Glory

Goldenwing Cycle #1

by Alfred Coppel

The age of colonization ended a thousand years ago. Only a few Goldenwings, the huge spaceships which carried humanity from Earth to many colony planets, still remain, still voyaging between the distant colonies carrying the cargoes those societies need to survive.
The Goldenwing Gloria Coelis (known as Glory), with the glittering beauty of a sunrise, its huge space sails spread for hundreds of miles, approaches the planet Voerster with an essential shipment of biological materials, ordered 400 years before in local time.
And on Voerster, settled by South Africans determined to preserve apartheid, revolution and war threaten, while the conservative ruler Ian Voerster and his wife are locked in a struggle over their sick daughter, whose heart condition will kill her without the advanced medicine of Glory.
Filled with action and memorable characters, Glory is a triumph, a far future epic of humanity in space to set beside the works of Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson.

Genres: Science Fiction

349 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1993

About the author

Alfredo Jose de Arana-Marini Coppel was an American author. He served as a fighter pilot in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. After his discharge, he started his career as a writer. He became one of the most prolific pulp authors of the 1950s and 1960s, adopting the pseudonyms Robert Cham Gilman and A.C. Marin and writing for a variety of pulp magazines and later "slick" publishers. Though writing in a variety of genres, including action thrillers, he is known for his science fiction stories which comprise both short stories and novels.

Reviews

[Dave Bara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rarely do I give space opera 4 stars, but this book deserves it. Glory is full of rich settings, engaging characters, and fascinating conflict. I really enjoyed this series, and this book, the first volume, is the best of the three. The details of both the culture of planet Voerster and the nearly-angelic world the Goldenwings is done in depth and detail that is rare. Coppel has a gift for storytelling and setting, and this book is a delight to read with every page.

[Harold Ogle · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting premise, but not a great deal else. Coppel establishes an intriguing setting effectively (and somewhat laboriously): in the future, Earth's population crisis reaches a critical point of forcing a great deal of technology innovation so that humanity can colonize other planets. The result is the Goldenwings: large colony ships that travel at a high percentage of the speed of light by means of sailing the tachyon winds with vast stretches of "skylar". The Goldenwings are used successfully to transport colonists to dozens of worlds, but the relativistic delays in communication mean that each world develops independently of the others. Absent a population crisis on any of the worlds, including the depopulated Earth, technology stagnates. Thousands of years pass, and the fleet of Goldenwings slowly dwindles until only a few are still in operation, running trading missions between worlds. Such a one is "Glory", crewed by a half dozen or so Goldenwing syndicate members whose only family is the rest of the crew. In parallel with our learning all this stuff, we are introduced to the planet Voerster, which was colonized a thousand years ago by refugees fleeing South Africa so as to keep their way of life (read: Apartheid) alive. Nine hundred years ago, the population of black settlers, enraged at their unequal yoke, rose up in rebellion, and the planet's population was almost entirely destroyed. The survivors, apartheid still intact, have been holding onto senseless traditions and shunning technology ever since, barely eking out a living on this foreign world (the native animal species are all "necrogenes", meaning that, like the phoenix, offspring are born from the death of the mother. This makes for a very delicately balanced ecosystem that cannot support the wild increase of human population). In order to survive, some of the initial colonists were also genetically engineered to survive on the several-miles-high plateau on the main continent, in order to mine necessary minerals there. These three populations - blacks, whites, and the brutal high-plateau people - all exist in uneasy peace. On Voerster we follow the ruling family - royalty in all but name - as they prepare for the delivery of Earth livestock that was ordered delivered by Goldenwing three generations earlier.

We follow these two groups - the bigots on Voerster and the crew of Glory - for hundreds of pages before they actually interact with one another. The build-up for the arrival of the spaceship is excruciatingly drawn-out. Coppel seems to have fashioned a detailed science fiction universe, and he's not content with using those details to inform his plot: he actually has to tell us all about all the characters' backgrounds and all the history of the planet and the Goldenwings (and the planets from which each crew member came originally). It's interesting stuff, but the plotting is plodding, and to make matters worse, when the actual confrontation happens, it is resolved in perhaps a dozen pages, making the actual conflict of the story feel like a denouement. It's calculated to leave the reader wanting more...and, not surprisingly, Coppel has at least two other books in a series of books about "Glory" and the universe it inhabits.

The world-building is interesting, and Coppel's ability to make us care about characters - even characters who are bigots like the Voersters - is effective, though a bit ham-fisted (we readers are told repeatedly how wonderful the Voerster's wife Elianna is, both by telling it directly by the narrator and by showing how characters fall all over themselves to please her, yet we never see her do or say anything particularly of note. But by the time there is conflict, the reader is solidly rooting for her). The book is OK, but it doesn't make me want to rush out and read the next one, despite what the author's intentions may have been. I might read the sequels someday, and the details about the setting are well-thought out enough that I might re-read "Glory" someday...just not anytime soon.

[Christine Powell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Could not Finish this... The characters were childishly written. The world and ship were beautiful but it almost seemed like he had a teenage boy write the people. The sex scenes were PAINFUL.

[Paul Jarzabek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent science fiction story. Unusual cultural (Apartheid) setting for crew and colonists. Interplanetary voyages, Space vehicles.

[Brett]

Science Fiction

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

Had a difficult time finishing the book.