pose no great difficulty for prospective readers to track down today.

"Starchild" is set some 20 years following the events of Book #1. The Machine has mysteriously rescinded its permission for mankind to explore and colonize the Reefs, and as this Book #2 gets under way, the worlds of our solar system are in something of a tizzy. Someone or something called Starchild has threatened to make our sun and some dozen neighboring stars wink out for a short time unless its demands to the Planner and the Machine are met. Those demands include the release of all the Starchild's devotees, as well as the dismantling of the so-called Spacewall, a string of armed ships and stations beyond Pluto's orbit that make passage to the Reefs an impossibility. And then, to the system's consternation, the stars and our Sol do indeed wink out for a period of time! The reader is then introduced to 26-year-old Machine Major Boysie Gann, who, besides being a commissioned tech expert, is also a graduate of the spy school on Pluto. The Machine sends Boysie to the Polaris Station, one of the many links in the Spacewall, to investigate supposed anti-Plan activities therein. But Boysie's mission is soon uncovered by one of the station's personnel and he is summarily knocked out cold, only to awaken on one of the minor Reefs...20 billion miles away from the sun! While there, Boysie meets an old, grizzled farmer named Harry Hickson, who takes care of the bewildered spy until he, Hickson, mysteriously vanishes one day. But Boysie is rescued from his marooned condition by the lovely Quarla Snow, who flies Boysie to another Reef, via her pet spaceling, after telling Boysie that Harry Hickson had died of a fusorian infection three years earlier! Wha? Boysie is taken to the largest settlement of the Reefs, Freehaven, where he stays for a time with Quarla and her father, a physician. But then, a short while later, Boysie suffers some extreme vertigo, and returns to consciousness in what is probably the most heavily guarded area in the entire solar system: the control complex of the Machine itself, thousands of feet underground, on Earth!

Now thoroughly discombobulated (and who wouldn't be?), Boysie is of course immediately arrested, beaten and interrogated. He is even brought in front of the Planner himself (a different, harsher Planner than the one we'd encountered in Book #1), but of course is completely unable to explain his presence there. Later, Boysie is shocked to find that his old girlfriend, Julie Martinet, has now become an acolyte of the Machine; one of the cowled women who have arduously learned how to speak Mechanese and who have had a plate surgically implanted into their forehead so as to physically connect themselves to the Machine via a linkbox! Julie, who is now called Sister Delta Four, interrogates Boysie even more closely, as does the fanatic General Abel Wheeler. Soon, this most-secure underground installation is overwhelmed by the sudden appearance of dozens of monstrous pyropods--enormous scorpion/dragon/living rocket creatures of the Reefs--that spontaneously materialize just like Boysie had done earlier. And soon, Boysie's lot grows even stranger, when he learns that he is now being accused of being the Starchild itself...and stranger still, when the Machine orders that Boysie must begin training to become its new, surgically enhanced acolyte! And incredibly, even stranger things will befall poor Boysie, before all is said and done....

As I inferred up top, "Starchild" arrives with more exciting sequences than Book #1, but somehow it is a much less satisfying experience. The major reason for this, I feel, is that most of the reader's many questions this go-round remain unanswered. Do you remember the hit TV show "Lost" of some two decades back, and how it piled on one conundrum after another, week after week? I always maintained that if the writers on that series had only answered all the many questions that the show raised over the course of its six seasons, it would have been one of the greatest programs of all time. Sadly, and disappointingly, they didn't, and neither do Pohl & Williamson here. How exactly does Hickson return to life, and come and go in a flash? How is Boysie teleported 20 billion miles across space? What precisely happened to the explorers on the missing Togethership? Who wrote those threatening notes to the Planner? Why was it necessary for Boysie, Wheeler and Sister Delta Four to go to the observatory on Mercury? If the answer is indeed a godlike sentient star, made conscious by dint of having merged itself with fusorians, then are all the stars sentient, like our Sol? And why is Deneb especially worshipped by the peoples of the Reef? So many things to ponder over, in the face of all the nondisclosures by the authors! I suppose it is possible that the answers to these posers will be vouchsafed in Book #3 (just as "Starchild" does clarify some gray areas in Book #1), but as I say, this reader was ultimately not left satisfied. Upon turning the final page of "Starchild," I felt as if I had just finished half of a jigsaw puzzle, with the outline clearly visible but many pieces missing.

That said, I must admit that reading the book (like watching "Lost") was as fun as can be...at times, even thrilling. The book gives us one remarkable sequence after another at a rapid clip; no wonder we're told at one point that Boysie was trying "to recover from the shocks and stresses of the last few weeks. And how fast they had accumulated...." Among those bravura set pieces: Boysie's awakening on the tiny Reeflet where he'd been marooned; Boysie regaining consciousness in the heart of the Machine (something akin to you being mysteriously teleported to a nuclear research facility in North Korea!); Gann's interview by the Planner in his sumptuous audience chamber; the attack by dozens of murderous pyropods underground; Boysie being involved in a calamitous subtrain accident; the intensive training in Mechanese that Boysie undergoes, preparatory to becoming an acolyte of the Machine; that side trip to the Mercury observatory; and the finale aboard the so-called Togethership, lost and abandoned in the Reef Whirlpool.

Once again, the authors load their book with a generous amount of offhand, futuristic/imaginative touches. Putting aside the Spacewall and the cranial communion plates for a moment, we're also given a nerve-pellet gun that renders its victim unconscious till given an antidote; the scars that one of the Plan majors sports, a souvenir from a "Venusian anaerobic parasite"; and the Mechanese trainer into which Gann is inserted...a kind of virtual-reality device that offers both positive and negative reinforcements. As to those acolytes of the Machine, they are presented in language that strongly suggests some kind of religious order. Thus, Sister Delta Four is not only dressed in a habit similar to a nun's, but has a set of sonic beads, analogous to a rosary, that she constantly toys with to help perfect her Mechanese tonal qualities. Boysie goes through a novitiate period before becoming an acolyte, and the act of physical communion with the Machine is seen as a kind of nirvana. Too, Julie Martinet renounces all worldly interests after becoming an acolyte, to Boysie's very great dismay.

Starchild again gives the reader some well-drawn descriptions of the Reefs themselves. And so, we are told:

"...There are spiked forests of silicon plants, shining with their own light. Like jewels, and sharp enough to shred your spacesuit. There's a growth that makes great brain-shaped masses of pure silver. There are thick stalks of platinum and gold, and there are things like flowers that are diamonds...The life in the Reefs was sometimes warm-blooded, carbon-based, oxygen-breathing animal. But more often it was metal or crystal--at best, worthless for food; at worst, a deadly danger...."

We get to know more about the exact nature of those blasted pyropods, and are again given an interesting raft of secondary characters: the mad-for-power General Wheeler; the once-sweet, now dronelike Julie/Delta Four; and the enigmatic figure that is Harry Hickson. Steve Ryeland, our mathematician hero from Book #1, is absent from this sequel, although he is mentioned, and we do get to learn a little of his fate, as well as the fates of the Planner and Donna Creery from that first installment, as well. (This reader was not at all happy to learn what became of them!) And of course, one of the major selling points of "Starchild" is getting to observe how Boysie Gann changes over the course of the book, going from a loyal soldier/spy for the Plan of Man, to a person who dreads becoming one with the Machine, and finally, to an individual who actually begins to wish for the freedom of the Reefs. Boysie is a marvelous character who goes through way too much for any human mind to handle.

I have very few bones to pick with the authors here, other than their letting me down in the area of full explication. But I did notice one boo-boo that Pohl & Williamson make, and it is something of a major one. Early on, we are told that of the three residents in the Mercury observatory, one of them, the Techtenant, is Julie Martinet's brother. But around 100 pages later, when Boysie & Co. find the bodies of the three in that observatory, we are told that Julie's brother is the Technicadet! As I say, this is something of an embarrassing slipup, but I suppose that even future sci-fi Grand Masters are only human, after all. (And I suppose this is one of the dangers of a managing editor editing his own work!) So yes, "Starchild" remains something of a mixed bag, but surely an entertaining one. By the book's end, the Machine has been outdone by the mysterious Starchild, and the seemingly sentient stars have given us their warning. What could possibly happen next? I suppose we'll have to dive into Book #3, "Rogue Star," to find out...and, hopefully, get some further enlightenment.
Stay tuned....

(By the way, this review originally appeared on the FanLit website at https://fantasyliterature.com/ ... a most ideal destination for all fans of sci-fi adventure tales....)

[Andrea Sacchi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Same as the first book of this saga, with excellent ideas, and well-written chapter by chapter, but all in all the result is not very organic. The different styles and different environments preferred by the two authors, don't really mix well together, creating the weird effect of reading two novels in a single book.

[Tom Britz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll go with a 3.8 star on this one. I love both writers and this novel goes back to 1965, but there were a few inconsistencies that made me realise that I was reading and not experiencing the story. This novel is the second in a trilogy, though it isn't a direct follow up. This story picks up a couple of generations after the first, The Reefs of Space.
Mankind has reached out and is utilizing the entire solar system and many asteroids and moons. But this is revealed by telling, as the only places visited were Earth, the reefs out past Pluto someplace and a short stay on Mercury. Even with this vast backdrop of people and places, it boils down to a struggle for "world dominance", which should have been eradicated by then.
The interesting thing on this novel is that it is revealed that the stars are in fact alive and sentient, though this is revealed quite late and possibly will be the driving force of the final volume, Rogue Star. I will discover this when I resume reading this series.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Felt like a more cohesive book than The Reefs of Space

[Raj · Rating 2 out of 5]

Set some time after The Reefs of Space, it seems that the hope expressed for the Reefs have come to nothing. The Plan of Man has tightened its grasp on the solar system and established a space-wall between it and the Reefs so that no person may escape and no ideas may enter. However, a strange and powerful entity calling itself the Starchild has arisen out there and is threatening the very Plan itself.

The Reefs of Space had a fairly hopeful ending; this novel indicates that that hope was misplaced, although it never quite goes into details about what went wrong. It also introduces new elements - the Fusorian microbes from the first book are expanded upon, and we get to see a new side to the universe: the idea that the Fusorians can also inhabit stars and make them sentient. Somewhat more convoluted than its predecessor and not so well structured, this is still a fairly entertaining book.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable and very readable, this novel has one or two moments of solid science fiction (as in, explaining the fake-physics - though it could be real physics, not an expert) but they're pretty well integrated into the storytelling and didn't make it too dry.
What slightly marred this book for me was a couple of episodes of rather cheesy fantasy action. For me, the philosophical plot was enough to keep the pages turning and I didn't need a tall and attractive protagonist to delay dragons. But I guess that some people like that kind of thing.
Another sticking point was one or two seriously boring characters, for example the cartoonish General Wheeler.
But the plot and the questions it raised were interesting and thought provoking, and I'll certainly look out for the other 2 books in this series.

[Michael Hall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starchild takes place a generation or so after the events in The Reefs of Space. Unfortunately the ending that pointed to hope and freedom appears to have been in vain. The totalitarian control that the Planning Machine enforced is just as nightmarish as it ever was. This time our protagonist is a spy sent by the machine to investigate some abnormal reports at a distant station. At a rapid pace that is seemingly out of control Boysie Gann finds himself in the center of a convoluted web of intrigue and change that will affect all of mankind. This book wasn't as well-formed as the first, and didn't tweak as many emotions, but is still an interesting (if a bit out of date) read about the nature of life and intelligence in the universe.

[Rich Meyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the best of Frederik Pohl's work by far, this sequel to The Reefs of Space is enjoyable up to a point. It's got some very dated viewpoints though, and even the dystopic universe at it's center hasn't aged well.

The segments on the so-called "reefs of space" themselves are excellent, and I know I had hoped that the story would've delved deeper into that culture, but Pohl took in in a completely different direction.

There are some definite interesting ideas here though, particular when the identity of the "Starchild" is finally revealed. So I'm hoping that the third book will flesh those out rather then running off on yet another reader-weary tangent.

[Saul · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book wasn't bad, but it seemed to lack many of the qualities I expect from Pohl. The characters didn't seem very 3dimensional, a problem very much exemplified by the antagonist. However, the book was written quite a while back. It's quite interesting to see how much Pohl changed from this from this early period. Overall I'd recommend this book to serious fans of the author, letting new readers pass it up for better works like Gateway.

[Nippy Katz · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 novelettes combined. The style is not seamless from story to story. The first, "The Reefs of Space" is most Pohl-like. A more or less naive narrator goes through a series of bizarre experiences including being a convict in a prison where the inmates are used to provide organs for transplantation. The other 2 are less memorable. The last, in particular, seems like mediocre YA stuff.

[Little Timmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great older SiFi story by 2 of the masters of the genre. Very recommended.

[Steven]

Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson

[SciFiOne · Rating 3 out of 5]

1980 grade C-

Series book R2

(In the Starchild trilogy)

with Jack Williamson

[Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sci-fi version of Hegel or Spinosa's pantheism.

[Nat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intruiging. Convoluted, odd, dull at times , lots to process