Tau Zero by Poul Anderson
Tau Zero by Poul Anderson
I first read Anderson’s Tau Zero when I was in my late teens or early twenties – not long after it was released in paperback. In those days, I wasn’t as fond of Anderson as I am now. I was reading in a different way, more looking for a combination of ideas and adventure from SF books, and not as much for style or deep character development. Thus, while I enjoyed Tau Zero – it certainly contains some great SF ideas – I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did when I reread it for the first time in thirty years. It’s a marvelous book, well written, with some great hard SF ideas, but at the same time it’s a good exploration of character, of how people cut off from everything in a near hopeless situation act.
The Leonora Christine is a starship that, powered by a Bussard ramjet, travels at speeds that get closer and closer to the speed of light. Her crew is to colonize a nearby star, and the speeds they reach will effectively cut their journey time – from the crew’s perspective – to less than half of what it would have without relativistic effects. But something goes wrong; the ship passes through a small nebula, and its ability to decelerate is destroyed. For, at close to the speed of the light, the crew cannot simply switch off the Bussard and go outside and repair the deceleration engine. At such high speeds, the Bussard serves not only as an engine but as a shield, picking up the stray atoms before the can hit the ship at near-light speed. The only solution for the crew is to keep accelerating and head for the space between galactic clusters where there is less matter. They can do this since, although from the stars’ (or the earth’s) point of view, the voyage will take hundreds of thousands of years, from the crew’s perspective it will take months.
Anderson faces squarely what the crew must go through, knowing that, by the time they finish their journey, everyone they know – and in fact their whole civilization – will be gone. The crew responds in various ways. The main character, Charles Reymont, a very private man who is also the ship’s chief of security, believes that firm rules have to be established; he realizes sooner than others how some will react to this. But he also uses some subtle psychology, both allowing dislike to focus on him, but at the same time building up the support structures of the ship. In the end, he succeeds in holding things together, despite even greater stresses than they thought.
For it turns out that the inter-cluster area still has too much matter for them to stop deceleration. The only solution is to accelerate more, to get outside of the super-cluster. They do repair the decelerator, but by that time they are moving at such a speed that it’s not easy to find a galaxy that they can slow down enough to rendezvous with. And it gets worse. Soon, they notice the universe changing. The universe is no longer expanding; it’s contracting, heading back toward the big crunch that happens before another big bang. (Today’s cosmology finds this unlikely, but it was in line with what we knew in 1970.)
The only part of the book that bothers me a bit from a hard science perspective is the end. Oh, earlier on Anderson waves his hands a bit about how the ship can accelerate at thee Gs while the crew only feels one; but in that case, I sort of wrote it off as his simply not explaining what was going on clearly enough. Perhaps his physics was OK. But in the end he falls into the fundamental misunderstanding of space and the big bang that’s rather common; he, as a physics major, should have known better (though in his defense, he’d been out of school for a while at that point, and in 1970 there weren’t nearly as many good popular science books by physicists as there are now). In the end, the ship stays outside of the big crunch, circling the mass of material, until the new big bang, then becomes part of the new universe. The fallacy here is that somehow space exists independently of matter, that the big bang explodes into empty space (and, for that matter, that time exists on its own). This isn’t the case, as “space” is not an absolute, but comes into existence in the big bang. (Other cosmological theories, including brane theory, allow for a “bigger space” that our universe is part of, but the universe there is even stranger, and again rules out what the ship’s crew in Tau Zero do.) But this is a minor quibble, one that I would have ignored in a book that wasn’t otherwise more strict with its science throughout.
Tau Zero was certainly worth re-reading. I’m glad that I did.
Highly Recommended
I first read Anderson’s Tau Zero when I was in my late teens or early twenties – not long after it was released in paperback. In those days, I wasn’t as fond of Anderson as I am now. I was reading in a different way, more looking for a combination of ideas and adventure from SF books, and not as much for style or deep character development. Thus, while I enjoyed Tau Zero – it certainly contains some great SF ideas – I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did when I reread it for the first time in thirty years. It’s a marvelous book, well written, with some great hard SF ideas, but at the same time it’s a good exploration of character, of how people cut off from everything in a near hopeless situation act.
The Leonora Christine is a starship that, powered by a Bussard ramjet, travels at speeds that get closer and closer to the speed of light. Her crew is to colonize a nearby star, and the speeds they reach will effectively cut their journey time – from the crew’s perspective – to less than half of what it would have without relativistic effects. But something goes wrong; the ship passes through a small nebula, and its ability to decelerate is destroyed. For, at close to the speed of the light, the crew cannot simply switch off the Bussard and go outside and repair the deceleration engine. At such high speeds, the Bussard serves not only as an engine but as a shield, picking up the stray atoms before the can hit the ship at near-light speed. The only solution for the crew is to keep accelerating and head for the space between galactic clusters where there is less matter. They can do this since, although from the stars’ (or the earth’s) point of view, the voyage will take hundreds of thousands of years, from the crew’s perspective it will take months.
Anderson faces squarely what the crew must go through, knowing that, by the time they finish their journey, everyone they know – and in fact their whole civilization – will be gone. The crew responds in various ways. The main character, Charles Reymont, a very private man who is also the ship’s chief of security, believes that firm rules have to be established; he realizes sooner than others how some will react to this. But he also uses some subtle psychology, both allowing dislike to focus on him, but at the same time building up the support structures of the ship. In the end, he succeeds in holding things together, despite even greater stresses than they thought.
For it turns out that the inter-cluster area still has too much matter for them to stop deceleration. The only solution is to accelerate more, to get outside of the super-cluster. They do repair the decelerator, but by that time they are moving at such a speed that it’s not easy to find a galaxy that they can slow down enough to rendezvous with. And it gets worse. Soon, they notice the universe changing. The universe is no longer expanding; it’s contracting, heading back toward the big crunch that happens before another big bang. (Today’s cosmology finds this unlikely, but it was in line with what we knew in 1970.)
The only part of the book that bothers me a bit from a hard science perspective is the end. Oh, earlier on Anderson waves his hands a bit about how the ship can accelerate at thee Gs while the crew only feels one; but in that case, I sort of wrote it off as his simply not explaining what was going on clearly enough. Perhaps his physics was OK. But in the end he falls into the fundamental misunderstanding of space and the big bang that’s rather common; he, as a physics major, should have known better (though in his defense, he’d been out of school for a while at that point, and in 1970 there weren’t nearly as many good popular science books by physicists as there are now). In the end, the ship stays outside of the big crunch, circling the mass of material, until the new big bang, then becomes part of the new universe. The fallacy here is that somehow space exists independently of matter, that the big bang explodes into empty space (and, for that matter, that time exists on its own). This isn’t the case, as “space” is not an absolute, but comes into existence in the big bang. (Other cosmological theories, including brane theory, allow for a “bigger space” that our universe is part of, but the universe there is even stranger, and again rules out what the ship’s crew in Tau Zero do.) But this is a minor quibble, one that I would have ignored in a book that wasn’t otherwise more strict with its science throughout.
Tau Zero was certainly worth re-reading. I’m glad that I did.
Highly Recommended
posted by Jim Mann at 7:44 PM
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