Chris Beaton's Reviews > Tau Zero

Live girlflesh

Let me start by saying that I liked this book. With my 'internal' rating system, I'd give it four stars, but GoodReads informs me that this means I "really liked" a book and I think I just "liked" it, so I'm downgrading to three... Regardless, a VERY pleasurable read, a real page turner and a superb thought experiment. But enough with the forewarning, time for some griping, cos bits did indeed cheese me off.

WHAT IT IS ABOUT SCIENCE FICTION? Why are there so many great novels that have been needlessly burdened with tedious, 2-dimensional characters, the personal lives of which are dominated by *sleeping* with as many of their brilliant fellow scientists as they can, and then getting jealous, at the same time as either striving to become alpha males or to worship them? I mean, really??? It's like the editor has stepped in and said, "ok, mister, that's enough science - time for some fucking, or we'll lose our audience!"

Theories:
* They really DO think a heavily science-driven plot must be balanced with cavemen antics.
* They are more likely than other authors to have given up on the human race as barbarous savages.
* Old sci-fi was written in an era with few sexual liberties, so part of the allure of other worlds was fantasizing about other sexual freedoms (gotta say, I think there's a lot of weight to this one).
* They are more likely to not give a damn about human emotions and drama, and they just kind of fill that bit in hurriedly at the end, once they've got their awesome concepts fully fleshed out.

And don't get me wrong, sex, love, jealousy, attraction, all these are fun times. If the writing (and the psychology) is good. Here are some of my favourite bits from Tau Zero:

She whistled. 'Hey,' she said, 'I hadn't seen you before in less'n a coverall. That's some collection of biceps and triceps and things you pack around. Calisthenics?'

'M-m-m-hm.' Reymont kissed the hollow between shoulder and throat. Through the wetness he smelled live girlflesh.

'Maybe someday you'll dare trust me.' She drew close to him. 'Never mind now, Carl. I don't want to harass you. I want you in me again. You see, this has stopped being a matter of friendship and convenience. I've fallen in love with you'

Unclad, she could never be called boyish. The curves of breast and flank were subtler than ordinary, but they were integral with the rest of her - not stuccoed on, as with too many women - and when she moved, they flowed. So did the light along her skin, which had the hue of the hills around San Francisco Bay in the summer, and the light in her hair, which had the smell of every summer day that was ever on earth.

Lindgren got up, paced the narrow stretch behind her desk, struck fist into palm. 'I've assumed obligations,' she said. The words wrenched her gullet.
'I know -'
'Not to smash a man, especially one we need. And not to... be promiscuous again. I have to be an officer, in everything I do. So does Carl.' Raw-voiced: 'He'd refuse!'

Stuccoed on!?! Eeeew. And EVERY summer day? Even the ones when the sewers backed up? As you can see from the above, though, the saving grace about all this stuff is that it is EXTREMELY entertaining, even if depressingly heteroboring.

The other doozie I want to complain about before I sign off is the women. They're supposed to be scientists, but it's only the men who actually seem to *do* anything, while the women are manipulated into managing people's emotional welfare (apparently, this is ok because 'Her role demands she not be a Machiavelli type who'd play a part deliberately', and she's too dumb to notice anyway) or hysterically demanding that they be allowed to have children (She crawled from him, handhold to handhold. 'No!' she yelled. 'I know what you're after! You'll never take my baby! He's yours too! If you... you cut my baby out of me - I'll kill you! I'll kill everyone aboard!).

Hilariously, towards the climax of their voyage, when hope is at its lowest, the best insight we get into the human condition is that one of the men can no longer sustain an erection, until he gets drunk and then slapped on the back by his biceps-triceps-and-things best mate, who is not quite the captain, and keeps saying "this must be the captain's decision!", until people grovellingly say "no, Carl, you've taken us this far, the crew trust you" yadda yadda.

So, despite MASSIVE FAILURE on the human scale, I feel like I should end by reminding you, the core of this book is a wonderful thing. Essentially, something goes wrong with a ship travelling at close to light speed, such that they can no longer decelerate. For various reasons, they keep deciding that their best option is to continue accelerating, getting closer and closer to the speed of light (at which point 'tau', a variable in the equation describing something to do with light speed, is zero). Due to the effects of relativity, the speed at which they perceive time becomes massively different from the rest of the universe, and soon they see the very universe aging around them... Like all great thought experiments, there's just so much innate drama and excitement and questions in this scenario, that it's really invigorating, and it leaves you burning with ideas of all the storylines that *didn't* happen. You want to gather all the little silver balls and put them back into the machine and start it over, to see other ways they could have navigated through its intricacies.