The blurb on the front of the book calls this the ultimate hard science fiction
novel. It’s pretty close. There’s essentially two plot points that stood out to me, one hard and one soft.
The Leonora Christina is a exploring/colonizing space ship. It’s designed to accelerate to a significant fraction of the speed of light by using a large magnetic field to suck in stray molecules in space to be used as engine fuel. It is not the first colony ship to leave. The target star system is 32 light years away. Subjectively the crew members will spend five years on the trip. Time dilation and all that. That’s the hard science fiction part, all the pseudo-science about traveling near the speed of light. Some of the problems are waved away with a magic wand, but the science seems mostly good if technologically not possible. I do have an issue with one item that is key to the ending, but since that would spoil it, I’ll not quibble here.
Then there’s the social science fiction part. Partway through the voyage, the ship crashes through a nebula. Even though there isn’t much matter there, it’s more than the ship can handle, and the equipment to decelerate becomes non-functional. And you can’t go outside to fix it for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that even a small amount of matter at that speed will kill everyone. The crew is trapped inside a relatively small ship with no means of rescue and no means of stopping, short of crashing. Major cabin fever!
Neither part is all that compelling on it’s own, but in combination it’s a great yarn. The hard science fiction is continued with the crew speeding up the ship ever faster in a search for an empty piece of space in which it would be safe to repair the ship. But also one where they have enough momentum to continue on to somewhere they can stop at. With time dilation ever increasing, years can go by outside with only a small amount of time inside. The text makes it seem like they are increasing speed ever faster, though in reality it’s only a small smidge closer to light speed each time. It just seems faster to the ship inhabitants. The cabin fever results in all sorts of fighting between the crew and officers, and attempts to improve morale, and some polyamory going on.
I don’t think the book would have worked if it was too long, but at 207 pages, there’s just enough verbiage to make this interesting.
Title: Tau zero
Author: Poul Anderson
Imprint / publisher: Lancer
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 207 p.
Publication date: 1971
LC classification: PS3551.N378
