James Nicoll Reviews

John Brunner’s 1991 A Maze of Stars is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

Ship planted human colonies on six hundred worlds chosen from the six hundred thousand systems of the Arm of Stars1. Ship monitors each colony’s progress… as best it can, given the peculiar restrictions that define Ship​’s course up and down the Arm.

As any rec.arts.sf.science regular could tell you, faster-than-light travel implies time travel. Those human cultures who master tachyonic travel do not appear to encounter this aspect of FTL. Ship cannot avoid it. Ship is never sure quite where or when it will appear.

Hopping back and forth through time has provided Ship with an excellent map of how the Arm of Stars’ history will play out. However, Ship​’s ability to alter the ordained course of history is minimal, if that ability exists at all. Ship can facilitate fate, not alter it.

Antiquity has at least provided Ship with considerable skill at finding loopholes in its programming. Settlers were for the most part to be provided with the tools to survive, then left to their own devices. Only in the case of looming extinction could Ship intervene by transporting the survivors to more hospitable worlds. However, the programmers of old never specified that this directive would apply only to entire communities.

Lonely Ship keeps an eye out for individuals like Stripe, Annica, and Menlee, people whose short-term prospects are grim indeed. The loophole allows Ship to rescue individuals. While the worlds to which Ship delivers its visitors may prove as hostile as the ones from which they fled, at least Ship has company for the duration of the trip.

Is there a purpose behind Ship​’s travels back and forth across space-time? If so, what is it?

~oOo~

Not only does this novel feature the time travel aspect of FTL, there’s an oxygen-rich atmosphere created via abiogenic means. I don’t know that I buy the mechanism, but at least it’s novel, and reminds readers that not every marker we associate with life has to be created by life.

Being befriended by Ship appears to confer similar long-term benefits as being befriended by that fellow in the police call box. Companions will get at least one interesting trip out of the relationship. They may not get much opportunity to savor their memories once they disembark.

Whether or not the colonies are successful depends on the criteria used. The colonies are not immune to the usual human foibles. Settling alien worlds adds additional challenges, as local lifeforms do their best to assimilate humans (or at least, the chemicals from which humans are composed). Has the project achieved liveable utopian societies? Not really. For most settlements, the outlook is grim. However, surprising few of the settlements appear to go extinct in the time frame covered by the novel.

A number of SF authors pursued careers like Brunner’s: early prodigious output of competent pulp, a middle ambitious period, the grim realization that readers had no interest in rewarding their hard work with a commensurate increase in income, embittered disenchantment, and a return to their origins, albeit with better prose and plotting.

Maze is a competent example of the latter part of this process. It’s a space opera embracing bombastic themes like Human Destiny! And The Fate of the Race! But it’s written by an author who comes across as a jaded pessimist, armed with more technical talent than he could have brought to bear thirty years earlier.

The novel has its interesting elements, but I can’t say that I loved Maze. In large part this is due to the unpleasant fate suffered by a sympathetic character, who is sent off to their doom without so much as heads-up by Ship. Yeah, Ship​’s free will is constrained, but Brunner’s is not.

A Maze of Stars is available here (SF Gateway), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), and here (Chapters-Indigo).

I did not find A Maze of Stars at Bookshop UK or at Words Worth Books. The latter is likely because Maze is only available as an ebook, but I don’t know what the issue is with Bookshop UK. As well, it may not be possible to buy directly from SF Gateway.

1: The USA is not so much delenda as irrelevant.